EthicalAds Newsletter - April 2023

New features

Our progress in April was:

• The ads now have a live preview while advertisers edit them. We've always shown a preview of exactly what the ad looks like, but now it changes in real-time.
• We're slowly rolling out more discussion of our machine learning topic classifier into our landing pages. Readers of our blog and our advertisers know about it, but we want to highlight it and be transparent about exactly how we classify content for great contextual ad targeting.
• Some of our sales process improvements rolled out over the last month. Along with a new team member, Emily, we've been able to followup with a lot more past advertisers, past leads, and improve the quality of our sales process.

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

April advertising stats

In April 2023:

• We generated $44,423.82 for our publishers. While not a record, this is a very good month.
• We had 160 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 28,954,706 paid ad views across the world. This beat last month's record.

We've had some success selling a few more very broadly targeted campaigns that are increasing our overall paid view numbers although sometimes those don't earn as much money as some other campaigns. Regardless, we are very happy with these numbers. We are expecting May to be similar to April.

Upcoming features

The major features in our upcoming roadmap for May:

• We have a new report coming for advertisers that shows a performance breakdown by topic. This will be especially interesting for advertisers focused on multiple topics.
• We intend to rollout some additional publisher-focused changes that will help publishers using EthicalAds on multiple sites.
• We've been very happy with the performance of our topic classifier. It's proven to be more accurate than some of our previous naive attempts such as detecting keywords with our ad client. As a result we're going to be phasing out some of our other attempts and relying on our machine learning a bit more.
• We're still refining it, but we will also have a content piece with the lay of the land of the ad industry. Lots of our publishers and many developers don't fully understand the ad industry and exploring what it looks like and the direction we hope to steer it toward are important.

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.