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We're trying to build an ad network that doesn't track users: https://www.ethicalads.io/ https://www.ethicalads.io/ We talked a little bit about how these ads

We're trying to build an ad network that doesn't track users: https://www.ethicalads.io/ https://www.ethicalads.io/ We talked a little bit about how these ads still work, even without tracking you. You might be losing 10-15% of revenue, but if you never had that revenue to start with, you don't miss it: https://www.ethicalads.io/blog/2018/04/ethical-advertising-works/ https://www.ethicalads.io/blog/2018/04/ethical-advertising-w... I think the real secret is just to not become dependent on the additive revenue. All businesses forgo additional revenue based on ethics and regulation, and I don't understand why that's such a odd thing to do with advertising.

ogre_codes 6y ago
Presumably if your adverts don't do tracking, they don't need to slow page loads down the way current advertising does either which should be a big plus. Fundamentally serving an advert should be a light process adding only a tiny amount of overhead to the site.
- ericholscher 6y ago
  Yea, we are planning to do a blog post on it, but the total overhead is in the 10's of KB. Just a single JS file, and an image. All open source: https://github.com/readthedocs/ethical-ad-client https://github.com/readthedocs/ethical-ad-client
franklampard 6y ago
I totally read it as ethical lads.
- tilolebo 6y ago
  And I read your comment as "ethical ads" and was wondering what I got wrong from the GP comment, ahah.
msl 6y ago
These are some of the only ads I see online these days (on Read the Docs, mostly). I don't use ad blockers, but I do use tracker blockers, and those block pretty much all ads, for obvious reasons. Not these ones, though. And that's how it's supposed to go.
- HappySweeney 6y ago
  Can you elaborate on your setup?
  - morvita 6y ago
    I'm not OP, but I have my browser setup to block trackers only, nothing that's billed as an ad-blocker. I use Firefox with Strict Enhanced Tracking Protection [0] and Privacy Badger [1] as an extra layer of protection. Some sites, mostly news orgs, complain that I'm blocking ads, but inevitably these are the sites Privacy Badger reports 20+ trackers blocked. I'm happy to see ads online, I'm just not willing to sacrifice my privacy for them. [0] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/enhanced-tracking-protection-firefox-desktop#w_strict-enhanced-tracking-protection https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/enhanced-tracking-prote... [1] https://privacybadger.org/ https://privacybadger.org/
    - TedDoesntTalk 6y ago
      Why not just block ads, too? Do you really think advertising is ethical at any level? Because I do not. If I want to buy something, I seek it out. Anything else is like junk snail mail: a waste of my time and your money.
      - morvita 6y ago
        The short answer: I am not anti-advertising, so I don't block ads that respect me. I don't love advertising in many of it's forms, but taken from the viewpoint of those who make money from ads (i.e. content creators), it is one of the best ways out there for them to make a living. Platforms like Patreon are great for some folks, but not everyone can make a living off of sponsorship from their viewers. But, I am not willing to sacrifice my own privacy to allow someone else to make money, especially given that we have tonnes of examples of non-privacy-invading advertising that works. I listen to 8-10 hours of podcasts a week and I generally find the ads on them, usually where the host does an ad read and includes a discount code, to be far more useful and relevant to me than the hyper-targeted ads backed by 20 tracking scripts I see on news sites. Another example, many of the indie tech news sites I read (e.g. Daring Fireball or Six Colors) will have a weekly sponsor that will have an advertising post or two interspersed with their regular content. I'm happy to take 2-3 minutes out of a 30 minute podcast episode to listen to a couple ad reads or see a brief write-up of a sponsor's product as I'm scrolling through the week's tech news. What I'm not happy to do is have my web browser load a dozen tracking scripts in the background when I open a news article and have flashing pictures deliberately trying to distract me from what I'm reading.
Nextgrid 6y ago
This is great. How are the ads paid for though - is it billed per click or per impression, or is it billed per an approximate amount of time the ad will be displayed for? The problem with charging per click or impression is that you're vulnerable to fraud which means you either lose money/trust or you have to do invasive tracking to detect & prevent fraud (which you'll be unlikely to achieve as well as the big players - Google & Facebook - do). Charging per amount of time (regardless of actual impressions or clicks) doesn't have that problem.
- ericholscher 6y ago
  We are doing CPC & CPM pricing. I don't believe anyone has asked us for "time seen" pricing. I don't even really know how that would work, and why it wouldn't be open to fraud in a similar fashion. Do you have a good example of how this is priced, and how it would work in practice?
  - Nextgrid 6y ago
    By time seen I don't literally mean time displayed on screen but more like TV/radio ads, as in this ad will be part of our rotation of X ads for an entire months across X publishers. I think The Deck used to do this. Determining the price will be a bit tricky (and I would expect that you'd have to lowball yourself until your platform builds credibility in terms of good ROI) but in the long run it should mean your advertisers pay a flat price to be included per week/month regardless of actual impressions or clicks (thus there's no fraud potential as only the raw profit from the ads will matter - the only "fraud" potential would be to literally buy the advertised product en masse).
