Who is the tl;dr sec community?

The tl;dr sec newsletter community is full of passionate security professionals who want to stay at the top of their game by keeping up with the latest security news, tools, resources, and current research at top security conferences.

Subscribers vary from hands-on security professionals working as application security engineers or SOC analysts, to security managers, to heads of application or product security, as well as CISOs, CSOs, security founders, and a VC or two.

What Does Sponsorship Look Like?

You can include a brief blurb about a job opening, your product, or your company that will be included in an issue of tl;dr sec.

This blurb will be included in:

The blurb will be placed right before the newsletter summary section block in the newsletter and blog post.

Note that the full text of the sponsor-provided blurb may not easily fit on social media platforms and may need to be condensed.

Your company, if desired, will be @Referenced on the relevant social media platform.

Clarifying What “Sponsorship” Means
Currently the unit of sponsorship is per tl;dr sec issue, as opposed to what conferences or some other media outlets do (e.g. having the homepage have a list of sponsors at the bottom that stays up for a few quarters / year, etc.) If you’re interested in a cross-issue, tl;dr sec-wide type sponsorship, reach out and we can discuss this further.

But as of today, what companies are doing is pre-purchasing a specific number of  “issues” up front and then selecting dates over one or more quarters to include ads in.

Sounds Great, How Can I Make This Happen?

Fantastic, we look forward to working with you!

Reach out to sponsorships AT tldrsec.com and we’ll work out the details 🎉

Discounts may be available for bulk sponsorships.

Sponsorship Details

tl;dr sec has a primary and secondary sponsor slot.

The primary sponsor’s blurb is included at the top of the email, they can have inline links as well as a CTA button, their blurb can be a bit longer, and they can provide a small blurb that will be included in the issue announcement on Twitter and LinkedIn.

The secondary sponsor’s blurb is shorter, it’s included towards the bottom of the email, they can only include one CTA link, and they are not included on the Twitter and LinkedIn announcement of the post.

Primary Sponsorship

  • Location: Top of the newsletter, before the table of contents
  • Title: 80 characters or fewer
  • Copy body: 400 to 600 characters
  • CTA: Inline link and/or button
  • Social copy: Provide a tweet-length blurb that will be shared on Twitter and LinkedIn.

Here’s an example from tl;dr sec 102:

Sponsor

📢 Understanding Salesforce Flows and Common Security Risks: An AO Labs Whitepaper

Salesforce’s Flow Builder is built on the Lightning Platform and allows end-to-end process automation by leveraging reusable components known as Flow Actions. This whitepaper discusses the security nuances unique to Salesforce Flow development, as well as permission management pitfalls and how to combat them. AO Labs is the research arm of AppOmni and produces in-depth research and content written by security researchers and engineers. To see more AO Labs content visit: appomni.com/aolabs.

Read the Whitepaper from AO Labs - no form required

Notes:

  • You can have at most one in-line link in the body copy. The title cannot contain a link.
  • You can use italics or bold once, but not other colors.
  • Your tweet content must fit within Twitter’s tweet length limitations, including “📣 Sponsor: “.

Secondary Sponsorship

  • Location: Towards the bottom of the newsletter
  • Title: 80 characters or fewer
  • Copy body: 400 to 600 characters
  • CTA: Button
  • Social copy: Not included

Sponsor

📢 Take control of your security career

Advance your career and demonstrate your skills, by becoming a Burp Suite Certified Practitioner. Prove your ability to detect and exploit common vulnerabilities like XSS, SQLi, and HTTP request smuggling using Burp Suite Professional - the leading toolkit for web security testing.

Get Burp Suite certified for $99

What Sort of Engagement Should I Expect?

Audience

  • Currently ~17,000 subscribers.
  • Audience tends to be fairly technically minded, ranging from ICs to Heads of AppSec/CloudSec/etc. all the way up to CISOs, VCs, and founders.
  • The companies represented are fairly diverse, from small start-ups to massive FAANG companies, from San Francisco Bay Area-based tech companies to healthcare, finance, and government.
  • Many readers are based out of the U.S., but there are readers all over the world.

Engagement

  • Email open rates: ~44%.
  • Twitter and LinkedIn impressions: the posts announcing the issue typically receive 1K-5K and 1K-1.5K impressions, respectively.
  • Email engagement: 11%-20% of readers click on at least one link in the email (~17% on average).
  • Sponsor clicks: From email data alone (not including tldrsec.com or social media data), sponsor links typically receive tens of clicks (~30 - 70 clicks), with some over 100, and a handful over 200 clicks.

Engagement Metrics: What I’ll Share

In order for you to better evaluate the ROI of your sponsorship, tl;dr sec will provide the following metrics for the issues you sponsor:

  • The number of unique users who opened the email
  • The number of unique users who clicked the sponsored link
  • The number of impressions and engagements on the associated tweet and LinkedIn Post

The privacy and trust of tl;dr sec subscribers is of paramount importance to us.

Thus, tl;dr sec will not provide:

  • The names, email addresses, or any other information about any tl;dr sec subscriber, including users who engaged with the newsletter sponsor link
  • Any information about users who engaged with the sponsored tweet thread or LinkedIn post

As there is a trailing window of when users open emails and see social media posts, tl;dr sec will provide these metrics approximately one week after the sponsored issue. Please let us know if there is a specific point in time that is most useful for you.

Terms and Conditions

From us:

  • tl;dr sec reserves the right to refuse sponsorship requests for any reason.
  • Sponsorship blurbs will be contained in a clearly demarcated section, and sponsoring an issue does not give any influence over the rest of the newsletter.
    • A competitor’s newly released tool, blog post, or talk may be referenced in the issue you sponsor.
    • Similarly, an article that negatively covers your company or product may be included in the issue you sponsor.
  • tl;dr sec will not officially endorse a company, product, or job description.
  • If you purchase a sponsorship of multiple issues at a time, you must use all of them within one year of purchase, else they are forfeited.

From you:

  • Your company placing an ad in tl;dr sec does not imply that your company endorses tl;dr sec or its views. It’s merely an ad placement.

What Prior Sponsors are Saying

I’m not surprised tl;dr sec sells out far in advance - I was afraid that might be the case based on how well our own ads performed! :) We really did get quite a bit of attention from them, so congrats on the high quality readership!

-Jessica Maffetore, Head of Marketing, Americas, Secure Code Warrior

Multiple companies:

tl;dr sec is one of our best performing venues. We’ll buy as many sponsored issues as you’ll sell us!

What the Security Community is Saying

Prior Sponsors

Netflix Datadog Databricks AppOmni Sqreen Secure Code Warrior Pentester Lab Bridgecrew Praetorian StackHawk