EthicalAds Newsletter - October 2022

October wasn't quite a record month in terms of revenue, but it was our best month ever except for September.

New features

These are the major features we released in October:

• We released a campaign calculator to help advertisers budget for a campaign based on the responses they're hoping to achieve.
• We did our first privacy teardown of search engines. Depending on the response we get, we think this could be a series of posts to educate audiences on what to look for in services from a privacy perspective.
• Our GPU trained contextual targeting model rolled out into production in October. So far, the results are much better than the previous iteration. There were some performance issues taking the model from development into production, but those were worked out.
• We announced our partnership with the PSF to help them manage and roll out their sponsors logos and imagery to all their properties.

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

October advertising stats

In October 2022:

• We generated $45,511.07 for our publishers. This was our second highest publisher revenue month after September
• We had 152 publishers on our network with at least one paid ad impression. This number continues to creep up as more sites become interested in making money without invasive tracking.
• We had 20,236,866 paid ad views across the world.

As I expected, October was a very strong month for us and for our publishers. We usually see a seasonal slowdown around the holidays and between fewer ads shown over the Thanksgiving holiday in the US and other seasonal pullback, we expect November to be a quite bit weaker than October.

We've definitely seen some advertisers tighten their budgets as well and that's further contributing to a weaker finish to the year. Usually advertising is back to full swing in January or February, but outside of the brief Covid crash in March 2020, we haven't operated through a true downturn. Regardless, we can weather an economic downturn if it comes.

Upcoming features

The major features in our upcoming roadmap for November:

• From a content marketing perspective, we're planning to do a followup post on our privacy teardown of search engines, a post with details about how our ML model works, and a blog detailing how ad blockers can actually help a privacy-focused network like ours.
• On the product side, we're hoping to get a continuous integration service configured for our GPU trained model. This would mean retraining and updating the model anytime we add new hand categorized data to our data set. This tight feedback loop will create a flywheel to help our model get better more rapidly.

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.