What Makes EthicalAds a Great Carbon Ads Alternative for Your Site
We know that we are competing with a few other ad networks that focus on developers. This page talks a bit more about how we're different, and why you might want to choose us instead of Carbon Ads.
Carbon and their parent company BuySellAds have attractive, unobtrusive ads. Like us, they also focus on developers and related niches. We are happy to compete with a company that also cares about the user experience around ads. However, there are some differences between EthicalAds and Carbon especially around privacy, security, and community focus. Let's explore them.
| Carbon | EthicalAds | |
|---|---|---|
|
Payouts
Does the network pay monthly with one of the industry-best revenue shares? |
|
|
|
No cookies & user privacy
Is the ad network cookie-free so you won't need a cookie banner? |
|
|
|
Compliant with global privacy regulation
Will ads require tracking notifications due to regulation like the GDPR or CCPA? |
|
|
|
Transparent
Is the network transparent about which ads and advertisers will appear on which sites? |
|
|
|
Developer-focused
Will there be off-topic ads or ads focused on people besides developers? |
|
|
|
Open source
Is the ad network open source so you can see exactly what it is doing? |
|
|
Privacy: We never set a cookie on your site, or load third-party scripts.
When running a web site, if you integrate with an ad network, you expect to send data to that network. When using a provider like Carbon Ads, you are also sending data to third-parties that you didn't even know about. EthicalAds will never load javascript from other providers on your pages.
EthicalAds is 100% GDPR and CCPA compliant.
Carbon Ads reserves the right to set cookies on your browser session, as well as load scripts or resources hosted by third parties into a publishers web page. You can see a screenshot of Carbon Ads loading a Google tracking pixel here:
Carbon sometimes loads third-party resources from Google or other trackers
Removing Our 3rd Party Ad-Serving Cookie from Your Browser
— Carbon Ads (BuySellAds) Privacy Policy
EthicalAds will never set cookies on your users, and we don't use any user-specific data to target advertising. This means you don't need a cookie banner, we are GDPR-compliant, and your users data is not being tracked across the internet.
Community: We give back with Community Ads
Our long history in the open source community helps guide the actions that we take as an organization. We appreciate that we have the ability to give back to other projects, so we offer Community Ads for projects to show community-focused ads for free.
We have run this program since we launched ads on Read the Docs, because we love being able to support other projects. This program allows EthicalAds to help give back to other projects in free advertising, as well as by giving them money as publishers.
Open Source: Our code is open source, and easy to read
The code behind other networks is proprietary and incredibly complex. This is because there is a large amount of time being spent trying to figure out exactly who you are and how to target you with an ad.
With EthicalAds, our code is both simple and open source. You can look at our ethical ad server and ethical ad client on GitHub. You can read the exact logic we use to select that ads that show on your website, because we don't need complex tracking logic.
Join today: Ready to take the next step?
Improving the advertising ecosystem is why we are building our company. We hope that you'll join us.
We believe the open source community should show the way forward, since we have a deep understanding of how privacy issues impact the internet. We have space for additional publishers, and look forward to building something meaningful with you:
- Become a publisher today
- Follow our journey in our newsletter