About Us
We believe that advertising can be effective without compromising privacy. At EthicalAds, our goal is to build an ad network that works for advertisers and helps sustain open source.
Small Team. Big Impact.
EthicalAds was built to sustain open source development of Read the Docs, an open source documentation platform. Advertising was the natural model because it scaled up well as our platform grew. However, we wanted to do ads right without tracking users or having security issues with third-party scripts. Since no existing ad networks would partner with us on privacy-respecting ads, we built our own.
Read more about our team and our vision for ethical advertising.
Meet the ads team
Eric Holscher
Eric cofounded Read the Docs and took it from a hackathon project in 2010 to full-time in 2014. Experimenting with funding models led him to create EthicalAds to make Read the Docs sustainable and now he wants to bring that to the wider open source community. He previously worked at Urban Airship and the Lawrence Journal-World, the home of the Django web framework.
David Fischer
David joined Read the Docs back in 2017 to work on security, privacy, and to build EthicalAds. He saw the importance of ethical advertising and joined the team to help take the approach from a single site to a larger network that supported the open source ecosystem. Previously David worked on security at Qualcomm and Amazon before being director of technology at TapHunter.
Ra Cohen
Ra orginally joined EthicalAds in 2021 as a data scientist and designated people person. They're excited to assist with account management, bespoke data visualizations, and in bringing machine learning to privacy preserving advertising. Ra previously worked as an intern for Google and then as a research scientist at Perspecta Labs, a descendent of Bell Labs.