EthicalAds Newsletter - December 2023

New features

Our progress in December was:

• We trained and released a new version of our topic classifier that roughly doubles the size of the training set. So far, we're seeing improved accuracy in analyzing the pages where our ads appear.
• On our website, we released our Q1 prospectus. There were no pricing changes but we did change up the prospectus considerably to talk more about our advertising worldview and focus on the value we provide to advertisers.
• Our experiment with ads that rotate occasionally when there's user input hit a few snags with a couple publishers. This experiment is live on Read the Docs and our beta client and it should roll out more widely in January.
• Years ago, we ran a few campaigns that targeted geographically more finely than countries. We made a few improvements to be better able to target both US states and major US metro areas in response to advertiser demand.

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

December advertising stats

In December 2023:

• We generated $39,248.91 for our publishers.
• We had 173 publishers on our network with at least one paid ad impression.
• We had 19,916,532 paid ad views across the world.

Our business is highly seasonal and traffic to our network drops drastically starting around December 18th or so to ~1/3 of normal levels. All things considered, this was a very strong month for advertising and we expect a strong January.

2023 holiday traffic levels

Upcoming features

The major features in our upcoming roadmap for January:

• We're continuing to work on ad rotation and expect to have more hard stats about how rotated ads (currently a tiny fraction of the total) perform.
• We're actively working on some incentives for publishers who switch from other networks to EthicalAds. If you've been on the fence about trying out our network, let us know.
• One service we frequently provide to advertisers is to more actively manage their advertising. We can turn off lower performing ads or even slightly tweak ads to try to find something that performs even better. We want to highlight these "agency-lite" features on our website and prospectus.
• We're still hoping to collaborate with a few advertisers who use Tableau (or something similar) to make sure we build exactly what they want in terms of reporting. If you're interested in this, please get in touch!

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.