EthicalAds Newsletter - February 2023

New features

Our progress in February was:

• We released a number of performance improvements to our reporting. All timeout issues have been resolved and performance is downright snappy on most reports.
• We released some improvements to our ad pacing that will yield better performance for our advertisers. Specifically we now allow pacing by the hour instead of by the day to spread out ads across the day more effectively.
• We released a change that will prioritize ads with high CTRs. This is another quality of life change for advertisers in order to improve their performance.
• We documented a few tips on measuring conversions. Advertisers are always comparing how much they spend on ads and what they got in return. We want our ad network to be measured consistently against other channels so advertisers can see for themselves that our network works well.
• We built a number of internal sales dashboards to better measure our inventory, what's starting soon and what is outstanding. The hope here is to be able to bring in some additional hands for our small sales team.

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

February advertising stats

In February 2023:

• We generated $34,464.67 for our publishers.
• We had 147 publishers on our network with at least one paid ad impression.
• We had 12,773,611 paid ad views across the world.

As we mentioned last month, we expected February to be a bit stronger than January and we generated about $2,500 in additional revenue for our publishers despite the shorter month. We expect March to be even stronger still.

Upcoming features

The major features in our upcoming roadmap for March:

• We aim to update our advertiser guide with more examples of successful ads and concrete ways to track and measure the success of your ad campaigns (without compromising privacy). This didn't happen in February because it involved getting permission from advertisers which was a bit of a slow process.
• There has been some interest from the open source community in our server. We are spending some time to make it easier to take our ad server and use it to serve ads for your own project or website.
• Currently, we are combining a few different techniques in order to categorize websites where we serve ads including from our ML model, our previous more naive model, and in some cases from publishers themselves. Now that we're pretty happy with our ML model, we are going to make a few tweaks that will result in better targeting results for our advertisers.
• We are also working on some minor UX improvements to our ad server for advertisers.

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.