EthicalAds Newsletter - July 2026

New features from the previous 3 months

• Our updated Q3 prospectus is out. There was a small price increase for advertisers marketing to AI devs in North America.
• We are seeing great traction in the AI space. LLMs and chatbots are now our biggest source of new advertisers and publishers.
• Driven by a surge of inbound interest from publishers building AI tools and LLM integrations, we've released a new landing page dedicated to this space. This helps us better serve these newer products and the developers behind them and provides even richer contextual targeting for our advertisers.
• We're now showing metrics to publishers around how much of their site is indexed for niche targeting. The goal is to increase this number by making the data more transparent. Niche targeted campaigns yield the best results for advertisers in terms of performance and earn the most money for publishers: a win-win.

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

Q2 advertising stats

Over the last quarter:

• We generated $117.4k for our publishers. While this is down slightly quarter-over-quarter as a few large publishers successfully transitioned to direct ad sales, our core network continues to thrive.
• We supported 208 active publishers on our network. We welcomed quite a few new publishers to EthicalAds in the last quarter, including mvnrepository.com, a site for Java Maven artifacts, and mcpservers.org, a collection of Model Context Protocol (AI tooling and data sources).
• We served 61.4M paid ad views globally. While we saw a brief dip early in the quarter for broadly targeted campaigns, our network is now almost completely sold out across every market.

Demand in North America has been so strong we've had to delay advertiser start dates. It's been the case for the last year or so that we've been limited by the number of high-quality publishers we can onboard. If you operate a site looking to monetize your audience of developers, we'd love to hear from you.

Upcoming features

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

• As part of our niche targeting, we are enhancing our topic classifier for our major audiences. The goal is to take what we've learned in targeting niche campaigns and make even broadly focused campaigns perform better through improved targeting. Specifically, this is building on our work with domain centroids and applying them to topics.
• We are actively building the infrastructure to serve ads directly from the "edge," without needing to connect to a central server. While it may not launch this quarter, this will result in dramatically faster ad performance, especially for users further from our servers (mostly in US East).
• We're beginning a pilot with a large open-source project. This won't exactly be "advertising" but we're helping them get more sponsorships, including with marketing the benefits to sponsors and highlighting what sponsors receive. Helping out open-source projects has always been part of our DNA. There are many projects that don't want "ads" exactly but want sponsors, and we think this is an area where we can help.

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.