Read the Docs Blog - Posts tagged ethical ads

Advertising update and open sourcing our ad server

2020-07-01T00:00:00Z

It’s been a while since our last advertising update and it felt like a good time to talk about what’s working with our advertising model and how things are getting better.

How advertising is working for Read the Docs

In our 2019 stats post, we broke out our advertising revenue which was fairly flat year over year. The way our ad business is structured, our revenue mostly grows with increases in traffic and Read the Docs is mature enough that it isn’t doubling in size every year.

With that said, we’re pleased with our steady and sustainable growth. Read the Docs doesn’t have any investors putting pressure on us for short term growth and that has allowed us to invest in our ad business, commercial hosting, and in our community version for the long term. We’ve rolled out a huge number of improvements to all the sides of our business in the last year and we’re happy with the results. Advertising remains the single largest source of funding for Read the Docs and one that scales as our costs scale.

On a real world note, Covid-19 had a short term impact on our advertising revenue with a number of advertisers understandably pulling back due to uncertainty in funding and the economy in general. While the world isn’t completely back to normal, we have returned some degree of normalcy and most of these advertisers returned once there was a bit more clarity in the broader economy and the virus’ effect on the tech industry specifically. Advertising on Read the Docs is now close to capacity in the US, Canada, and Europe which are our largest advertising markets.

Improved targeting for ads

Advertising on Read the Docs is different from most ad networks out there. Our ad targeting is based on the content and the reader’s geography rather than personal data about our users. Read the Docs’ authors and readers have told us that privacy is important to them. That’s great because it’s important to us too! With that said, there are great ways to target specific content niches with ads relevant to those readers without compromising on privacy.

To start, we chose a few groups of content advertisers can target where we have enough traffic without the ads being focused on a tiny number of projects. These niches are:

Data science and machine learning
Frontend web development
Backend web development
Security
DevOps
Technical writing

We tested this improved content targeting with a select group of advertisers and the results were great. In some cases we saw click through rates more than double. Whether the ad is to hire a developer or to promote a service, we always want to deliver ads that are most relevant to the documentation being served. This results in better value to our advertisers while still respecting the privacy of our readers.

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Open sourcing our ad server

One thing we’ve wanted to do for a long time is open source the code we use to run advertising at Read the Docs. While there’s always a bit of an incentive to keep advertising code closed so it can’t be abused, our hope is that the trust we’re building with the ethical ads model can be used by others who want to run their own ethical advertising. Read the Docs is an open source company and it’s nice to have all our code out there. We call it the ethical ad server.

The ethical ad server is built to handle the kind of load Read the Docs itself receives – over a million hits per day – and it delivers advertising based only on content and geographic targeting rather than building up user profiles from personal information. It’s built from the ground up with user privacy in mind. We’re excited to share it with you so please check out the code on GitHub.

Conclusion

Just as we’re constantly delivering improvements to Read the Docs itself for our readers and project maintainers, we also strive to give a better experience and better results to the companies who trust Read the Docs as a marketing channel. I want to thank all our advertisers who believe in our approach and continue to support us and stay tuned to this space for more great features in the future!

Our ethical ad network is just about ready for launch and we’re actively looking for projects to beta test the network. If you run a developer focused website and you’re looking for a way to earn money without selling out your visitors’ privacy, please get in touch.

Ad Funding at Read the Docs and What’s Next for Ethical Advertising

2019-06-11T00:00:00Z

It has been three years since we first launched ads on Read the Docs and while we gave a limited update in our 2018 stats, we figured it was time to give an update on ethical advertising and how it is working.

Advertising without tracking

Our ethical advertising model is still going strong. We proved that it is possible to build a business model on top of advertising without resorting to user tracking. Unlike most other ad-supported sites, we show advertising based on the context of the page, not by creating behavoral profiles of large numbers of individual users. If you are browsing documentation for a Python project, you might see a relevant ad about Python. It’s that simple and it works.

Despite a slow start to the year, we expect to earn about $75,000 from advertising in Q2. This brings our advertising revenue back to the level before our ads were added to major ad blocking lists last year.

While we do earn money from other sources such as our commercial offering, advertising continues to be our largest source of revenue and has allowed us to expand our team to five full-time people. Compared with three years ago when we were scraping along with very little money, our community issue tracker and support requests receive prompt responses.

Progress

We’ve made great progress on advertising over the past year.

