[ericholscher]

I definitely appreciate the negative view of ads. I had some similar internal conflict around building on ads, but it was the only way for us to sustain the project we worked on..

Read the Docs was a huge part of the open source community, but all the other ways we tried to fund it didn't work. I posted about this at the time, and still think it makes a good argument for why we should be investing to fund open source infrastructure with marketing money, not just engineering budget:

https://www.ericholscher.com/blog/2016/aug/31/funding-oss-ma...

We are also experimenting with an option for showing sponsorships, instead of paid ads. This works well for non-profits, and could layer on top of Open Collective or GitHub Sponsors. We're working with the Python Software Foundation to power their "sponsored by" messaging, which is another option other than "paid ads"

https://www.ethicalads.io/sponsorship-platform/

[williamtrask]

If the ads didn’t change what you showed based on the price and instead charged a fixed price ti be in the list (and still be ranked by what’s best) then I think you can call it ethical.

That is to say, helping people find the best product is ethical. Helping them find whichever product has the biggest marketing budget less so.