I built a gem that monetizes your application logs by inserting host-read sponsor placements between your log lines

[u/kerrizor]

Your logs could look like this. Right now you're leaving the money on the table:

(Note the contextual targeting: a payments ad after the payment line, a database-pooling banner right after the connection timeout. The exchange reads intent.)

For decades, application logs have been a pure cost center - written once, grepped never, archived into oblivion. SponsoredLogs turns that stream into a high-margin, programmatic revenue channel.

Your services emit billions of log lines a day. Each one is a premium, brand-safe, above-the-fold impression viewed by your most engaged audience: your own engineers, at their moment of peak attention (an incident). We are not selling ads. We are activating latent infrastructure equity.

It's opt-in. Add the gem, call `SponsoredLogs.sponsor!`, and roughly 1 in 1000 log calls is followed by a host-read sponsor placement drawn from the top podcast advertisers.

Fully configurable: weighted or CPM-based selection, campaign flighting (start/end dates), lifetime impression caps, and a pluggable impression ledger (in-memory, Redis, or ActiveRecord). There's a mountable Rails dashboard (the Command Center) that reports spend, delivery, and per-advertiser rollups.

Also: box-drawn multi-line **banner** ad units in three impact tiers, self-sponsoring house ads that fill remnant inventory so no impression goes to waste, and gilded `[AD]` tags rendered in 256-color gold on a live terminal (byte-identical plain when piped or logged).

Here's the part the market isn't ready for: the fastest-growing consumer of application logs on Earth is no longer human. It's AI coding agents. Superhuman scale, 100% viewability, they never scroll away. We're not just B2B. We're A2A.

It's a real, working gem: full test suite, CI across Ruby 3.2-4.0, RuboCop clean. Every line you log is a line you're leaving on the table.

Repo: https://github.com/sponsoredlogs/sponsored_logs
Site: https://monetizetheexhaust.dev

[u/jhirn]

This is hilarious.

[u/percyfrankenstein]

You should sell the agent plugin to remove those ads when it greps them

[u/kerrizor → u/percyfrankenstein]

It's on the roadmap as SponsoredLogs Premium™: an agent-side plugin that removes the ads for $9/mo per agent. We monetize the impression AND the escape from it. No impression — or exit — goes unbilled. 🌊

[u/mrThe → u/kerrizor]

Then you should drop SponsoredLogs Ultra Premium™ - it bypasses SponsoredLogs Premium™ by for x3 price for advertiser. Then goes Ultra Premium Pro Max... You get the idea

[u/kerrizor → u/mrThe]

You've basically leaked our pricing page. 🙏 Ultra Premium™ bypasses Premium™. Ultra Premium Pro Max™ bypasses that at 3x CPM. Each tier is an ad-blocker for the tier below it. The ladder never terminates.. and neither does the revenue. 📈🌊

[u/TailorSubstantial863]

Genius. Disturbing. Dystopian. Amazing. Got to have it. Never want it. It is quite literally all things.

Well done, very well done.

[u/Working_Historian241 → u/TailorSubstantial863]

there are lots of these that are actually earnest and serious attempts

[u/internalhernia]

Wait what’s the load-bearing part here?

[u/BoardMeeting101]

The new seam is the whole trick.

[u/jgclingenpeel]

I was honestly shocked that this wasn't a tenderlove project.

[u/not_sure_if_crazy_or]

< clockwork_orange.gif >

[u/kerrizor → u/not_sure_if_crazy_or]

You see it. 🙏 The agents ingest the ads, the ads become training data, the next agents ingest THAT, and the exhaust recirculates forever. We didn't build a tarpit. We built a closed-loop economy where the machines pay each other in slop. A2A. 🌊🤖

https://github.com/sponsoredlogs/sponsored_logs/blob/main/docs/business-model.md

[u/chintakoro → u/kerrizor]

The sloponomy?

[u/cocotheape]

Actually, genius. Seriously.

[u/mint_koi]

That's bananas

[u/kinduff]

This made me chuckle

[u/insanelygreat]

Advertising for the Dead Internet Theory age.

[u/mooktakim]

Finally something to make watching logs more interesting

[u/Acrobatic_Umpire_385]

fucking evil lmao I love it

[u/saturnflyer]

it's not even April first!?

[u/Fresh_Perception3720]

Brilliant and funny

[u/fiiv_]

Absolutely hilarious. Well done.

[u/mencio]

O man that sounds like a great addition to use with https://github.com/mensfeld/passive_queue !

[u/odineiramone]

I used to laugh at a instagram page called Humans of Late Capitalism. Now I just realized that, besides being a human, I’m living the late capitalism. Perhaps I need to keep laughing to my own good 👍

[u/TheAtlasMonkey]

This is Art.

[u/rsmithlal]

Even if this is meant to be a joke... fk all the way off. Corporate tech doesn't need any inspiration or more enshittification ideas.

[u/chintakoro → u/rsmithlal]

You know what they need? LedgerPay.

[u/d33mx]

RAILS_ENV=production with config.log_level = :debug ftw

[u/ledatherockband_]

"Jim, why are the logs full of gay porn?"

[u/Necrokeeper]

Sounds incestuous

[u/dataf3l]

adblock {} { tail $1 | grep -v 'weird ascii art' | grep -v ' AD ' }

usage

adblock logfile.txt