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Introducing Ghost: The Ad Marketplace That Can't Track Your Users

We built a privacy-first ad marketplace with sub-50ms delivery, 75% revenue share, and zero user tracking. Here's why and how.

Ghost Team · · 5 min read

The Problem With Online Advertising

Online advertising is broken. Ads are slow — typical load times of 200-500ms kill your Core Web Vitals. They track users across the web through cookies, fingerprinting, and surveillance capitalism. Revenue share is opaque: Google claims 68%, but publishers see 30-40% after the ad tech tax. Small publishers are locked out entirely — Mediavine requires 50K sessions, Raptive demands 100K pageviews.

We built Ghost to fix all of this.

What Ghost Does Differently

Architecture, not policy. There is no database of user profiles. No cookies are set. No fingerprinting code exists. Ghost is architecturally incapable of tracking users. This isn’t a privacy promise — it’s a technical constraint.

Sub-50ms from the edge. Ads are served from 300+ Cloudflare edge locations worldwide. Median delivery time is under 50ms. Your pages stay fast.

75% means 75%. No intermediaries, no hidden fees, no ad tech middlemen. Publishers keep 75% of what advertisers pay. Full transparency.

You control your site. Cross-publisher ads go through an approval gate. You review and approve every ad before it appears on your site.

How It Works

Getting started takes about 5 minutes:

  1. Add a script tag — the SDK is 1.9KB gzipped
  2. Create placements in the dashboard
  3. Ads start serving from the edge
  4. Track performance with real-time analytics

Here’s the integration code:

<!-- Add the Ghost SDK -->
<script
  src="https://api.ghostads.io/v1/sdk/ghost-sdk.js"
  data-publisher="your-publisher-id"
  data-endpoint="https://api.ghostads.io"
  defer
></script>

<!-- Place ads anywhere on your page -->
<div data-ghost-ad="top-banner"></div>

That’s it. The SDK handles contextual matching, consent gating, IntersectionObserver-based viewability tracking, and lazy loading — all built in.

Pricing

  • Free tier: Serve your own campaigns at no cost
  • Marketplace: 25% platform fee (publisher keeps 75%), no upfront cost
  • Beta offer: First 50 publishers get 100% revenue share for 3 months
  • No traffic minimums — we’re built for publishers of all sizes

See the full pricing details.

Get Started

Ghost is in private beta. Sign up for early access, and you’ll be serving privacy-first ads in under 5 minutes.

Integration takes a single script tag. Read the docs to learn more.