Top all-time · #2459
EthicalAds
Company blog · ethicalads.io/blog · on HN as davidfischerbusinessweb
EthicalAds is the company blog at ethicalads.io, writing about business and web. Since 2020, 31 different Hacker News readers have linked it 90 times, most often “Ethical Ads”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-13, and you can follow it by feed.
Rarely recommended · 1 of 30 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers cite EthicalAds' pages as an example of privacy-focused, contextual ads for developers and as an alternative to Google Ads. Most comments mention the ad network itself rather than judging its writing.
- Recommended for · 1 comments
- One commenter says the newsletter post seems more interesting than the submitted front page, because it details the number of ads, publishers and revenue.1
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 30 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
EthicalAds is an ad network for software developers that takes privacy seriously. We use powerful contextual targeting to match ads with the right audience, powered by AI.
Most-linked posts?
- Ethical Ads20 people · 26 mentions · first linked 2020-02-19
- Ads that don't track you, sold by a company you can trust2 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2020-11-02
- /2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2021-07-10
- Doing Math with Embeddings for Better AI Ad Targeting2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-10-08
- /blog/2022/11/a-new-approach-to-content-based-targeting-for-advertising/2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2023-01-08
- Mozilla's privacy preserving ad attribution: The future or an oxymoron?2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2024-08-29
- Show HN: EthicalAds – Privacy-first ad network for developers2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2022-08-30
- Handling 100 Requests per Second with Python and Django2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-07-27
What Hacker News says?
We're trying to build an ad network that doesn't track users: 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-w... I think the real secret is just to not become dependent on the additive reven…
Comment linking /blog/2018/04/ethical-advertising-works/
on “Firefox 85 cracks down on supercookies”Submitted Invasive ad targeting is bad for journalism and other high-quality publishers as a story · 206 points
HN discussionWe're trying to build an ad network that stands in stark opposition to Google's tracking: https://www.ethicalads.io/advertising-vision/ -- it's still early days, but we're always look for more OSS projects and products to join.
Comment linking /advertising-vision/
on “No More Google”Submitted Show HN: EthicalAds – Privacy-first ad network for developers as a story · 189 points
HN discussionThis is exactly why we're building EthicalAds. It's an ad network that only targets based on the content of sites, doesn't allow any third-party media, and is currently only focused on a developer audience: https://www.ethicalads.io/advertising-vision/ We had the same choice on Read the Docs, but didn't really have any other way to make money but advertising. We decided to build ethical advertising, so that we could…
Comment linking /advertising-vision/
on “Google’s FLoC Is a Terrible Idea”Submitted Handling 100 Requests per Second with Python and Django as a story · 50 points
HN discussionStrongly agree here. We wrote a similar post on how we’re scaling to a pretty big size with stock Python and Django: https://www.ethicalads.io/blog/2021/07/handling-100-requests... So much of the content around the programming web is about huge scale and domain-specific stuff. We’re in a pretty magical place where the core technologies we use can scale to the size of a successful business without much work. We shoul…
Comment linking /blog/2021/07/handling-100-requests-per-second-with-python-django/
on “In Defense of Simple Architectures (2022)”Submitted Mozilla's privacy preserving ad attribution: The future or an oxymoron? as a story · 26 points
HN discussionWe've thought a lot about this issue. We have a page in our docs written up about it: https://www.ethicalads.io/surveillance-advertising/ -- there's definitely a small but growing movement of folks building a better advertising industry. It's a long road though..
Comment linking /surveillance-advertising/
on “The NSA and CIA use ad blockers”Submitted Mozilla's privacy preserving ad attribution: The future or an oxymoron? as a story · 10 points
HN discussionInterestingly, we’ve had a bunch of fraud where people impersonate OSS devs. They then proxy their docs, and try to run fake traffic for ad revenue. More info in our blog post: https://www.ethicalads.io/blog/2022/09/watch-out-ad-scammers...
