Both sell advertising on your website. They work in opposite directions: EthicalAds brings advertisers to your slot, and Perch lets your own readers buy it.
| Network | Minimum to join | Publisher share | Payout threshold | Self-serve |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| EthicalAds | 50,000 monthly pageviews, and developer-focused sites only | 70% | $50 | No |
| Perch | None | 75% | $65.00 | Yes |
Sources, checked 2026-08-26: Publisher policy (www.ethicalads.io/publisher-policy) · Publishers (www.ethicalads.io/publishers)
Your site is about software and you have 50,000 monthly pageviews — their advertiser pool is well matched and they will fill the slot for you.
Your site is about anything else, or is smaller than 50,000 pageviews a month. Both are hard requirements there and neither exists here.
A genuinely filled slot without you doing anything, and an advertiser pool that actually wants developer audiences. They also publish quarterly totals of money paid to publishers, which is a transparency standard worth copying.
Nobody finds your advertiser for you. There is no demand pool to fall back on — the slot fills when one of your own readers, or a business you approach, buys it. On a site with no local or niche connection to its audience, that is a real disadvantage against a matched network.
On EthicalAds the rate is an outcome — set by an auction, a matched advertiser, or a managed partner, and reported to you afterwards. On Perch you type a number: what one advertiser pays for one day in your slot. Nothing sells below it.
On EthicalAds they come from a pool you do not choose. On Perch the slot itself carries an invitation, so the buyer is usually someone already reading the page — a local business, or another site in the same niche.
No cookies, no behavioural targeting. Contextual placement only. Perch's embed sets no cookies and writes nothing to the visitor's device, so it does not itself create a consent-banner requirement. The full detail is on the security page, including the exact byte size the script adds to your page.
EthicalAds pays out at $50. Perch pays out at $65.00, into your own Stripe account. For a site earning a few dollars a month, that gap is the difference between money arriving and a balance that only ever grows on a screen.
Usually yes, and plenty of sites should. They are not the same slot: a direct-sold space in a prominent position alongside network fill elsewhere on the page is a normal arrangement, and it is worth checking EthicalAds's own terms about what may run beside their units.
No published traffic minimum, but every site goes through an approval review
$5,000+ in annual ad revenue for the main programme; the Journey tier starts at 1,000 sessions
The full comparison table covers every network here with sources, or work out the numbers for your own site with the earnings calculator.