[HN Gopher] Show HN: EthicalAds - Privacy-first ad network for d...
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Show HN: EthicalAds - Privacy-first ad network for developers
(More info posted in a comment below:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32651107)
Author : ericholscher
Score : 131 points
Date : 2022-08-30 14:24 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.ethicalads.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.ethicalads.io)
| tintedfireglass wrote:
| No site can escape the clutches of the deadly HN Hug Of Death x_x
| ericholscher wrote:
| Seems up to me?
| https://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/ethicalads.io
| matt-p wrote:
| Love this idea, but Wow.. those are some crazy CPM numbers. Would
| it not be a better idea to shoot for CPC?
| ericholscher wrote:
| Crazy how? In the past we have done some CPC campaigns, but it
| leaves the risk of a poorly performing ad on us, instead of the
| advertiser. With CPM, we make the same amount for our
| inventory, but advertisers with great ads benefit with a higher
| CTR and lower CPC.
| legitster wrote:
| Professional marketing person here.
|
| I think this is pretty neat! I would definitely consider chucking
| a few dollars into something like this. Especially since it has a
| nice, niche target audience.
|
| My concerns:
|
| - These are pretty spendy for CPM ads, and we almost never do CPM
| because of low historic RoI.
|
| - We're not going to spend any money on any advertising unless we
| can approximate how much business it brings us. For digital, that
| means we need something like UTM. And if we are using UTM, we are
| basically getting the exact same information Google would be
| giving us. And we would still get complaints from developers. So
| not sure what tangible difference it would bring us.
|
| - Developers (technical people) are a pretty lousy group to
| advertise to. They make the cheapest, whiniest customers
| (sorry!). But if I had a niche product, this could certainly be
| very appealing.
| [deleted]
| ericholscher wrote:
| Thanks for the kind words (and being real with some of the
| unkind words :D).
|
| To answer your questions:
|
| * CPM ads work well for us, because we make a set amount, and
| places the burden of having good targeting & ads on the buyer.
| With CPC, a crappy ad just gets lots of views without paying us
| anything for them, which is a bad incentive. Lots of companies
| have found success with our ads, so they must have good ROI for
| them, but it does require a somewhat high LTV and good ads that
| people click.
|
| * You can use UTM codes on the ad clicks. We don't track users
| on our side, but once a user clicks an ad, all bets are off. We
| mention specifically using UTM codes in our FAQ:
| https://www.ethicalads.io/advertisers/faq/#where-do-the-ads-...
|
| * Well, can't do much about that one :)
| legitster wrote:
| I think that's a fair enough point. And it's not like
| Google's display advertisement network is a stellar option to
| begin with, so this could certainly be worth the money in
| comparison there.
|
| BUT.... the lion's share of our digital advertising budget
| goes to CPC - it's just easier to shell out 8k a month ahead
| of time when we roughly know what it will get us. In the
| interest of not leaving money on the table, I am sure you
| guys will eventually pursue CPC options as you scale up.
| digitallyfree wrote:
| Adding to the third point developers are technical people and
| many have adblockers set up in their browsers (at least
| that's what I see in industry). I wonder if many developers
| will even notice the ads provided by this service.
| legitster wrote:
| Their advertiser FAQ mentions they don't charge for ads
| that don't load.
| [deleted]
| benjaminjosephw wrote:
| > To comply with DNT, we pledge to delete user personal
| information such as IP addresses in server logs after no more
| than 10 days. We do this regardless of whether you set the DNT
| flag in your browser or not.
|
| EthicalAds does not comply with the intent of a user who sends a
| DNT request. It's not obliged to, but it's a bit disingenuous to
| claim that the request has been honoured in some way.
| davidfischer wrote:
| Can you give a few more details of what you mean?
|
| It's true that Do Not Track (DNT) is not a true standard in
| terms of implementation and intent and different folks mean
| different things when setting the DNT flag. However, when
| building DNT for EthicalAds and for Read the Docs, we followed
| the EFF's implementation guide for DNT[1]. This means a number
| things including:
|
| * We do not store personally identifying information when users
| are merely browsing a site with our ads.