    - ericholscher 6y ago
      Gotcha, that definitely makes sense. We are looking at doing that for some of our larger sites, similar to Daring Fireball: https://daringfireball.net/feeds/sponsors/ https://daringfireball.net/feeds/sponsors/ -- which I believe is based off the old Deck model :) Thanks for following up.
  - deleted 6y ago
AndrewUnmuted 6y ago
There is no such thing as an ethical ad. Advertising is a cynical deployment of our knowledge of crowd wisdom, media manipulation, and statistics to make people part with their money for things they wouldn't think they needed. Our economy can't handle this kind of reckless consumerism anymore. Worse yet, we don't need advertising to bolster our media. Unfortunately, the media execs don't realize this yet. All your metrics are fuzzy, your standards ridiculous. We have far better practices we can deploy than the ones the advertisers use. Please, stop advertising to us. If that's all you plan to do with this new company, can you please kindly go away?
- ericholscher 6y ago
  If you'd like to suggest another way to make OSS sustainable, I'd be all ears. A bit more color here: https://www.ericholscher.com/blog/2016/aug/31/funding-oss-marketing-money/ https://www.ericholscher.com/blog/2016/aug/31/funding-oss-ma...
  - myWindoonn 6y ago
    Rather than open source, let us return to Free Software. The point of our labor is not to ensure that we are paid; it is to tear down the systems which create inequality and scarcity in the first place.
  - smichel17 6y ago
    I'm working on https://snowdrift.coop https://snowdrift.coop for that. We could use help, particularly from anyone who's good with css.
  - TedDoesntTalk 6y ago
    You've obviously thought this out extensively and decided to advertise. Who am I to offer a better solution? You know your business domain, revenue needs, etc better than me or anyone else. However, that does not mean I have to agree to advertising -- whether it is labeled ethical, green, sustainable, cage-free or whatever. If you're lucky, you won't have a lot of extremists like myself visiting your site; i.e. the advertising will be successful.
hhjj 6y ago
It would be nicer if no tracking would mean no data sent to ethicalads unless user engaging with ad because we know what happen when we trust advertising companies. So a step in the right direction but i would still block impressions when hosted on another domain. Also ads should not distort users perception in order to sell but that's another debate.
- ericholscher 6y ago
  We support a backend API, but it's much more complicated to implement, and the client gets more complex as well. We started out with a vision of all backend integrations, but it was impossible to sell to most publishers.
TedDoesntTalk 6y ago
To me, there is no such thing as an “ethical ad”. You are trying to steal my attention, my time. You don’t get to do that. My time on Earth is limited and you don’t get a millisecond of it if I can help it. If I want to buy something, I seek it out. Anything else is a waste of my time and a waste of the advertisers money. I long ago decided to throw out every piece of physical ad mail I receive without even glancing at it more than long enough to recognize it as an advertisement. I don’t know why you expect me to treat your digital ads any differently? You can call my perspective extremist, but is it any more extreme than the methods used by advertising networks to steal my attention?
- silentsea90 6y ago
  Great morally charged argument, but I am not sure how you expect content creators to monetize.
  - TedDoesntTalk 6y ago
    That's not really my problem, is it? It is the content creator's problem.
  - beefield 6y ago
    Well, to be blunt, in my humble opinion more than 90% of "content creators" trying to monetize their content with ads currently produce content of so low quality, that world would be a better place without their content. So if my ad blocker helps any of those to change their career, I am happy.
    - silentsea90 6y ago
      Even with ad monetization, if their content is of no use, they will disappear if they survive on said ad monetization. Content creation on the web is hard enough to suffer from removing the major monetization avenue without a suitable alternative.
  - JoshTriplett 6y ago
    Charge money, either directly for the content, or indirectly in the form of patronage or a service or other business you run.
wpietri 6y ago
I appreciate that you're trying what you're trying, but I wanted to address this: > All businesses forgo additional revenue based on ethics and regulation, and I don't understand why that's such a odd thing to do with advertising. The great bulk of advertising is built upon a conflict of interest and is essentially manipulative. Consider, for example, an article. Both the writer and the reader want the reader's maximum attention on the article for as long as the reader cares to give it. The goal of advertising is to distract from that in hopes of extracting money from the reader. Generally, ads are constructed without much regard to whether the reader was intending to buy or would really benefit from the product. The goal is to make a sale. (If you doubt me, look at how many people who create or show ads, say, test a product before putting the ad in front of people. Or just look at tobacco advertising, a product that has killed hundreds of millions.) So I think there's an inherent lack of ethics to ads as an industry. It could be that you'll find enough people who are worried about privacy but not about the other stuff to build a business. But I wouldn't bet on it. It's no accident that this security hole is being closed not because of random miscreants but because of industrial-scale exploitation.
tgsovlerkhgsel 6y ago
I think the big problem in adtech isn't just targeting, it's also fighting ad fraud. Do you have a good plan for when you become big enough to become a target for ad fraud?

