I'm looking at the [Community Promotion Ads](https://meta.superuser.com/questions/2164/community-promotion-ads-1h-2011) submitted, and am wondering if they are being used in the best interest of the community.

I envisioned that these ads would be used to promote products and activities that, frankly, can use our help. My original vision was that these ads would be used to promote interesting activities and conferences that might, otherwise, have few outlets to get the word out.

Community promotion ads were supposed to be the counterpart to [Stack Overflow's Open Source Advertising](https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/93312/open-source-advertising-sidebar-2h-2011) program. But when I see ads for **Firefox** and **Gimp** and **Dropbox** and **Gmail** — who frankly do not need our help — I'm wondering if including these types of less-needy services will only crowd out those that this program was intended for.

**I'm not saying that there *IS* necessarily a problem.** I would just like to start a dialog.

Should there be a stated of purpose for how these community ads are used? What would that policy be? Is this program being used to it's fullest potential? Should we just leave things the way they are?