EthicalAds Blog

I recently passed 40,000 but my Substack is free so it's not a revenue source for me. I haven't really looked at who they are - at some point it would be interesting to export the CSV of the subscribers and count by domains, I guess. My content revenue comes from ads on my blog via https://www.ethicalads.io/ - rarely more than $1,000 in a given month - and sponsors on GitHub: https://github.com/sponsors/simonw - which is adding up to quite good money now. Those people get my sponsors-only monthly newsletter which looks like this: https://gist.github.com/simonw/13e595a236218afce002e9aeafd75cd0 - it's effectively the edited highlights from my blog because a lot of people are too busy to read everything I put out there! I try to keep my disclosures updated on the about page of my blog: https://simonwillison.net/about/#disclosures

I've never used any ad provider, so I don't have a personal recommendation. https://www.ethicalads.io/ seems to be what I'm thinking about, albeit only aimed at developers.

Ethical Ads (https://www.ethicalads.io/) looks interesting, wish there were more ad-tech companies like this. Would love one focused on the travel niche.

Lots of people talking about how advertising is terrible in the comments here. Unfortunately, much of the internet is dependent on ads for revenue. I am personally working to improve the technology behind the ad ecosystem, so we can not worry so much about privacy and page performance, along with malware and other issues. I’d love to have more people working with us to improve things, rather than just commenting on how they are terrible. Unfortunately, advertising is never going to go away, unless you want to start paying for every newspaper or service online. So let’s work to make it better. https://github.com/readthedocs/ethical-ad-server & https://www.ethicalads.io/

I've been using Plausible for https://www.nslookup.io for about a month now. I can definitely recommend it over Google Analytics. Simpler, more intuitive and privacy first. However, at some point I'd like to monetize this site. I know there's https://www.ethicalads.io/, but they've limited their target audience to developers. Are there any privacy focused ad networks?

Neat, their ads are powered by: https://www.ethicalads.io/ This makes me wonder - what ads would be acceptable in the eyes of privacy focused developers? Any? And i don't mean UX - i mean, what ads would you, a privacy focused developer, recommend i install on my site. Assuming i want to fully respect by users privacy, while still attempting to pay for the server costs. Maybe this warrants a AskHN, but it seems relevant here as they're implementing this exact concept. Thoughts?

I also just came across this, https://www.ethicalads.io/ It looks promising, but it hasn't launched yet and I can't get the "subscribe to updates" form to send me a confirmation email.

I did the same and switched to Ethical Ads (no cookies, tracking etc.) on https://frequal.com Ethical Ads: https://www.ethicalads.io/

I built EthicalAds (https://www.ethicalads.io/) for exactly this reason. No tracking. No cookies. No behavioral targeting (targeting based on stuff you've previously done). Every website where our ads appear AND every advertiser is hand approved. No JS from advertisers: just a plain JPG/PNG and text. We're small but on track to pay out $500k to publishers this year.

There is a platform called ethical ads for developer focused advertising: https://www.ethicalads.io/

If the content is software development focused https://www.ethicalads.io/ (https://www.ethicalads.io/publishers/calculator/)

Keeps showing "Loading..." indefinitely if an empty string is entered. Also, the ad provider (https://www.ethicalads.io/) is just displaying the dev's own Patreon page? (https://www.patreon.com/cadey) And I just realized there is a scam opportunity in ads on small sites like this. In ad provider for the Indie web, run an ad with a fake donation button. Might fool some readers into donating to the scammer thinking they are supporting the blogger.

There's https://www.ethicalads.io/ if you're only targeting developers

https://www.ethicalads.io I mean, I haven't audited their systems and haven't seen any reports from independent auditors, but at least they are making direct statements about privacy that the other ad networks aren't.

> Is there really no way to monetise an audience with ads without collecting their personal info? There sure is: Contextual ads. DuckDuckGo does it, various documentation sites do it (https://www.ethicalads.io/), a dutch broadcaster does it (https://archive.ph/Zk4Pv). It's how newspapers used to work and TV channels still do, as well as YouTube sponsorships (and probably many more). It improves the UX over personalized ads because a) you don't have to invade your users' privacy (including asking them for permission to do it, obviously) and b) the ad is actually relevant to the context the user is thinking about, instead of something completely unrelated from some other part of their life (or, more often than not, something completely random).

