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EthicalAds

A developer-focused network placing small image-and-text or text-only units on hand-picked technical publishers — documentation sites, developer tools, open-source projects — at around 35 million impressions a month. Targeting is contextual and geographic only: the page's own content and the reader's country. No profile, no cookie, no cross-site identity.

Will they accept our page?

Unstated

The published criterion is editorial rather than structural — "we want ads that are of interest to our audience of millions of software developers" — and every campaign passes a human approval that the network describes as rarely an obstacle. No policy addresses affiliate links or intermediate pages either way, so this is recorded as unstated. In practice the question here is not whether the page is permitted but whether the network's readers would find it worth their attention, which is a harder and more useful bar.

What the destination has to do

  • Approval is by a person, not a crawler, so there is no robots.txt or crawlability trap of the kind ChatGPT Ads sets.

Buying it

Cost
CPM
Floor
$1,000
How you get in
managed
Where you can buy
Global, with country and US-state targeting.
  • CPM — Priced per impression, varying by topic and geography and adjusted quarterly; rates are in a prospectus rather than published. Volume discounts of 10% at $3,000 and 15% at $25,000, plus 10% for auto-renewal.

What you can aim at

  • Page content, classified by a contextual model trained on real pages
  • Topic: AI and machine learning, backend web, frontend web, security and privacy, DevOps
  • Country, and US state

What comes back

Click parameter none · pixel no · server-side no

Deliberately none. The network declines to use conversion pixels on privacy grounds and tells advertisers to append UTM parameters and read their own analytics. That makes it the only source here where measurement is entirely ours to build — which is a poor fit for a controlled experiment, and an exact fit for an attribution model based on our own signed receipt rather than the platform's.

Good for

Reaching developers in the place they are already reading documentation, on a page whose contextual relevance is doing the targeting work. The audience overlaps the densest part of the corpus, and the format — a small unit with text, no interruption — is the one the storefront's own design language came from.

Not for

A fast test. There is a human approval step, a four-figure minimum, and no conversion tracking, so the loop from spend to answer is long.

The honest part

The $1,000 floor is real money for a first experiment, and the absence of conversion tracking means the platform can never settle the ship/kill question on its own — every conversion read would be ours to construct. The interesting thing about this network is not its inventory but its stance: it is the one source on this list whose privacy position matches the one the product is being built on, and it is therefore the natural first customer for a referral receipt rather than a pixel.

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