|
| * We rotate our logs in less than 10 days
|
| * We do not set cookies on ad requests. We also don't use some
| non-cookie alternative. Obviously for publishers or
| advertisers, logging into our backend requires a login cookie.
|
| [1]: https://github.com/EFForg/dnt-guide
| cunidev wrote:
| Have been using this network for 6+ (?) months now on my blog
| [1], and I've been amazed. The current CPM is well higher than
| what Google AdSense used to give (at least many years ago), the
| ads are non-intrusive and of great quality in the tech niche
| (rather than the sadly common scammy banners from major
| networks), and it does not spy my visitors, which for me is an
| absolute priority.
|
| [1] won't spam since it's unrelated, but my profile page contains
| the link if you want to see a simple placement
| slugiscool99 wrote:
| $2 cpm (https://www.ethicalads.io/publishers/faq/#how-much-
| will-i-ma...) 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.
| ericholscher wrote:
| We definitely get a lot more than that for US developers
| (pricing here:
| https://www.ethicalads.io/advertisers/#pricing). The CPM is
| averaged across all the traffic in the network, as most sites
| have traffic from eg. Poland, as well as the US, and the
| average ends up quite a bit lower.
|
| We also want to underpromise and overdeliver, so we generally
| keep our published numbers on the conservative side.
| ipaddr wrote:
| Your site missing key piece sof information. Pricing.. what
| amount/percentage does a publisher get? What does running an ad
| cost? What are your maximum daily traffic numbers if I ran an ad?
| How do you payout? An faq would be helpful
| ericholscher wrote:
| We have lots of that info on other pages:
|
| Pricing: https://www.ethicalads.io/advertisers/#pricing
|
| Publisher page: https://www.ethicalads.io/publishers/
|
| Publisher FAQ: https://www.ethicalads.io/publishers/faq/
| tech234a wrote:
| Interesting concept. A couple questions:
|
| Do you plan on expanding your audience beyond developers to other
| users such as, for example, the slightly more general group of
| those who are technologically-adept but aren't necessarily
| developers?
|
| Do you have other options for targeting ads other than page
| content? For example, some web apps may display private user
| information in the web page and would not want to send the page
| content to the ad server. Perhaps it would be possible to target
| based on a general list of keywords that are known to be related
| to the site?
|
| Would it be possible to run the ad script in a sandbox iframe to
| ensure the server doesn't get access to page content? (I see in
| other comments that you mention server-side rendering but that
| wouldn't work for a static client-side web app.)
| ericholscher wrote:
| Thanks :)
|
| We don't currently plan to expand our audience. There's still a
| lot of growth in the dev market we're hoping to achieve. That
| said, we are looking at selling our product as a SaaS for other
| folks (https://www.ethicalads.io/sponsorship-platform/) --
| which could target any market they wanted.
|
| We do allow our publishers to set keywords on the inbound
| traffic, as well as our own ML (https://ethical-ad-
| client.readthedocs.io/en/latest/#configur... data-ea-keywords
| here). The content of the site isn't send to our servers for ML
| -- we crawl the sites, so private content stays private.
|
| You could run it in a sandbox, but I question the use case of
| highly private content having ads on it. That's going to be
| harder for us to verify your traffic, and look a lot like
| fraud, but we might be willing to give it a try. We'd keep it
| on the network if our advertisers see good results with it.
| tech234a wrote:
| Thank you for the explanation!
| ericholscher wrote:
| Hi HN!
|
| We've been working on our ad network for a couple years, but we
| just launched the 1.0 of our open source code, so it seems like a
| great time to do a Show HN! We have more info on our 1.0 post
| here: https://www.ethicalads.io/blog/2022/08/going-v10-the-
| backsto...
