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prideout | 1 year ago

Am I the only one who is irked by by ads on Read the Docs pages?

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anileated|1 year ago

Let’s put it this way: I would consider myself eligible to be irked by ads on Read the Docs pages if I paid whoever maintains the project.

If they bother you enough, absolutely no one’s going to frown if you estimate how much they would be making on ads from traffic volume yearly, email the maintainer and suggest to pay that in return for turning off the ads for a year.

(Some people might frown if you just block the ads, since after all it is robbing a fellow open-source dev of some income.)

There are two points I am curious about:

— I would like to know if RTD forces the ads. Considering they have a business tier, it would be funny if they had to finance OSS project hosting from ads.

— EthicalAds started as an ad platform for developers, but apparently is now an “AI ad network”. I wonder if Python OSS project owners know about the 180 degree turn that’s happening there…

almarklein|1 year ago

I wish. The revenue from the ads goes to readthedocs, AFAIK nothing is paid to the maintainers of the project.

That said, readthedocs is a pretty nice platform to host your docs in a simple way. Plus users are not tracked. So personally I don't mind so much, but I'm going to have a look at the paid plan to remove ads for our users :)

craigds|1 year ago

We used the free tier for a couple of years before a user mentioned the ads. We had no idea our docs were surrounded by ads as no one on the team had ever tried it without ublock origin... We upgraded to the paid plan after that :)

BiteCode_dev|1 year ago

Yes, because all the other people on HN use unlock origin.

littlestripes|1 year ago

There are ads in docs now?? Thank my lucky adblocks