Privacy respecting banner advertisements on cy-x.net
This thread is most likely going to be the official "cyberix cost transparency thread":
Cyberix costs 8.70 euros/month + 2 euros IPv4 + $15/year domain. We pay around 12-15 dollars per month, and ~$180/year total. Cyberix doesn't really receive donations (and there isn't any extreme begging going on outside of the home page), so I've been exploring the idea of trying to set us up with a privacy respecting advertising service.
Costs are pocket change (not to me!) and I am also assuming advertising services make it pretty easy to rack up payouts up to 15 dollars within a month without any issues. I am not interested in using privacy violating services and will try my best to find advertising services that respect user privacy and won't immediately crash old browsers.
I'd like to know what your thoughts are on this idea and how you feel about it. I'll most likely implement a checkbox in the Settings page that lets you prevent advertisements from loading at all on the site if it's really bad. I just need ONE person to throw me $15/month, whether it be donations or advertisers. If you hate this for some reason, feel free to send donations (crypto or fiat) and you can save us from exploring this kind of territory. Also, related to donations, I might add a progress bar to the top ("$8 of $15 donated this month") to make it more clear as to how much funding Cyberix needs to simply stay online.
Is there such a thing as a 'privacy respecting' ad service? If you find any, please share them, it'd be like seeing a unicorn. I'm not in a good position to donate right now because of unemployment, but I have a job lined up, once I'm in I'd be happy to contribute.
EthicalAds and CarbonAds https://www.ethicalads.io/ http://carbonads.net/
They seem to be the only ones that I'm aware of that aim to respect user privacy
Here's an idea: Keep the donation banner goal, but if it hits 15$, disable ads sitewide for EVERYBODY.
From what I remember, your site needs to have a certain number of monthly visitors in order to qualify for advertisements. Different advertisers have different requirements.
Applied.
This is what I sent:
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The Cyberix Network is an oldschool tech-oriented discussion forum that grants users the privilege of posting anonymously. Topics commonly discussed on Cyberix typically range from privacy&security to the philosophies of online communities and off-topic musing.
The site was publicly founded on June 7th, 2025.
As of February 15th, 2026, the site has a total of 2,005,494 page hits across 1,057,224 unique visitors.
Cyberix has been experiencing incredibly exponential growth since its inception:
From June 7th, 2025 to December 31st, 2025, we observed a total of 932,589 page hits across 392,444 unique visitors.
For the month of January 2026 alone, we observed 704,264 total page hits across 456,135 unique visitors.
From February 1st to the 15th (today's date as of the time this request is being written), we have observed 368,641 total page hits across 208,645 unique visitors.
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I will receive a response within 2 business days. I will let you know what their response is when it comes.