Comment by hinkley | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hinkley | Hacker News Reader

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I have unfortunately seen firsthand projects where the marketing crap was over 70% of the page load time. Put another way, the weight of the tracking software was 2x the cost of generating the entire rest of the page.

Do you have any idea how soul crushing it is to work your ass of on site performance, to have people passive-aggressively question the team's abilities when the numbers are even 100ms too high...

And then when you're done some nosey assholes go and add over 2 seconds to your page loads just so they can do something ethically questionable. And the fact they waited til the end to add it on just proves that they knew it was going to be bad news but they did it anyway.

It sucks. It kills trust for the organization, and it kills respect for everyone in the decision chain.

My coworkers and I joke from time to time about running an ethical advertising network with reasonable software. Well, they're joking. I don't think they know I'm not entirely.

> My coworkers and I joke from time to time about running an ethical advertising network with reasonable software. Well, they're joking. I don't think they know I'm not entirely.

How would that work? And more importantly, how would it stay ethical? I imagine the very basic idea would be to not need to track users, which removes the need for the huge swaths of Javascript that pollute the internet. But would that be profitable?

I'm curious to know what thought you put into this so far.

This is exactly what we built and have been running for over 2 years. CodeFund [1] is an ethical advertising platform that is open source, does not permit or perform any tracking, and only displays ads based on the context of the site. We load our ads async so there’s no slowdown of the page. We are also open with our finances. We exist to fund open source maintainers, bloggers and builders.

[1] https://codefund.io

Yeah that’s the question isn’t it. Let’s say I run a B Corp, or a non profit. Do I really want to associate with some of these networks?

Or on the flip side, I run a website. I want to make some money to pay my expenses, but do I really want to inflict these ad networks on my readership?

It’s not the sort of project that’s going to make you rich. It’s the sort of project that lets you sleep better.

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