|
| A few years back, we were building Read the Docs, a documentation
| platform for open source. We had millions of monthly visitors and
| the obvious way to monetize was ads. However, we cared about the
| privacy of our visitors and we didn't want ad companies to track
| our users around the web. We went to a few ad networks and asked
| if we could proxy the ad traffic or even just run ads without
| cookies. They weren't willing to do what we wanted, so we built
| our own ad network.
|
| We decided to build a privacy-first ad network. We don't use any
| cookies, and target ads based on content. The code is all open
| source (https://github.com/readthedocs/ethical-ad-server), and
| we're slowly working to help fund open source projects. We only
| show developer-related ads on developer sites. No ads about a
| product whose site you visited last week and nothing off topic.
|
| Next, we built a crawler that indexes the sites on our network to
| help target our ads. Using an ML classifier (built with SpaCy),
| it can tell if a page is about data science or about full stack
| development. This allows advertisers to target the niche they are
| focused on and ensure the ads perform well, without doing any
| user tracking.
|
| We're pretty excited about the future ability of our ML to
| improve ad targeting without any information about the user. The
| coolest thing is that our business gets better as we understand
| the content we're serving ads on better, instead of "learning"
| more about our users by harvesting more data about them.
|
| We've been a true network beyond just ads on Read the Docs for a
| couple years and we now have ~130 publishers. We gross just under
| $60k per month in ad revenue of which 70% goes to publishers.
| Most of our publishers are small sites or open source projects so
| to send them ~$40k/mo feels great.
|
| Do you have a developer site that you're looking to monetize? Or
| are you an advertiser trying to reach developers? Or are you just
| curious about privacy and advertising? Happy to answer any
| questions!
|
| (If you just want to play around with our ad client, you can try
| it out here: https://jsbin.com/roniviv/edit?html,output -- docs
| here: https://ethical-ad-client.readthedocs.io/en/latest/)
| webmobdev wrote:
| If your ad doesn't run any javascript code, doesn't place any
| cookie, doesn't do any kind of tracking, and is relevant to the
| content many wouldn't mind unblocking it in their adblocker.
| Especially if it is served from the same domain host the
| content is on. What kind of ads you serve also matter - small
| text ads (like Google Adsense / Adwords ads used to be a decade
| or two ago) was actually interesting when it was relevant to
| the subject content. Tiny tidbits of text are easy to scan and
| read or skip. I can also somewhat tolerate still-image banner
| ads as long as it is a few kbs lightweight and doesn't draw too
| much attention to itself. I absolutely abhor animated gifs,
| video, pop-up etc. ads of any kind. "Interrupt ads" (those
| placed in between the content) are also very irritating.
| ericholscher wrote:
| Thanks -- We actually maintain an exclude list of OSS ads
| that you can use with your ad blocker of choice: https://ads-
| for-open-source.readthedocs.io/en/latest/index.h...
|
| Of note, we do run _our own_ javascript client on the pages.
| Our users can opt into hitting our backend API instead of
| running JS code, but many just use our client directly.
|
| We currently serve the ads on our own domain. We could
| implement the ability for our publishers to proxy the ad
| views to our domain (this is generally called "ad cloaking"),
| but it hasn't felt like the right thing to do.
|
| We are also on the Acceptable Ads non-tracking list, so our
| domains are unblocked for people who choose that in their ad
| blocker. If we use a publishers domain, they will be
| unblocked for some period of time, but then _their_ domain
| gets added to the ad blockers, and we lose this Acceptable
| Ads traffic.
| webmobdev wrote:
| I feel ad proxying and server side rendering would be a
| better fit for the brand identity you are trying to create.
| Why does one need javascript to serve some text or image,
| along side some content? One of the common reasons for
| blocking ads is they slowdown websites by using more
| resources and thus also reduce battery life. It also
| introduces another barrier to trust you more - how do I
| know that the Javascript code is not doing something
| unwanted (like browser fingerprinting, introducing some
| annoying animation etc.) - after all, it would be a pain to
| keep reviewing your javascript code and would be easier to
| just block it.
