EthicalAds Newsletter - August 2022

New features

On the marketing side, we did a Show HN post that got a fair amount of traction and a ProductHunt launch (that didn't). This coincided with our v1.0.0 release post that talks about our backstory and the future of our network.

These are the other major features we released in August:

• We worked quite a bit on updating our landing pages to better explain our product positioning as an open source, privacy-focused ad network that uses contextual (rather than behavioral) targeting. We added more screenshots of the product and answering more questions about process and reporting before they're asked.
• We rolled out a few advances to better detect and handle ad fraud. While ad fraud is part of the industry, we work very hard to minimize it from impacting our advertisers. We have an upcoming blog post detailing some of the blatant tactics we've seen.
• Also in our ad server, we added a number of reporting improvements that improved performance and showed more of our metrics in graphical form.

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

August advertising stats

In August 2022:

• We generated $34,591.50 for our publishers.
• We had 133 publishers on our network with at least one paid ad impression.
• We had 14,258,799 paid ad views across the world.

As I mentioned in July, we saw a large advertiser scale back their marketing and this impacted us during early to mid-August as we scrambled to fill our inventory. Fortunately, we are now very booked up through September and a little into October.

September should be close to a record month for both our revenue and payouts to publishers. It will also feature a significant increase in paid ad views due to a few new lower priced campaigns running with cheaper targeting options.

Our wins

We got a significant amount of inbound publishers and advertisers from our ShowHN post and the great review from a customer last month on a developer marketing blog. These write-ups are continuing to pay huge dividends in terms of getting the word out about us.

Upcoming features

The major features in our upcoming roadmap:

• We continued to make really good progress on our ML model for contextual targeting. After contacting some of the devs, we started working with one of the folks from SpaCy on a contract basis to help improve our model and there's been some good work started there that I expect to continue throughout the month. It always feels great to build our product while putting money directly into the hands of open source devs.
• On the marketing side, we're going to produce a blog series that does privacy teardowns of popular websites. The first one will be in September.
• It feels like 2022 is still getting started but September is time to create our Q4 prospectus already.

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.