ogre_codes 6y ago

Presumably if your adverts don't do tracking, they don't need to slow page loads down the way current advertising does either which should be a big plus. Fundamentally serving an advert should be a light process adding only a tiny amount of overhead to the site.

ericholscher 6y ago
Yea, we are planning to do a blog post on it, but the total overhead is in the 10's of KB. Just a single JS file, and an image. All open source: https://github.com/readthedocs/ethical-ad-client https://github.com/readthedocs/ethical-ad-client

franklampard 6y ago

I totally read it as ethical lads.

tilolebo 6y ago
And I read your comment as "ethical ads" and was wondering what I got wrong from the GP comment, ahah.

msl 6y ago

These are some of the only ads I see online these days (on Read the Docs, mostly). I don't use ad blockers, but I do use tracker blockers, and those block pretty much all ads, for obvious reasons. Not these ones, though. And that's how it's supposed to go.

HappySweeney 6y ago
Can you elaborate on your setup?
- morvita 6y ago
  I'm not OP, but I have my browser setup to block trackers only, nothing that's billed as an ad-blocker. I use Firefox with Strict Enhanced Tracking Protection [0] and Privacy Badger [1] as an extra layer of protection. Some sites, mostly news orgs, complain that I'm blocking ads, but inevitably these are the sites Privacy Badger reports 20+ trackers blocked. I'm happy to see ads online, I'm just not willing to sacrifice my privacy for them. [0] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/enhanced-tracking-protection-firefox-desktop#w_strict-enhanced-tracking-protection https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/enhanced-tracking-prote... [1] https://privacybadger.org/ https://privacybadger.org/
  - TedDoesntTalk 6y ago
    Why not just block ads, too? Do you really think advertising is ethical at any level? Because I do not. If I want to buy something, I seek it out. Anything else is like junk snail mail: a waste of my time and your money.
    - morvita 6y ago
      The short answer: I am not anti-advertising, so I don't block ads that respect me. I don't love advertising in many of it's forms, but taken from the viewpoint of those who make money from ads (i.e. content creators), it is one of the best ways out there for them to make a living. Platforms like Patreon are great for some folks, but not everyone can make a living off of sponsorship from their viewers. But, I am not willing to sacrifice my own privacy to allow someone else to make money, especially given that we have tonnes of examples of non-privacy-invading advertising that works. I listen to 8-10 hours of podcasts a week and I generally find the ads on them, usually where the host does an ad read and includes a discount code, to be far more useful and relevant to me than the hyper-targeted ads backed by 20 tracking scripts I see on news sites. Another example, many of the indie tech news sites I read (e.g. Daring Fireball or Six Colors) will have a weekly sponsor that will have an advertising post or two interspersed with their regular content. I'm happy to take 2-3 minutes out of a 30 minute podcast episode to listen to a couple ad reads or see a brief write-up of a sponsor's product as I'm scrolling through the week's tech news. What I'm not happy to do is have my web browser load a dozen tracking scripts in the background when I open a news article and have flashing pictures deliberately trying to distract me from what I'm reading.

Nextgrid 6y ago

This is great. How are the ads paid for though - is it billed per click or per impression, or is it billed per an approximate amount of time the ad will be displayed for? The problem with charging per click or impression is that you're vulnerable to fraud which means you either lose money/trust or you have to do invasive tracking to detect & prevent fraud (which you'll be unlikely to achieve as well as the big players - Google & Facebook - do). Charging per amount of time (regardless of actual impressions or clicks) doesn't have that problem.

ericholscher 6y ago
We are doing CPC & CPM pricing. I don't believe anyone has asked us for "time seen" pricing. I don't even really know how that would work, and why it wouldn't be open to fraud in a similar fashion. Do you have a good example of how this is priced, and how it would work in practice?
- Nextgrid 6y ago
  By time seen I don't literally mean time displayed on screen but more like TV/radio ads, as in this ad will be part of our rotation of X ads for an entire months across X publishers. I think The Deck used to do this. Determining the price will be a bit tricky (and I would expect that you'd have to lowball yourself until your platform builds credibility in terms of good ROI) but in the long run it should mean your advertisers pay a flat price to be included per week/month regardless of actual impressions or clicks (thus there's no fraud potential as only the raw profit from the ads will matter - the only "fraud" potential would be to literally buy the advertised product en masse).
  - ericholscher 6y ago
    Gotcha, that definitely makes sense. We are looking at doing that for some of our larger sites, similar to Daring Fireball: https://daringfireball.net/feeds/sponsors/ https://daringfireball.net/feeds/sponsors/ -- which I believe is based off the old Deck model :) Thanks for following up.
- deleted 6y ago

