HACKER Q&A
📣 drakerossman

Ethical ads providers to monetize personal blog


I've just started my personal blog (link in bio), never done this before, but I'm looking forward to eventually get some money from my blogging activities. My first idea was to serve some ethical ads - I don't want anything that tracks the visitors, obviously. Something like a sponsorship banner, or, maybe, a precisely targeted context ad with the exact hit to the tune of my blog.

I'm talking about something like the banners in the header of FastAPI website[1], look pretty neat. Is it just cold emailing for those, who use the said framework, or are there providers of such sponsored banners?

Where should I look for the advertisers providing ethical ads? Which companies have you dealt with? I'm aware of EthicalAds.io[2], but it looks like I'd have to be an established publisher to qualify.

Maybe, you'll advise against serving such ads and share your experience of utilizing some other type of blog monetization?

Thanks in advance!

[1] https://fastapi.tiangolo.com/

[2] https://ethicalads.io/

  👤 dazc Accepted Answer ✓
To make money from ads you either need to have massive amounts of traffic or be ultra niche targetted. Banner ads are pretty much invisible to your average use these days too, so are really just a waste of time and space.

The most effective and ethical way of monetizing a personal blog is to use it as a promotion tool for some other business, ideally your own.

👤 stevesearer
I have a lot of experience selling and hosting my own contextual advertising.

Before including advertising it is important to consider what value your site (and your readers) provide to advertisers and whether they can get the same or more value than you offer more easily elsewhere.

One strategy you can use is to see which advertisers spend money on sites which are similar to yours. Figure out the traffic and demographics for those websites and see how yours matches up.

It will be much easier to convince those companies to use part of their existing ad budgets on you than it will be to convince a company with no ad budget to create one.

👤 gsu2
This question reminded me of Project Wonderful[1], which I used on several tiny projects in an attempt to cover hosting costs: $5 per month. I never had enough traffic to make anything close to that, but it was pretty fun trying.

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Wonderful

👤 gerardnico
Seeing the content on your website, don't bother nobody will care about your website if you don't have at minimum 1M page view.
👤 ffhhj
If you don't want to deal with ad companies, another solutions is to create an e-book app with your content, and sell it in app stores.
👤 Detrus
https://www.carbonads.net/

I'm not sure what they track