EthicalAds Newsletter - March 2023

New features

Our progress in March was:

• We rolled out a new landing page detailing our ad specs with a number of examples and tips to help campaigns perform their best.
• We made some improvements to the landing pages that compare us against Carbon and Google.
• We made a number of improvements to our open source ad server which aim to help the folks who use it for their own purposes. We'd received some helpful feedback and wanted to show the community some love.
• The improvements we made in February to pacing and prioritization were rolled out to (almost) everybody.
• We are making a lot of improvements to our sales process. Beginning in early April, Eric and I are onboarding a sales rep to help for the next few months.

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

March advertising stats

In March 2023:

• We generated $48,749.84 for our publishers. This was our best month ever for publisher revenue!
• We had 152 publishers on our network with at least one paid ad impression. This number has been creeping up nicely. We want it to grow slowly and steadily.
• We had 23,744,797 paid ad views across the world. This was another record for us.

March was a record month for us. One change we made to our pricing recently was to lower the cost of some campaigns in regions that have been historically undersold. Partially as a result, we sold a lot of traffic in those regions resulting in a huge increase in total paid ads. While many of these don't earn a lot of money (region is the biggest factor in our prices), this was very nice to see.

We don't expect April to be quite as good as March, but it should still be a very good month.

Upcoming features

The major features in our upcoming roadmap for March:

• We have more advertiser UX improvements coming including a live preview so our advertisers can see exactly what their ads will look like.
• We are still putting the finishing touches on some ML improvements to our content targeting. We continue to work with the team behind SpaCy to get those most out of our model (using their tool). It's great to keep contracting money in the OSS ecosystem.
• A number of improvements we're working on are for our sales process. The goal of these are to smooth the process for new and returning advertisers. In the past, we've joked that we could sell triple the amount of ads with no changes to our product. While that's a bit of an exaggeration, advertising requires doing sales and we are ramping up there.

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.