Blog of EthicalAds, a privacy-focused ad network for developer audiences, covering ad targeting, privacy, and the Django and Python systems behind it.
Commenters point to it as a privacy-respecting ad option for sites, though noting it is aimed only at developers.
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-2020/ 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.
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).
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
> 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).
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/
> 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.