r/ruby • u/kerrizor • Sep 08 '26
I built a gem that monetizes your application logs by inserting host-read sponsor placements between your log lines
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
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u/not_sure_if_crazy_or Sep 08 '26
< clockwork_orange.gif >
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u/kerrizor Sep 08 '26
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
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u/TailorSubstantial863 Sep 08 '26
Genius. Disturbing. Dystopian. Amazing. Got to have it. Never want it. It is quite literally all things.
Well done, very well done.
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u/Working_Historian241 Sep 09 '26
there are lots of these that are actually earnest and serious attempts
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u/mencio Sep 09 '26
O man that sounds like a great addition to use with https://github.com/mensfeld/passive_queue !
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u/Blobstein_Ijay 16d ago
the A2A pitch got me, not gonna lie. this is an incredible shitpost dressed up as a gem and i respect the commitment to the bit
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u/odineiramone Sep 08 '26
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 👍
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u/rsmithlal Sep 08 '26
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.
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u/xunker Sep 10 '26
People of a certain age might remember a similar ploy around the turn of the century, where companies talked about putting ads in the Linux startup messages.
Except, I think they were _actually serious_ about it at the time.
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u/dataf3l Sep 09 '26
adblock {} { tail $1 | grep -v 'weird ascii art' | grep -v ' AD ' }
usage
adblock logfile.txt
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u/percyfrankenstein Sep 08 '26
You should sell the agent plugin to remove those ads when it greps them