Invision Community's advertising system enables the inclusion of linked images in your community's feeds to highlight events, draw attention to important updates, and promote external services.

You can even monetise your community by selling advertising space via the built-in commerce tools.

In Invision Community 5’s July release, we’ve added several improvements to the advertising system to make advertisement placement more flexible and even allow them to be placed in emails.

Let’s dive in!

A flexible approach to advertisement placement

The system enables you to place advertisements between topics when viewing a list and between posts when viewing a specific topic. However, the current setup only allows for advertisements to be displayed at set intervals, which may not achieve your desired results. For example, if you set an advertisement to appear every three rows and repeat once, it could end up appearing on the sixth row instead of the intended placement.

The update introduces an additional option that allows you to place items via intervals, for example, every 10 rows, or via a specific list position, such as after the third item.

In addition, you can now specify which forums you want the advertisements to show, giving you even more flexibility when targeting content.

Selling email advertisement slots

New to our Invision Community 5 July release is the ability to sell advertisements in select emails, such as notifications. You could do this for internal marketing, or to generate revenue for your community.

The advert will appear at the top of the email.

You can set up advertisement sales from the built-in Commerce functionality. You can choose to sell advertisement space on your community, or you can sell advertisement space in notification emails. Furthermore, you can choose which member groups receive these advertisements as well as target specific areas of the community.

In addition to these features, we’ve given the Page Editor widgets a refresh to improve their functionality.

We continually strive to enhance existing features, and we hope you enjoy the updates to our advertisement system!

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Man, I'd really like some cheese now.... 😮‍💨

This is great though. I'm definitely looking forward to this update for my community. Email marketing is a big part!

1 minute ago, Cedric V said:

Man, I'd really like some cheese now.... 😮‍💨

This is great though. I'm definitely looking forward to this update for my community. Email marketing is a big part!

We've got three more blogs on the way of new features. 😇

1 minute ago, Matt said:

We've got three more blogs on the way of new features. 😇

Today?! Please hurry up. I'm excited now! 🤤

Hah, I've just finished one more which is scheduled and we've got some finishing touches to add to the last two.

This is really great. More options are better.

Question: Can we select which groups receive email advertisements?

This would be really nice. Our subscribers don’t see ads on the site and we’d like to not send them ads in emails.

3 hours ago, Chris027 said:

This is really great. More options are better.

Question: Can we select which groups receive email advertisements?

This would be really nice. Our subscribers don’t see ads on the site and we’d like to not send them ads in emails.

Yes, you can do that.

2 hours ago, Day. said:

If you have 5 advertisers, are these randomly displayed?

Is this also for self-hosted?

This email advertising, if it works like it looks it does, could be a game changer for me and make me switch to v5 cloud very soon.

8 hours ago, Matt said:

Hah, I've just finished one more which is scheduled and we've got some finishing touches to add to the last two.

Actual GIF of me and the community. 😄

Love this update, and can't wait to hear what else Invision Community has in store! Thanks as always, team.

11 hours ago, Square Wheels said:

If you have 5 advertisers, are these randomly displayed?

Is this also for self-hosted?

Yes, this is for all Invision Community packages including self-hosted.

Looking big and cheesy! Nice improvements, long overdue!

P.S. I'm just glad he didn't advertise that weird Polish Smeat thing again! Finally got it out of my head.

Maybe I'm too dense, but I can't locate where to restrict which groups of users receive email advertisements.

Anyone know?

Hi @Chris027,

These are shown when you create a new advertisement, or editing an existing one.

Go to your AdminCP → System → Site Promotion → Advertisements → Create New → scroll a bit and you'll see an area to select which groups this ad will be shown to.

I think this may be what you're looking for... 🤔

Edited August 31, 2025Aug 31 by Gary

8 hours ago, Gary said:

Hi @Chris027,

These are shown when you create a new advertisement, or editing an existing one.

Go to your AdminCP → System → Site Promotion → Advertisements → Create New → scroll a bit and you'll see an area to select which groups this ad will be shown to.

I think this may be what you're looking for... 🤔

This seems to be missing from Email Advertisements (it's there for Website Advertisements, but not Email ones).

2 hours ago, James Hargreaves said:

This seems to be missing from Email Advertisements (it's there for Website Advertisements, but not Email ones).

That’s what I’ve (not) found as well.

4 hours ago, James Hargreaves said:

This seems to be missing from Email Advertisements (it's there for Website Advertisements, but not Email ones).

You are right!

We'll have to wait for someone from the team to confirm what is at play here and whether this is intentional. 👌

Edited September 1, 2025Sep 1 by Gary

This is not something available at present, but please feel free to post an item in our feedback forum to request this

1 hour ago, Marc said:

This is not something available at present, but please feel free to post an item in our feedback forum to request this

Matt said this can be done. Was this enabled then removed?

On 7/7/2025 at 10:41 AM, Matt said:

Furthermore, you can choose which member groups receive these advertisements as well as target specific areas of the community.

I still don’t see this feature for email advertisements. Am I missing something?

8 hours ago, Chris027 said:

I still don’t see this feature for email advertisements. Am I missing something?

There isnt a setting for that currently. We're aware :)

On 5/15/2026 at 2:33 AM, Marc said:

There isnt a setting for that currently. We're aware :)

If we had this setting, i could cover my cost of IC Cloud hosting/SaaS very easily.

Am I correct that email advertisement does not send ads in bulk mail?