About Us
We believe that advertising can be effective without compromising privacy. At EthicalAds, our goal is to build an ad network that works for advertisers and helps sustain open source.
Fully-owned by our founders
Our core mission is to build an ad network that doesn't track you. We haven't raised any outside funding and are fully aligned with our network of publishers and advertisers. We operate one of the biggest publishers on our network and we will never put profits over privacy.
Read more about our vision for ethical advertising.
Small Team. Big Impact.
EthicalAds was built to sustain development of Read the Docs, an open source documentation platform. Advertising was the natural model because it scaled up well as our platform grew. However, we wanted to do ads right without tracking users or having security issues with third-party scripts.
Since no existing ad networks would partner with us on privacy-respecting ads, we built our own.
Meet the ads team
Eric Holscher
Eric cofounded Read the Docs and took it from a hackathon project in 2010 to full-time in 2014. Experimenting with funding models led him to create EthicalAds to make Read the Docs sustainable and now he wants to bring that to the wider open source community. He previously worked at Urban Airship and the Lawrence Journal-World, the home of the Django web framework.
David Fischer
David joined Read the Docs back in 2017 to work on security, privacy, and to build EthicalAds. He saw the importance of ethical advertising and joined the team to help take the approach from a single site to a larger network that supported the open source ecosystem. Previously David worked on security at Qualcomm and Amazon before being director of technology at TapHunter.