> my main concern was actually running strange 3rd party fingerprinting / zombie-tracker / god-knows-what Exactly - i briefly looked into https://www.ethicalads.io/ but mostly IT related ads it seems. > Facebook's ads (at least on Instagram) show me really cool things, while Google (who should know way more about me) shows me complete garbage I personally remember being pretty shocked at how the Facebook like button & social login spread to everywhere and they could track you all around. Long time ago. Facebook probably knows a lot more about you than you think.

In my experience, everyone else is worse than AdSense. You might reach out to https://www.ethicalads.io/, though I haven't got much first-hand knowledge of them. They're focused on privacy centered digital advertising and don't approve flashy distracting media, but their target demographics are very limited and they are small. In January, they paid out a total of only $30K to all of their publishers.

Tracking and profiling users is completely unnecessary. Context-based, non-intrusive, ads are reasonable and better than paywalls and users won't hate them. I wish someone would make https://ethicalads.io but not just targeted at developers.

https://www.ethicalads.io/ is by Read the Docs, which I have a generally positive opinion of. https://www.carbonads.net is by buysellads, which I have a generally mixed opinion of. There was a similar company called codefund, which has recently shut down and now redirects to ethical ads. All of these are for tech publications and have moderately rigorous applications, with requirements for content and traffic.

Love the idea behind EthicalAds and hope for great success for you guys as an alternative to the tracking industry that is online advertising. Couple of thoughts and questions: 1. When submitting to HN the front page probably isn't the best thing. The blog post at https://www.ethicalads.io/blog/2020/12/ethicalads-newsletter-november-… seems more interesting to me because you detail the number of ads, publishers, and revenue. It's much more likely to generate interest and discussion. 2. Classic two-sided market problem in that you need to attract advertisers and publishers to the network and there's no incentive to take the risk of joining. Any thoughts on how to make the network more attractive to publishers and advertisers? 3. Really like the focus on a niche audience (developers), at least as a starting point. There's probably an answer to #2 above. 4. Are there plans to increase the contextual awareness of the ads? E.g. if the publisher is focus on front end tools (e.g. react) might be able to tailor the ads on that site to more front-end relevant advertisements.

You could check out ethical ads [1]. I have no first-hand experience with them as a publisher. But they are fairly unobtrusive on readthedocs [2] sites. [1] https://www.ethicalads.io/publishers/ [2] https://docs.readthedocs.io/en/stable/#

An alternative to Google Ads is EthicalAds: https://www.ethicalads.io/alternative-to-google-ads/ (by the folks who make Read the Docs)

ReadTheDocs have a sub-division called Ethical Ads, where targeting occurs based on the content of the page you are viewing, and are claimed to be privacy-respecting. Developers are the ones targeted by these ads. https://www.ethicalads.io/blog/2022/11/a-new-approach-to-content-based…

$2 cpm (https://www.ethicalads.io/publishers/faq/#how-much-will-i-make) is not higher than adsense, especially for a high value audience like US developers. We were seeing ~$5-$8 cpms on adsense for a much less affluent demographic on our site. Totally support this and am rooting for alternative ad networks - especially ones like this. However I think it's fair to acknowledge that without tracking it's inevitable that you'll have less value to provide to advertisers. We can't have our cake and eat it too.

There's a link on this in their footer https://www.ethicalads.io/alternative-to-carbon-ads/ (and another comparing to Google). My skim of Carbon diff: open source, no third party tracking, support open source community. (I personally want to tax all ads but am cheering EA on to capture a larger share of a smaller pie.)

We're trying to build an ad network that stands in stark opposition to Google's tracking: https://www.ethicalads.io/advertising-vision/ -- it's still early days, but we're always look for more OSS projects and products to join.

Maybe I'm not getting it but I don't see how (as a user not a dev) any ad acceptable to me can be acceptable to an advertiser. You can't know my wants if you don't build a profile of me. To do that you need to track me and my browsing behaviour. That is unacceptable. But if you don't you'll be throwing a lot of things with none of them sticking. So how can this work? Edit: this is what they say (https://www.ethicalads.io/advertisers.html> "When you run a campaign with us, your ad only appears on developer and technical websites. This drives your business results and respects our audience without having to resort to programmatic ad buys" Well, good luck lads, I hope you succeed. If I can offer a small hint, never try to get my attention with any kind of animation. Images from your entire domain will be blocked instantly (whether it be ethicalads.io or if they're self-hosted on pqrs.com, then pqrs.com. I repeat - don't try to draw my attention).