Comment linking /blog/2022/09/watch-out-ad-scammers-are-impersonating-open-source-devs/
on “Ask HN: Have you experienced “hiring fraud?””Submitted Doing Math with Embeddings for Better AI Ad Targeting as a story · 5 points
HN discussionThis is the exact approach we're taking with EthicalAds ( https://www.ethicalads.io/advertising-vision/#what-is-ethica... ). We allow targeting by site content (keywords), and we've found that it works quite well (see our pricing for how this is marketed: https://www.ethicalads.io/advertisers/#pricing ). This post reminds me we need to write up a full blog post on how it works, and how we're seeing great results fro…
Comment linking /advertisers/
on “Techdirt Is Now Without Any Google Ads or Tracking Code”Submitted Privacy Teardown: Search Engines as a story · 4 points
HN discussionWe were discussing with them adding https://www.ethicalads.io/ which is our new non-tracking ad network. Sadly we're still only focused on developers, and Techdirt's content is very wide ranging, so we were only able to propose running ads on a subset of their content currently. We'd love to be able to support them when we are able to expand our audience to a larger tech-focused site in the future.
Comment linking /
on “Techdirt Is Now Without Any Google Ads or Tracking Code”Submitted Do the Ads on Your Site Respect Privacy as a story · 4 points
HN discussionThis is a great post. I’ve also been having a lot of fun working with embeddings, with lots of those pages being documentation. We write up a quick post on how are using them in prod, if you want to go from having an embedding to actually using them in a web app: https://www.ethicalads.io/blog/2024/04/using-embeddings-in-p...
Comment linking /blog/2024/04/using-embeddings-in-production-with-postgres-django-for-niche-ad-targeting/
on “Embeddings are underrated”Submitted Cookie Changes Coming to Ad Tech as a story · 4 points
HN discussionI'm biased, but a lot of users should also be using products that respect user privacy. We're building a dev-focused ad network called EthicalAds that does this: https://www.ethicalads.io/ -- but there's lots of other privacy-focused products out there we should be building and supporting.
Comment linking /
on “Ad tech firms test ways to connect Google’s FLoC to other data”Submitted Announcing EthicalAds: a privacy-focused ad network for developers as a story · 4 points
HN discussionWe’re trying to build a competitor to Google ads, targeted at developers: https://www.ethicalads.io/ As developers we understand the most how privacy is violated across the Internet. If we can’t contribute to the change in the ecosystem, we don’t have much hope for the rest of the industry.
Comment linking /
on “What I Use Instead of Google”Submitted DuckDB and PostgreSQL Make a Great Pair for Analytical Processing as a story · 3 points
HN discussionJust a reminder to folks who are looking for alternative's, we're building an open source ad network for developer-focused sites: https://www.ethicalads.io/ . We also take 30% of the revenue (which is around industry standard), but it's very well-defined in our Publisher Policy: https://www.ethicalads.io/publisher-policy/
Comment linking /publisher-policy/
on “An ad plugin was stealing revenue for a year and I didn't even notice”Submitted Using embeddings in production with Postgres and Django as a story · 3 points
HN discussionMaybe I'm not getting it but I don't see how (as a user not a dev) any ad acceptable to me can be acceptable to an advertiser. You can't know my wants if you don't build a profile of me. To do that you need to track me and my browsing behaviour. That is unacceptable. But if you don't you'll be throwing a lot of things with none of them sticking. So how can this work? Edit: this is what they say ( https://www.ethical…
Comment linking /advertisers.html>
on “Infinity: open-source search engine”Submitted Ethical Ads as a story · 3 points
HN discussionNeat, their ads are powered by: https://www.ethicalads.io/ This makes me wonder - what ads would be acceptable in the eyes of privacy focused developers? Any? And i don't mean UX - i mean, what ads would you, a privacy focused developer, recommend i install on my site. Assuming i want to fully respect by users privacy, while still attempting to pay for the server costs. Maybe this warrants a AskHN, but it seems rele…
Comment linking /
on “Infinity: open-source search engine”Submitted Surveillance Advertising: Good advertising doesn't have to follow you around as a story · 3 points
HN discussionFWIW, this is exactly what we do at EthicalAds. You can read a bit more about it here: https://www.ethicalads.io/advertising-vision/#how-our-ads-wo... -- but we should really have a better page explaining how we're doing content-based targeting. Our advertiser find it works really well, and our publishers enjoy having tasteful, reverent ads on their sites.
Comment linking /advertising-vision/
on “International coalition calls for action against surveillance-based advertising”Submitted What Happens When Elon Musk Tweets a Link to Your Site as a story · 2 points
HN discussion
