EthicalAds Newsletter - January 2026

Normally, the later part of the year into the new year are slow times for us. However, while traffic did slow down over the holidays, advertiser demand was higher than ever. We continue to almost completely sold out in North America and Western Europe.

New features from the previous 3 months

• We are continuing to work on our niche targeting and analyzer. One area we focused on, although there's more work to do, is to break out sections of pages we analyze (called "chunking") and analyze more, smaller parts to improve analysis. This has begun rolling out to our niche targeting.
• We launched a new larger ad format. We got a lot of demand for this from advertisers and publishers. While it's rolling out more fully this month, it is the culmination of a lot of work from the last few months.
• One interesting thing we noticed is an uptick in demand from advertising agencies. Agencies have always been part of our advertiser mix, especially for large companies. However, there's been a noticeable increase in demand. We updated a number of landing pages and our prospectus to mention features agencies are interested in including advanced reporting features and some more complex billing.
• We released a Q1 prospectus. There was a small price increase of roughly 7% in North American topic targeted content and a smaller increase in Europe. This was necessary since we're seeing demand there far more than we can currently fill.

Example of the new larger ad format

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

Q4 advertising stats

Last quarter:

• We generated $124.3k for our publishers and they received December's portion of this in a payout last week. We are on track to send over half a million dollars to publishers in 2026.
• We had 195 publishers on our network with at least one paid ad impression. This is slowly growing and we're seeing some publishers come in from other networks to ours. Interestingly, the most common way they're finding us is through ChatGPT and other AI chatbots. We've invested a little into making ourselves more discoverable by AI and it appears to be paying off a bit.
• We had 66.3M paid ad views across the world. This is a little higher than Q3 2025 but mostly due to some global campaigns.

Upcoming features

The major features in our upcoming roadmap for the next few months:

• We've invested a lot in our niche targeting and analyzer we use for contextual targeting. One big upcoming goal is to make more of the features we've built for niche targeting more broadly applicable to our regular targeting to try to get better performance out of all the campaigns we run.
• We're planning to surface metrics to publishers around how much of their site is indexed for niche targeting. The goal is to increase this by making the data more transparent.
• While renewals are a huge part of our business (over 65%) and we've made this much better than in the past, we believe we can make the renewal process even easier for our advertisers. We have a few more features around renewal billing and management to simplify the process for our recurring advertisers.

Thanks again for being along with us on this journey to build an ethical ad network. Please let us know if you have any ideas or feedback on our product or roadmap, we always love to hear from you.