Ethical ads update

[davidfischer]

This post contains:

• A financial update. We last gave a partial update in January and our last full update was a year ago.
• A progress update on changes over the last year. This is mostly recap.
• New ad format rollout and timeline. I do want to make sure I'm not burying the lede here but I also want to explain what we use money for and how we help the community before telling people with custom themes that they will get ads.

One thing I would like to get down a little better is our exact upsell path for companies who don't want ads. I feel like we are close there but I think we could use a little refinement.

[davidfischer]

I have updated this post to be purely an advertising update. I tease the new ad format but we'll detail it in a different post.

This post does feel a bit status-ey. While that is probably the main goal of the post, it might be a bit more interesting if it was a bit more forward looking.

While the title of the post "Ethical Advertising Update" is more accurate now, it still feels a bit weak. How about:

• Ethical Advertising at Read the Docs: A Year in Retrospect
• Ad Funding at Read the Docs and What's Next for Ethical Advertising

[ericholscher]

Of the two, I like the second better. Agreed that an "update" isn't super exciting -- we could also editorialize a bit and say something like "Ethical Advertising Update: Continuing to make money without tracking our users" or something cheeky like that. That isn't it, but something along those lines could also work.

[davidfischer]

Updated the title with a bit of editorializing. I think this is just about ready to go.