What we're building, and what the ad market is doing to publishers.
We write when there is something worth writing down. How the network actually works, what the numbers look like when you strip the auction out, and where the industry is heading. Coverage of Ethicly elsewhere sits under Press.
Who pays for a false positive?
The ad industry sells fraud detection to advertisers and bills the cost of its mistakes to publishers, who are never told it happened. We built the standard detection stack, measured what it did to real readers, and threw part of it out.
Meta and Google closed the door on cause-driven advertising.
Meta stopped selling political, electoral and social issue ads across the EU on 6 October 2025. Google announced its own withdrawal eight months earlier. Here is what actually happened, what the scope really is, and what still works for charities and values-led advertisers.
Why we built Ethicly.
Ethicly started with Tabs4Palestine, and with every ad platform we approached turning us down for being politically sensitive. Being refused turned out to be the useful part.
Contextual advertising is back, and it works.
Behavioural targeting was sold as precision. In practice it delivered a leaky pipe of personal data, frustrated users, and diminishing returns. Contextual targeting, done well, outperforms it on the metrics advertisers actually care about.
Publisher economics after RTB.
Real-time bidding was supposed to reward quality publishers. In reality, it rewarded scale and fraud. Take the auction out and you get a shorter value chain, honest numbers, and publishers who can plan.