Publisher Frequently Asked Questions

Contents

What is the minimum traffic required to join?

Your site needs at least 50,000 pageviews per month. This helps us provide enough scale to make it worthwhile for advertisers to buy ads on your site. If you're close, we do occasionally make exceptions for sites that are growing quickly and have high-quality, relevant content for our advertisers.

What data can I see about the ads?

We have reports for the following data:

• Revenue - This shows the total revenue per day. The most important report :)
• Geos - Top countries your traffic comes from are monetizing
• Advertisers - Top advertisers on your site, and how much revenue you're getting from each
• Keywords - Site or Page-specific keywords and how much revenue each is getting you
• Placements - Allows you to track different ad placements across your site (eg. homepage, blog sidebar)

Each report will have the following metrics:

• Index: The data that the report is based on, for example the date on the revenue report.
• Views: The number of views that your ads had. You can filter by paid, community, or house ads.
• Clicks: The number of clicks that your ads had.
• Click-through rate (CTR): The ratio of Clicks to Views. We generally expect this to be 0.1% or higher.
• View Rate: The ratio of Views to Offers (ads requested from our server).
• Revenue: The amount of money that you have made.

How do I improve View Rate?

View Rate will never be 100% because some users will close the browser after the ad is requested, but before the ad is viewed. If you have an ad that is loaded outside of the users viewport, it won't be counted as viewed until the user scrolls to see it. Having the ad visible by default on page load ("above the fold") is the most effective way to have a high view rate.

See our publisher guide for more details and tips.

Does it matter if I use text or image ads?

We sell a mix of CPC (paid per click) and CPM (paid per view) ads. Ads that are viewed and clicked more get more revenue. The better and more visible the placement, generally the more money we both make. Some of our best performing publishers use the text ad format, but in places that are very visible or persistent in the page design.

Any restrictions on ad placements?

Yes, please read our full Publisher Policy on ad display.

How much will I make?

These numbers will vary based on your audience and topics that you write about since advertisers prices vary by geography and by topic. In addition, the performance of your ad placements are a factor since some advertisers pay per click rather than per impression. Generally, publishers see around $2.50 per 1,000 pageviews (CPM), assuming most of your traffic is from the EU and North America. Traffic from Australia or New Zealand is typically right around this same range, while ads shown to users in the rest of the world usually bring in less.

You can get an estimate from our publisher revenue calculator.

How can I be paid?

Please read our full Publisher Policy on payouts.

Will I need to sign a contract?

There is no contract to sign. If you decide you no longer want to show EthicalAds on your site, you can just remove the ad client code. If you decide to remove EthicalAds, we would appreciate it if you let us know why you went in a different direction. This feedback is how we improve our product.

Why do I only see house ads?

You should generally see paid ads in North America and Western Europe, which are the most targeted regions by our advertisers. If you're somewhere else in the world, you might see paid ads or not. You can always look in your publisher dashboard to see more information on what is happening, once data has started to be collected.

How do I ensure the ads will perform well on my site?

Please read our Publisher Guide for placement help.

Analytics shows more pageviews than you're showing ad views. Why?

There are a number of reasons why this might happen.

• Ads have to be in the viewport for a full second in order to count as viewed. If the user navigates away, scrolls past the ad, or the ad isn't in the viewport for some reason like it requires scrolling to the ad on mobile, then we do not count an ad view and don't bill the advertiser.
• Your "view rate" in our reporting is the ratio of ads viewed to ads requested. Improving your view rate will close this gap.
• Notably, we do not bill advertisers for ads viewed by bots or over VPNs. We do our best to only charge advertisers when real people view and click their ads.
• Any request to us that is blocked, by an ad or tracker blocker cannot be viewed. We are on some ad blocker allow lists such as Acceptable Ads which helps minimize ads being blocked.
• Most of our advertisers focus on certain regions such as North America and Europe. If a substantial amount of your site's audience is from regions outside of those, we may not have all of our traffic sold in those regions. If you have house ads enabled, you will still see ad views in our reporting there, but they will not add to your revenue.

How do you target ads?

We target ads on two primary things: visitor location and page content. Location targeting uses the IP address of the visitor, but we only target this to the country level. IP addresses are not stored.

For page content, we crawl sites just like a search engine spider does and index individual pages on your site with their content relevant to advertisers. This lets us target ad campaigns to the most relevant sites and pages across our network for each advertiser. This is how EthicalAds serves relevant ads without using any personal data or tracking.

You can see exactly how much of your content is categorized in your publisher dashboard. This is our most advanced targeting and we charge advertisers more for these highly targeted placements. You'll earn more money the more of your content is categorized.

You can read more about our content targeting here.

Is EthicalAds open source?

Yes, both our ad server and the client that runs on publisher's sites are open source. You can read more about our open source code and transparency here.

This sounds great, how do I sign up?

Simply fill out our publisher application form with some information, and we'll get back to you right away.