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. 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.
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/)