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:
```
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.
```
I will receive a response within 2 business days. I will let you know what their response is when it comes.
Looks like we have been rejected.
```txt
Thanks for your interest, but unfortunately we're not going to be able to add you as a publisher. Currently, we're focused on serving ads for developers on developer-centric websites. There's simply too much off topic stuff on forum sites like this for it to work with our network and our advertisers. Since we don't track users with our ads, we have to keep our content focused in order to have good ad performance. Without this, we would have unhappy advertisers as well as unhappy publishers.
Thanks for your interest in ethical advertising, and best of luck with your site.
Cheers,
—
David Fischer
```
Does anyone know any non invasive ad networks? We'll try Carbon Ads next but I am not sure on what we're going to do if we get rejected by them as well.
Rejected by Carbon Ads.
Thank you for expressing your interest in collaborating with Carbon. Unfortunately, at this time, your site does not meet our network requirements. To qualify for partnership, please ensure that:
Your site caters to audiences in the design or development niches.
The majority of your audience comprises visitors from the United States, Canada, and other predominantly English-speaking countries.
Your site generates a minimum of 10,000 page-views per month.
We appreciate your understanding and encourage you to re-apply once your site meets these requirements. Please submit the required screenshots from this page when re-applying.
We appreciate your understanding and encourage you to re-apply once your site meets these requirements. Please submit the required screenshots from this page when re-applying.
Before resubmitting, make sure you meet these requirements:
Relevance: Your site serves creators or developers. Tell us why Carbon fits your audience.
Analytics: Share a public link to your stats if you have one.
Traffic: At least 10,000 pageviews in the last 30 days.
Upload Screenshots*
Screenshots must show the number of sessions sorted by countries in the last 30 days. We only accept screenshots from website analytics such as Google Analytics and Fullres.
>google analytics
>i have no clue what fullres is
Interesting. We're going to keep trying other options then
Everybody forgot to mention that BuySellAds rejected us as well.
Here's our list of rejections:
>EthicalAds
>CarbonAds
>BuySellAds
Cyberix will not be stooping low. We are not desperate right now. I also recognize the importance of not having advertisements at all in a website like this. We're pure and innocent. No JS, we allow TOR and VPNs.. And we don't have ads, trackers.. Not even a captcha.. And we're still alive. I believe that this is an incredible feat in the modern day.
I wonder if there's any demand for that.. Sure if so.
Nevermind, forgot that exposes one's location