Publisher Policy

Effective date: August 19, 2020 Last updated: March 14, 2024

The goal of this page is to set expectations between EthicalAds and our publishers about what is expected for each of us. Our goal is for these to be easily understandable and fair, but we're always happy to have feedback on these terms.

All publishers agree that their ad display meets these terms prior to enabling paid ads on their site. We will do an initial review of the ad display, but we expect publishers to stay within these guidelines at all times.

Contents

Ad display

We have the following rules around display of our ads:

• Our ad should be the only ad on the page. We currently only allow a single EthicalAds ad per page, but are discussing how to support multiple. Promotion of your own content or services on your site is fine, but we do not want our ads alongside ads from competing networks. It's fine to show our ad and other ad networks' ads on different pages or different requests, just not on the same page at the same time.
• The ad should appear when the user first visits, above the fold, on both desktop and mobile. You can disable the ad on mobile if this isn't possible or we can disable mobile ads for your site.
• The ad should not disrupt the natural reading flow of the page. It should be placed above, beside or below the main content, not within it. This is an Acceptable Ads requirement, and something we think is best for users as well.
• The ad placement should result in at least a 0.1% CTR (click-through rate). This will be reported in your publisher dashboard.

You are welcome to display a different ad as a fallback if EthicalAds doesn't have a paid ad to show. You are also welcome to show EthicalAds to a share of your visitors (eg. 50%) along with another ad network, as long as they aren't shown on the same page.

Payouts

We currently have a 70% revenue share with publishers which is around industry standard but slightly higher. This means you get 70% of the money that we make.

We handle payouts once a month, with a minimum payment of $50. Our goal is to get payment to our publishers by the 15th of the month, with the payment being the balance at the end of the prior month.

We currently support payouts via the following methods:

• Stripe Connect (Bank transfer)
• Paypal
• OpenCollective
• GitHub Sponsors

For our compliance and for tax purposes, we may require a government ID from you in certain circumstances to process payouts. We will ask for this explicitly if and when we require it. We handle your information securely and it is deleted no later than 30 days after your next payout.

Ad display validation

We reserve the right to validate that the traffic on your site looks authentic. Prior to issuing payouts, we will review all traffic for each publisher, and alert the publisher if we find any traffic that looks inauthentic.

We already invalidate different types of traffic automatically, which won't be counted as a paid ad view:

• Known bots
• Users with IP addresses we can't geolocate
• Users with IP address that map to known hosting providers, VPNs, and web proxies
• Multiple views of an ad within a short period from the same browser

We are regularly tweaking our ad fraud detection in response to new challenges, and we're happy to work with publishers to make sure our ads work for them.

Violations

We reserve the right to adjustment payouts contingent on following our publisher policy. If traffic is found to be fraudulent, invalid, or otherwise against our policy, we will attempt to detect this prior to paying out to our publishers. Payouts may be delayed in cases where we detect suspicious activity, because once a payout has been issued it will be very difficult to revoke.

Publishers who are found in violation of our publisher policy can have their paid ads disabled. We try to provide at least 7 days notice before disabling paid advertising, but this may not be possible in all cases.