AndrewUnmuted 6y ago

There is no such thing as an ethical ad. Advertising is a cynical deployment of our knowledge of crowd wisdom, media manipulation, and statistics to make people part with their money for things they wouldn't think they needed. Our economy can't handle this kind of reckless consumerism anymore. Worse yet, we don't need advertising to bolster our media. Unfortunately, the media execs don't realize this yet. All your metrics are fuzzy, your standards ridiculous. We have far better practices we can deploy than the ones the advertisers use. Please, stop advertising to us. If that's all you plan to do with this new company, can you please kindly go away?

ericholscher 6y ago
If you'd like to suggest another way to make OSS sustainable, I'd be all ears. A bit more color here: https://www.ericholscher.com/blog/2016/aug/31/funding-oss-marketing-money/ https://www.ericholscher.com/blog/2016/aug/31/funding-oss-ma...
- myWindoonn 6y ago
  Rather than open source, let us return to Free Software. The point of our labor is not to ensure that we are paid; it is to tear down the systems which create inequality and scarcity in the first place.
- smichel17 6y ago
  I'm working on https://snowdrift.coop https://snowdrift.coop for that. We could use help, particularly from anyone who's good with css.
- TedDoesntTalk 6y ago
  You've obviously thought this out extensively and decided to advertise. Who am I to offer a better solution? You know your business domain, revenue needs, etc better than me or anyone else. However, that does not mean I have to agree to advertising -- whether it is labeled ethical, green, sustainable, cage-free or whatever. If you're lucky, you won't have a lot of extremists like myself visiting your site; i.e. the advertising will be successful.

hhjj 6y ago

It would be nicer if no tracking would mean no data sent to ethicalads unless user engaging with ad because we know what happen when we trust advertising companies. So a step in the right direction but i would still block impressions when hosted on another domain. Also ads should not distort users perception in order to sell but that's another debate.

ericholscher 6y ago
We support a backend API, but it's much more complicated to implement, and the client gets more complex as well. We started out with a vision of all backend integrations, but it was impossible to sell to most publishers.

TedDoesntTalk 6y ago

To me, there is no such thing as an “ethical ad”. You are trying to steal my attention, my time. You don’t get to do that. My time on Earth is limited and you don’t get a millisecond of it if I can help it. If I want to buy something, I seek it out. Anything else is a waste of my time and a waste of the advertisers money. I long ago decided to throw out every piece of physical ad mail I receive without even glancing at it more than long enough to recognize it as an advertisement. I don’t know why you expect me to treat your digital ads any differently? You can call my perspective extremist, but is it any more extreme than the methods used by advertising networks to steal my attention?

silentsea90 6y ago
Great morally charged argument, but I am not sure how you expect content creators to monetize.
- TedDoesntTalk 6y ago
  That's not really my problem, is it? It is the content creator's problem.
- beefield 6y ago
  Well, to be blunt, in my humble opinion more than 90% of "content creators" trying to monetize their content with ads currently produce content of so low quality, that world would be a better place without their content. So if my ad blocker helps any of those to change their career, I am happy.
  - silentsea90 6y ago
    Even with ad monetization, if their content is of no use, they will disappear if they survive on said ad monetization. Content creation on the web is hard enough to suffer from removing the major monetization avenue without a suitable alternative.
- JoshTriplett 6y ago
  Charge money, either directly for the content, or indirectly in the form of patronage or a service or other business you run.

wpietri 6y ago

I appreciate that you're trying what you're trying, but I wanted to address this: > All businesses forgo additional revenue based on ethics and regulation, and I don't understand why that's such a odd thing to do with advertising. The great bulk of advertising is built upon a conflict of interest and is essentially manipulative. Consider, for example, an article. Both the writer and the reader want the reader's maximum attention on the article for as long as the reader cares to give it. The goal of advertising is to distract from that in hopes of extracting money from the reader. Generally, ads are constructed without much regard to whether the reader was intending to buy or would really benefit from the product. The goal is to make a sale. (If you doubt me, look at how many people who create or show ads, say, test a product before putting the ad in front of people. Or just look at tobacco advertising, a product that has killed hundreds of millions.) So I think there's an inherent lack of ethics to ads as an industry. It could be that you'll find enough people who are worried about privacy but not about the other stuff to build a business. But I wouldn't bet on it. It's no accident that this security hole is being closed not because of random miscreants but because of industrial-scale exploitation.

tgsovlerkhgsel 6y ago

I think the big problem in adtech isn't just targeting, it's also fighting ad fraud. Do you have a good plan for when you become big enough to become a target for ad fraud?