We survived a major hit to revenue from ad blocking without resorting to cat and mouse games of changing ad layouts and APIs to avoid ad blockers.
Our community ads program has been significantly expanded. We are actively running free community advertising promoting over ten open source projects and conferences.
While we never tracked users with advertising, we put in place stricter Do Not Track privacy protections. We continue to believe that advertising can be well targeted without tracking users.
We launched an advertising vertical to let companies promote their open jobs to developers.
Our advertising revenue share program tripled in size.

Our ethical advertising approach, with no user tracking, has been key to our sustainability and has allowed Read the Docs to continue to build new features and give back to our community.

What’s next

We have some really interesting developments coming regarding ethical advertising.

We are looking to add a few more projects to our ad revenue share program and help more projects reach sustainability with an ethical advertising approach. If your project on Read the Docs does 100k+ pageviews per month and you are interested in exploring a new revenue stream, please let us know.

We are testing a new text-only ad format which we will detail in a future post. Text-only ads are something we’ve wanted for a while because we believe they are less intrusive to readers but easy for advertisers to experiment with multiple variations. So far the results have been very promising and we are planning to roll this out more widely.

Our ethical ad network is getting closer to launch. It’s a shame, but there’s a critical lack of funding for open source projects that form the building blocks of some extremely valuable software. We believe that advertising can fill some of that gap and Read the Docs can help by sharing some of the lessons we’ve learned building our own advertising. If you know a site that might be interested in being a beta tester of a pro-privacy ad network built specifically to help fund open source, please get in touch.

Thanks

Advertisers always have a choice where to direct their marketing spend and for many of them it would have been simpler to just go with the usual behemoth advertising platforms rather than advertising with a niche site like Read the Docs. I want to thank all our advertisers who believe in our approach and continue to support us.

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Ethical Advertising Works

2018-04-16T00:00:00Z

It has been two years since we first launched ads on Read the Docs. We figured it was time to report on the results that we’ve seen, and say thanks to those who have helped us along the way.

The Results

To put it simply:

Ethical Advertising works.

In Q1 2018, our estimated revenue from advertising is $75,000. This is enough to fund our small team of 4 people to work on Read the Docs full-time.

When we started building our ethical advertising model, we didn’t know how it would work out. We didn’t know much about the ad industry, and we were doing things different than everyone else.

We are happy to report that you can build advertising that is a win/win/win for all parties:

Read the Docs wins because we generate revenue, allowing us to sustain our operations
Advertisers win because they are able to reach our audience of developers, helping to grow their business.
Users win because their privacy is maintained, and they continue to have access to our service.

Ethical advertising on Read the Docs has not been without its challenges, which we will cover in future posts.

Tracking users isn’t required

Along the way we’ve been trying to prove a simple thesis:

We can have successful advertising without tracking our users. So much of the trouble facing the ad industry these days is because of this massive databases of user data.

We have been able to show that we can show ads without knowing exactly who our users are. The content they are reading is enough to show them targeted ads, without knowing anything about them. Specifically:

We do not let advertisers run 3rd party code on Read the Docs. Ad images and javascript is all hosted by us.
We do not provide advertisers with data dumps, except aggregated reports on the clicks and views their ads got.
We target our ads based only on geography and the details of the page being visited, not on a profile of the user.

We’re now taking a look at what we’ve learned, and how we might help more infrastructure projects reach sustainability with an ethical advertising approach.

Towards an Ethical Ad Network

We have shown that an advertising business model that respects users can also sustain critical open source infrastructure. We hope that we can act as an example for other projects that depend on ads. You can make money without giving away your users data.

Developers have the power to shift the ad industry to respect user privacy. We must start with our own projects, leading by example. We need to have all the ads in the open source ecosystem respect user privacy, and then we can start to apply pressure to other parts of the tech industry.

We realize that not every open source project can do all the work that we’ve done. We want to explore how we can build an Ethical Ad Network, where user data isn’t sent to us, but each project doesn’t need to do ad sales.

Our ethical ad network is still in the planning phases, but if you know a project that might be interested in being a beta tester, please get in touch.

Thanks

I’d like to thank all of companies who have believed in our ethical ads initiative. You can only sell something if people buy it, and I’d like to give credit to the folks who have believed in our concept:

Twilio
Sentry
Rollbar
Stream
Intel
Data Dog
Mongo
Hosted Graphite
Level 12
Pyup
Triplebyte
Linode
Digital Impact Alliance
Digital Ocean
Exoscale
Nginx
Odoo
CircleCI
Cherry Servers
Uniregistry
OSCON

Want your company to be on the list? You can get more information on our advertising page.