EthicalAds Newsletter - April 2026

New features from the previous 3 months

• We are continuing to work on our niche targeting and analyzer. However, we wanted to take some of our learnings and apply them to help all campaigns, even the ones that are targeted by topic or simply by geography. Advertisers frequently have multiple ads in their campaign and now we're using the same embeddings we use for niche targeting to select the ad we think will perform best based on the page context. It's a little early to say how this is performing, but we're expecting a small bump in performance across the network from this.
• We made some small improvements to make renewals even easier for advertisers since it's such a huge part of our business (~65%). Specifically, we have improved billing to allow advertisers to charge a card on file or request a manual invoice.
• Lately, there's been a bit more demand from publishers who operate their own LLMs and want to inject ads into LLM responses. We made some improvements specifically so these AI publishers can get the domain where the ad goes (something we've shown on our ads for a long time) and get an icon for the advertiser.
• In addition to all of this, we migrated our infrastructure from Azure to AWS.

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

Q1 advertising stats

Last quarter:

• We generated $161.8k for our publishers and they received March's portion of this in a payout last week. At the beginning of the year, we were hoping to send $500k to publishers this year and it's looking like we're going to get there and then some.
• We had 210 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 82.2M paid ad views across the world. This is quite a bit higher than late last year and we've seen a bit of growth in global campaigns. We are continuing to see that in Q2.

Upcoming features

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

• Last quarter, we launched a new larger ad format. We're actively working on a change to make it trivial to request that format but fall back to our more common format if there's no matching advertiser.
• 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.
• Because of the uptick in demand from publishers wanting to inject ads into LLM responses on their own sites, we're building a landing page specifically for these kind of publishers to explain why they should choose our network.

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.