| ericholscher wrote:
| We do support publishers using an API directly, and
| running none of our code.
|
| Our ad client is also open source, and pretty simple:
| https://github.com/readthedocs/ethical-ad-client -- we
| have publishers who use a published version with
| Subresource Integrity, but you can also just host the JS
| yourself if you want.
| gbtw wrote:
| There is no such thing as ethical ad. Why would anyone leave
| money on the table and not do scummy / google / facebook ads. Not
| like anything is stopping them unless the ad industry gets killed
| by law.
| hedora wrote:
| Studies show that non-tracking ads pull in 96% as much revenue
| per impression as tracker-based ads.
|
| Is the 4% boost really worth chasing away users, adding cookie
| popups, etc? Also, it's possible for users to unblock non-
| tracking ad networks. If 4% of your audience does that, then
| you end up making more from them.
|
| Finally, with ads that target content, any extra revenue due to
| premium audiences goes to the content publisher. For ads that
| target end users, the premium goes to the ad network.
|
| If you're placing user-targeted ads on anything but bottom-tier
| content, then you are squandering your monopoly access to your
| readership. That's why this ad network specializes in just
| developer sites -- some advertisers will pay a premium to reach
| developers. Others will pay a premium simply to avoid being
| displayed next to toenail fungus and celebrity wardrobe
| failures.
| bogwog wrote:
| > Why would anyone leave money on the table and not do scummy /
| google / facebook ads
|
| If ethical ads do a better job of reaching developers, you
| would be leaving money on the table by not using them.
|
| Supply and demand applies, as usual. Companies selling dev
| services want more effective ad campaigns, ethical ads are less
| likely to be blocked/ignored by their target demographic, thus
| demand for ethical ads goes up. The supply of websites/apps
| running ethical ads is relatively low, so that means the
| payouts of those ads are higher.
|
| So in the end, running ethical ads on your dev-oriented website
| could make more money than google/facebook ads, advertisers
| could get more return on their investment, and end-users
| benefit from ethical and less-intrusive advertising (although
| that might not last forever once the MBAs are brought in to
| chase growth)
| ericholscher wrote:
| Love this reply! Hopefully we can make the real world act
| like that idealized version in your post :)
| aliqot wrote:
| The quality of ethical vs non-ethical is not a binary state,
| it's a transient descriptor. That which was not evil will
| either fail or grow large enough to become evil. There are no
| known exceptions to this.
| [deleted]
| ericholscher wrote:
| I definitely appreciate the negative view of ads. I had some
| similar internal conflict around building on ads, but it was
| the only way for us to sustain the project we worked on..
|
| Read the Docs was a huge part of the open source community, but
| all the other ways we tried to fund it didn't work. I posted
| about this at the time, and still think it makes a good
| argument for why we should be investing to fund open source
| infrastructure with marketing money, not just engineering
| budget:
|
| https://www.ericholscher.com/blog/2016/aug/31/funding-oss-ma...
|
| We are also experimenting with an option for showing
| sponsorships, instead of paid ads. This works well for non-
| profits, and could layer on top of Open Collective or GitHub
| Sponsors. We're working with the Python Software Foundation to
| power their "sponsored by" messaging, which is another option
| other than "paid ads"
|
| https://www.ethicalads.io/sponsorship-platform/
| williamtrask wrote:
| If the ads didn't change what you showed based on the price
| and instead charged a fixed price ti be in the list (and
| still be ranked by what's best) then I think you can call it
| ethical.
|
| That is to say, helping people find the best product is
| ethical. Helping them find whichever product has the biggest
| marketing budget less so.
| permo-w wrote:
| I agree that there is no such thing as an ethical ad, but not
| for this reason. an advert in and of itself is an outside actor
| trying to implant information in your head, by and large
| without your consent, by and large using manipulative
| psychological techniques. this, to me, is unethical
| pugio wrote:
| It sounds like we have a very different idea of what "ethical"
| means. In answer to your question about "what's stopping them?"
