EthicalAds

Hi Product Hunt! 💡 Problem & Solution 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 laughed at us. So we built our own ad network. 🔩 How EthicalAds Works It was scary to build our own ad network (nobody wants to compete with Google), but here's how it works. Firstly, we only show developer-related ads on developer sites. No ads about a product whose site you visited last week and nothing off topic. All our advertisers sell SaaS products for developers, cloud infrastructure, they're hiring devs, or something like that. All our publishers (that's advertising lingo for sites showing ads) are hand approved. We make sure each site is the right fit for our advertisers. Next, we built a crawler that crawls 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. We've been a true network beyond just ads on Read the Docs for 2 years and we now have ~130 publishers and 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? I'd love to hear from you.

Terrible network. Did not pay me and only has a few advertisers.

Just wanted to chime in here to say hi as well! I'm one of the co-founders as well, and happy to answer questions about our ML modeling, Django, or other aspects of our infrastructure.

Very well done I am looking forwards to give a try to an alternative to Carbon Ads ;)