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readthedocs
ethical-ad-server
Python2022–2023
readthedocs / ethical-ad-server

ethical-ad-server

The ethical ad server - ads for developers without all the tracking

Systems & InfrastructureDeveloper Tools
Explore on GitHubRead Hacker News discussions
3Distinct people
4Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
273GitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

The ethical ad server - ads for developers without all the tracking

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:56:07 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by month4 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2022-02-10 15:12:38 UTC to 2023-06-25 09:53:50 UTC.

012022-02-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-03-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 commentsFeb 20222022-03-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-04-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2022-04-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-05-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2022-05-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-06-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2022-06-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-07-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2022-07-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-08-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2022-08-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-09-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2022-09-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-10-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2022-10-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-11-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 commentsOct 20222022-11-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-12-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2022-12-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-02-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2023-02-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-03-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2023-03-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-04-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2023-04-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-05-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2023-05-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-06-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2023-06-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-07-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 1 submissions, 0 commentsJun 2023

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
Feb 20222022-02-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-03-01 00:00:00 UTC101
Mar 20222022-03-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-04-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Apr 20222022-04-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-05-01 00:00:00 UTC000
May 20222022-05-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-06-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Jun 20222022-06-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-07-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Jul 20222022-07-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-08-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Aug 20222022-08-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-09-01 00:00:00 UTC101
Sep 20222022-09-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-10-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Oct 20222022-10-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-11-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Nov 20222022-11-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-12-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Dec 20222022-12-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Jan 20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-02-01 00:00:00 UTC101
Feb 20232023-02-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-03-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Mar 20232023-03-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-04-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Apr 20232023-04-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-05-01 00:00:00 UTC000
May 20232023-05-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-06-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Jun 20232023-06-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-07-01 00:00:00 UTC110

What Hacker News says

4 sources
_3ruj·Jun 25, 2023Submission

Ask HN: How much revenue your ethicalads.io-running website generates?

submitted to HN in 2022: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32650878 > [...] a privacy-first ad network. We don't use any cookies, and target ads based on content. The code is all open source (https://github.com/readthedocs/ethical-ad-server), and we're slowly working to help fund open source projects. We only show developer-related ads on developer sites. No ads about a product whose site you visited last week and nothing off topic. Please report the page views (total and unique visitors) alongside the revenue, if possible.
2 points · Open discussion
hardwaresofton·Jan 8, 2023
I'm running ethicalads on my site (vadosware.io) and it's been pretty great so far (though I suspect revenue is much lower than other alternatives) -- they also have an open source server which they run an instance of and give you access to: https://github.com/readthedocs/ethical-ad-server Stats and lots of information about the advertisements and click rates/etc is available. Been pretty smooth sailing so far, was going to write about it in the future.
In Can ads be GDPR compliant?
ericholscher·Aug 30, 2022
Hi HN! We've been working on our ad network for a couple years, but we just launched the 1.0 of our open source code, so it seems like a great time to do a Show HN! We have more info on our 1.0 post here: https://www.ethicalads.io/blog/2022/08/going-v10-the-backsto... A few years back, we were building Read the Docs, a documentation platform for open source. We had millions of monthly visitors and the obvious way to monetize was ads. However, we cared about the privacy of our visitors and we didn't want ad companies to track our users around the web. We went to a few ad networks and asked if we could proxy the ad traffic or even just run ads without cookies. They weren't willing to do what we wanted, so we built our own ad network. We decided to build a privacy-first ad network. We don't use any cookies, and target ads based on content. T
Read the rest
he code is all open source (https://github.com/readthedocs/ethical-ad-server), and we're slowly working to help fund open source projects. We only show developer-related ads on developer sites. No ads about a product whose site you visited last week and nothing off topic. Next, we built a crawler that indexes the sites on our network to help target our ads. Using an ML classifier (built with SpaCy), it can tell if a page is about data science or about full stack development. This allows advertisers to target the niche they are focused on and ensure the ads perform well, without doing any user tracking. We're pretty excited about the future ability of our ML to improve ad targeting without any information about the user. The coolest thing is that our business gets better as we understand the content we're serving ads on better, instead of "learning" more about our users by harvesting more data about them. We've been a true network beyond just ads on Read the Docs for a couple years and we now have ~130 publishers. We gross just under $60k per month in ad revenue of which 70% goes to publishers. Most of our publishers are small sites or open source projects so to send them ~$40k/mo feels great. Do you have a developer site that you're looking to monetize? Or are you an advertiser trying to reach developers? Or are you just curious about privacy and advertising? Happy to answer any questions! (If you just want to play around with our ad client, you can try it out here: https://jsbin.com/roniviv/edit?html,output -- docs here: https://ethical-ad-client.readthedocs.io/en/latest/)
In Show HN: EthicalAds – Privacy-first ad network for developers
ericholscher·Feb 10, 2022
Lots of people talking about how advertising is terrible in the comments here. Unfortunately, much of the internet is dependent on ads for revenue. I am personally working to improve the technology behind the ad ecosystem, so we can not worry so much about privacy and page performance, along with malware and other issues. I’d love to have more people working with us to improve things, rather than just commenting on how they are terrible. Unfortunately, advertising is never going to go away, unless you want to start paying for every newspaper or service online. So let’s work to make it better. https://github.com/readthedocs/ethical-ad-server & https://www.ethicalads.io/
In I changed my mind about advertising

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