EthicalAds Newsletter - July 2021

New features

These are the major features we released in the last month:

• In our ad server, we added noopener to our ad links as a security precaution.
• Our ad server now raises a warning on link redirects and errors when advertisers are creating an ad, to make sure it isn't an error in the URL.
• Also in our ad server, we created actions to allow our staff to handle the creation and customization of new advertising flights.
• On our website, we created our first iteration of an ethical marketing funnel by implementing a transparent, human-readable first-person cookie, running the open-source, privacy-friendly Plausible analytics, and creating our first ad-specific landing page for prospective Python publishers. Lookout for a blog post on how we did it, coming out soon!
• Also on our website, we launched our Publisher Referral Offer.

You can always see our latest server updates in our ethical-ad-server changelog and ethical-ad-client changelog.

July advertising stats

In July 2021:

• We generated $23,981.08 for our publishers.
• We had 105 publishers on our network with at least one paid ad impression.
• We had 16,257,531 paid ad views across the world.

In July we undertook an effort to ensure the high quality of our network, we removed a number of under-performing publishers and onboardeded some new publishers, though we continue to look for more! We also launched a few globally-targeted ad-buys which resulted in a sizable increase of views from June's ~14.6 million paid views.

Tricky bits

We are still verging on max capacity with regards to ad inventory specifically in the US and EU. We focused our efforts this month are marketing in order to attract new publishers. We rolled out our new marketing funnel and were even featured on HackerNews twice. Unfortunately, determining the success of these new endeavors takes time as we don't want to change too many variables at once, lest we not know which avenues had the greatest impact.

Upcoming features

The major features in our upcoming roadmap:

• Implementing a view time metric for our ads to ensure a fair system for counting valid views as well as provide a metric for publisher quality.
• Releasing our Surveillance Advertising informational page to the Learning Hub.
• Highlighting our 10% discount on ad buys over $3000 in the flight report page.
• Updating our Publisher Guide with new examples of superior placements and some explanation as to why they are so desirable.

Thanks again for being along with us on this journey to build an ethical ad network. Please email us if you have any ideas or feedback on our product or roadmap, we always love to hear from you.