| - well, just that: ethics, morals, the desire to act decently
| even when there might be some additional benefit to being
| sleazy.
|
| Waiting for a law to prohibit immoral behavior doesn't seem
| like a sustainable way for a society to function, even though
| it does seem to be the way we're trending.
| permo-w wrote:
| >It sounds like we have a very different idea of what
| "ethical" means. In answer to your question about "what's
| stopping them?" - well, just that: ethics, morals, the desire
| to act decently even when there might be some additional
| benefit to being sleazy
|
| for some private companies, sure. but the second a company
| goes public, all of this completely goes out of the window.
| the only time a publicly traded company acts ethically is
| when it thinks its public image (read: stock price) will be
| harmed by acting otherwise
|
| >Waiting for a law to prohibit immoral behavior doesn't seem
| like a sustainable way for a society to function, even though
| it does seem to be the way we're trending
|
| as far as I've seen - i.e. the rise and dominance of free-
| market economics - we're trending and have been trending
| since the 70s, in the opposite direction.
|
| creating laws to prohibit harmful behaviour isn't some kind
| of crazy unsustainable new invention, it is just the basis of
| how societies maintain themselves. it's convenient for
| corporations (read: groups of resourceful people that will do
| anything they think they can get away with to take your
| money) to act like rules for them are a bad thing, but they
| are not, and short of implementing actual communism, they
| will continue to find ways to make profit. and if they don't?
| well should they have been making profit from harming society
| in the first place?
| dyeje wrote:
| Been toying with an idea like this for years, congrats on
| shipping!
| ericholscher wrote:
| Thanks! Shoot us an email if you ever wanted to continue toying
| with something like this with us! ;)
| jefftk wrote:
| It sounds like you have a good handle on targeting, where you can
| use contextual information to show ads users are likely to be
| interested in, but what about fraud detection?
|
| Context for others: the high level of tracking in modern
| advertising is a combination of targeting and measurement / fraud
| detection. Without good fraud detection there isn't much keeping
| a shady publisher from bringing in a lot of bot traffic and
| cheating your advertisers. Very roughly, if I can successfully
| pretend I have twice as much traffic I can earn twice as much
| money.
|
| (Disclosure: I used to work on ads at Google)
| ericholscher wrote:
| Fraud detection is definitely something that is a struggle in
| the overall industry. We have a couple benefits that make it
| easier for us.
|
| First, is that we hand-approve publishers, so that we are able
| to tell if they are a legit project or application. We look at
| some social signals when they sign up to see if their traffic
| numbers seem realistic, and do some sanity checking.
|
| Secondly, we do capture anonymized IP's & user agents, and
| create a hash of the original values. This allows us to see
| trends across browser types and high-level locations, which
| helps with fraud detection.
|
| The other big thing is that we have feedback from our
| advertisers. We do pass a UTM code about what publisher traffic
| comes from when an ad is clicked. This allows us to figure out
| who is sending junk traffic to our advertisers.
|
| We also have a few other specific technical methods that we
| generally don't talk about, because we don't want to give folks
| guidelines. But those are mostly just to stop obvious bad
| actors which aren't trying very hard :)
|
| Some of these approaches work because we're still relatively
| small, but I think they will scale to 10-100x our size, maybe
| just not to Google's size. But overall, our approach to fraud
| is currently working based on the number of repeat advertisers
| we have, and the success they are seeing with our network.
| jefftk wrote:
| Thanks! Over time this is likely to work less well, as it
| becomes more worthwhile for fraudsters to target your
| network. Off the top of my head, using a botnet to simulate
| traffic with a realistic range of UAs seems like it could
| allow a publisher to earn, say, 30% more revenue without you
| being too obvious. Overall, this would shift income from your
| honest publishers to your cheating publishers.
