Ask HN: Ad network for side projects that isn't ugly?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42586385

by scratchyone • 2 years ago

2 10 2 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Hey all, I'm curious what people here generally use as an ad network for side projects? I have a site that gets a few thousand impressions/month and I'd like to make a little bit off of it to motivate me to work on it more.

My issue is, standard banner ads are really ugly. Do you all have any suggestions that allow me to control the styling a bit more so the ads actually fit into my website and are less obtrusive? I know I'll probably make a lot less this way but that's okay with me.

mtmail2• 2 years ago

If the content is software development focused https://www.ethicalads.io/ (https://www.ethicalads.io/publishers/calculator/)

scratchyone3• 2 years ago

Ooh, that looks wonderful for future projects, but sadly my current one isn't targeted at devs.

Quick question, have you used it for side projects before, and if so how was your experience? It might be nice to try to launch a side project and monetize it with this, having a small amount of profit would make it a lot easier to justify some things I'd love to work on sometime.

davidfischer• 2 years ago

I'm not the poster you're responding to but I'm one of the founding team of EthicalAds. We're a small team, focused exclusively on marketing to devs, and really trying to show high-quality ads without tracking people (ads are contextually targeted).

You can get a feel for what you'll earn here[1]. Basically you earn 70% of the gross of what we charge advertisers (see advertiser pricing[2]). Keep in mind these are ad views which aren't quite the same as pageviews. They're a subset.

Ads are a straight-forward path to monetization but not always the best. If you can make a project work as SaaS or really make sponsorships work for you (this requires effort), those will definitely earn A LOT more money per pageview than ads. Ads require a lot of traffic to make them work well. Usually you want high tens to hundreds of thousands of pageviews per month.

From a what we look at for publishers (sites that show ads) perspective, we're usually looking for high quality dev-focused sites or projects that don't want to just show Google ads. Per ad, publishers will earn much more with us than Google display ads but if you want to stick 4-5 Google ads on your site, video ads, or the like we can't compete with that and we don't want our ads on sites that do that. Devs hate them. My email is in my bio if you want to discuss further.

Regardless, good luck on the projects!

[1] https://www.ethicalads.io/publishers/calculator/ [2]: https://www.ethicalads.io/advertisers/pricing/

mtmail2• 2 years ago

We used it years ago as advertisers. It didn't work for us. Our products is pretty niche even among software development, and VC funded startups can easily outspend us. We'd probably use them again if we had more marketing budget.

PaulHoule2• 2 years ago

Is it worth it?

It varies depending on your site, it can vary a lot, but you might get between $1 to $5 per thousand views.

If making your site ugly made you rich that would be one thing. If making your site ugly can pay for a Netflix membership that's another thing. That said, a site like that might cost $5 a month to run and it is possible it could cover your operating costs.

scratchyone3• 2 years ago

That's the hard choice for me tbh, you explained it very well. Currently the operating costs are $0 since it's hosted entirely on Vercel's free tier, so my hope is mainly just to justify me spending a few hours a month improving it with new features and stuff.

Currently, it's hard to justify working on anything new for it since it is just a helpful web-tool, there's really no future for it beyond making it slightly more helpful for people's niche use-case. On the other hand, I don't want to ruin it for a couple bucks a month, so I need to be really careful on how I do this.

beardyw• 2 years ago

Do you really want to do it? As the op said you are unlikely to make any meaningful amount from it. What is your motivation?

owebmaster• 2 years ago

Carbon Ads seems like a good option: https://www.carbonads.net/

I'm building something that would be better to monetize through ads but I need something like instagram stories to fit well into my product. Couldn't find anything good.

Ask HN: Ad network for side projects that isn't ugly?

Related Stories