| ericholscher wrote:
| Definitely true. Hopefully the folks who have the skillset
| to build a large OSS project, and build a network of fake
| traffic, would find other ways to spend their time with a
| higher return on investment than a 30% increment of their
| revenue.
|
| But it will certainly happen, and hopefully we can continue
| to minimize it. We've generally seen fraud that looks like
| a site with no real traffic, and trying to generate 1000%
| returns, which is a much easier pattern to catch.
|
| If you have any suggestions for ways we might improve our
| fraud tracking, definitely happy to hear them at eric@ our
| domain.
| flitzofolov wrote:
| There are products designed to solve this problem:
| https://www.humansecurity.com/products/ad-tech-teams
|
| Disclosure - I used to work for WhiteOps (now known as
| Human Security apparently).
| jefftk wrote:
| There are definitely products for this problem; it's a
| huge business. But they're not products that are
| compatible with EthicalAds' privacy-first JS-optional
| model.
| cercatrova wrote:
| Another filter to add onto uBlock Origin, I see.
| ericholscher wrote:
| Great, thanks!
|
| https://ads-for-open-source.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ is our
| default exclude list for OSS sustainability ads.
| cercatrova wrote:
| I meant another filter to block, not allow, but I appreciate
| the links.
| davidfischer wrote:
| We're already on the EasyList (a big blocklist) so it
| should already be blocked.
| compumike wrote:
| Hi Eric, I enjoyed working with you back in my Triplebyte days!
| Finding Ruby job ads on a Ruby library docs page seems
| straightforward enough... I'm just curious what major categories
| of advertisers you've found (beyond recruiting)?
| ericholscher wrote:
| Hey Mike,
|
| Good to hear from you! We also enjoyed working with Triplebyte,
| and still think that hiring/recruiting is a great use of
| EthicalAds.
|
| In general we've also found success with higher LTV SaaS
| products, and you might expect for display ads. Digital Ocean,
| Twilio, and MongoDB are folks who have done big campaigns with
| us over the years, as an example. I have a sort spot for the
| folks at Twilio, because they were actually the ones who
| convinced us to do ads on Read the Docs originally, with a
| hacked together campaign way back in like 2015 :) Running a
| Python-targeted campaign, with Python code in the ad image,
| linking to a Python-specific landing page tutorial really
| showed the vision for what we could build.
|
| We've also had a lot of luck with more niche targeting for
| specific audiences. Our current major audiences are Backend,
| Frontend, Data Science, Security, & Devops:
| https://www.ethicalads.io/advertisers/#audiences -- Each of
| these audiences has had good success with folks targeting
| specific products (Think feature flagging in JS for frontend
| devs, and ML model services for data science).
|
| As we grow and optimize our ML modeling, we're going to
| continue to expand our high-level topics, as well as offer more
| finer grained targeting.
| radihuq wrote:
| > I have a sort spot for the folks at Twilio, because they
| were actually the ones who convinced us to do ads on Read the
| Docs originally, with a hacked together campaign way back in
| like 2015
|
| This sounds really interesting! I find it fascinating that
| Twilio was willing to do such a personalized project with a
| relatively small company. Would you be willing to share the
| story?
|
| Specific curiosities:
|
| * Did you reach out to them, or did they reach out to you?
|
| * Who were you working with there? (someone in a business
| unit, or someone in engineering?)
|
| * Twilio is huge with (I imagine) big reputation risk. Why
| were they okay with being such early adopters?
|
| * What was the process like working with them through this
| campaign?
| ericholscher wrote:
| Sure -- it's a neat story. Happy to share it..
|
| _Digs through some emails_
|
| Looks like it was 2015. We did a fundraising campaign on
| our site (wrapup blog post here:
| https://blog.readthedocs.com/fundraising-wrapup/), which
| was our first big attempt at fundraising. To be 100%
| honest, we didn't reach our goal, and we padded the numbers
| with a Python Software Foundation grant, and the Twilio ad
| sponsorship to not fail in public. We were doing millions
| of pageviews a month at that point, but had a lot of
| failure around fundraising. More info on the burnout and
| sadness of that period here:
| https://www.ericholscher.com/blog/2018/feb/7/the-post-i-
| neve... -- but moving on to the happy ending :)
|
| The Twilio folks reached out as part of that campaign.
| Specifically it was Rob Spectre, who I think was very
| forward thinking about their developer outreach at the
| time. They wanted to sponsor us, and in return we promote
| the upcoming events & blog posts they were doing.
|
| It was very lightweight to start. I think we filled out
| their "event sponsorship" form, they gave us the money, and
| we put some images & copy in the sidebar of the docs using
| our theme.
|
| I think they were willing to do this because they saw the
| massive opportunity of the channel we had. We've been able
| to build a business that supports a team with almost the
| exact concept they pitched to us, so the value seems
| obvious in retrospect.
|
| More info on our eventual transition to advertising is
| here:
| https://www.ericholscher.com/blog/2016/aug/31/funding-oss-
| ma...
| soared wrote:
| Looks interesting and useful for small advertisers. I can see
| this being useful in some cases. Nice that you're insulated from
| cookie issues with context targeting only.
|
| I'd expect the lack of tools like frequency capping, impression
| trackers, brand safety, etc to stop you from getting many large
| advertisers.
| YetAnotherNick wrote:
| Is the list of sites you advertise in publicly available? Is it
| possible to just publish ads for one/few particular site/s with
| the same CPM?
| ericholscher wrote:
| We don't have a full list, but each of our audience pages shows
| some of our top publishers:
| https://www.ethicalads.io/advertisers/#audiences
|
| We generally charge our listed CPM, but if you narrow down the
| targeting a lot, that can cost a bit more.
| brightball wrote:
| Could you describe how your service differentiates from Carbon?
|
| https://www.carbonads.net/
|
| I've been considering monetizing my blog for a few months, but
| was only considering a service like yours. Would be interested to
| learn more.
| ericholscher wrote:
| Sure -- we have a post about just that topic!
|
| https://www.ethicalads.io/alternative-to-carbon-ads/
|
| To be 100% honest, Carbon is a great product, and I do
| recommend them. I wish we were competing against only Google &
| Facebook, instead of Carbon & BuySellAds, because they are a
| solid competitor. However, Carbon is not as privacy-focused,
| and they are closed source. They still inject Google's and
| other third-party images in your docs. We have pushed back
| against that with our advertisers, which has caused us to lose
| some business, but we want our publishers to know that we're
| the only third-party they are dealing with.
|
| Not to say that all third-party scripts are bad. The ad
| industry is pretty scammy, and there's a good bit of fraud. A
| lot of these third-party services are about verification and
| standardizing reporting. However, it's still sending all your
| visitor data to a third-party, which you have no knowledge of
| ahead of time, and could change. We have invested a good amount
| in our anti-fraud detection, and we know our product is good
| because of the number of repeat advertisers we have.
|
| We often have publishers who do a 50/50% split between us &
| Carbon, to diversify their revenue. Daily.dev does this, and
| talks a bit about it here:
| https://www.ethicalads.io/blog/2022/01/publisher-spotlight-s...
| -- We recommend that to folks who aren't coming to us for
| privacy or regulatory reasons, especially if they have a lot of
| traffic.
| brightball wrote:
| Thank you for the insight!
| ericholscher wrote:
| Definitely! Happy to answer any other questions you have
| via email once you're ready to move forward. Email is in my
| profile, or just eric@ our company domain :)
| NetOpWibby wrote:
| I was definitely thinking that your product seems like a
| BuySellAds for developers and it looks like I'm correct! Good
| to have an additional good option.
| mlinksva wrote:
| 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.)
| shortformblog wrote:
| Would love it if you expanded beyond devs, though I know that's a
| challenge as it requires building up a new base. I have been
| keeping an eye on you for a while either way.
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