A fairer way to advertise on the open web. Rewarded video ads, human-reviewed campaigns, and the lion's share of revenue going where it belongs: to the people who built the audience.
AdGrove is a disruptive initiative from Posh Tonic, born from a simple frustration: the web's relationship with advertising is broken.
For years, the open web has been treated as a pop-up battleground. Intrusive banners, autoplaying interruptions and chase-you-around-the-page ads have trained an entire generation of readers to install blockers and tune the whole experience out. The result is worse for everyone: publishers earn less, advertisers reach fewer real people, and viewers spend their day swatting away noise.
We looked at this mess and asked an obvious question. The mobile gaming world solved this years ago with rewarded ads, where players willingly watch a short video in exchange for something they actually want. Why on earth has the open web not adopted the same idea? AdGrove is our answer. We give publishers a clean way to gate the content their visitors are already there for, and we give advertisers a captive, attentive audience who chose to be there.
The other half of our answer is quality. Every campaign on AdGrove is reviewed by a real human being before it goes anywhere near a viewer. No AI-generated brain rot, no careless creative, no race to the bottom. When a viewer sees the AdGrove logo, they should know that the next sixty seconds of their time will be worth it. That promise is the entire product.
A quiet manifesto for an industry that has, for the most part, forgotten why it exists.
There is a global love-hate relationship with advertising, and it is not difficult to see why. Ads are everywhere. You cannot scroll for five minutes without one trying to climb into your lap. The honest truth, though, is that the problem is rarely the ads themselves. It is their frequency, their tone, and the cynicism behind them. People are, quite naturally, trying to earn as much as they can, and when handed the means to flood you with placements for an extra few pence, many will. That is human nature, and we do not particularly blame anyone for it.
Yet advertising, done with care, is one of the most empowering forces a market has. We are living through a quiet revolution in which more and more people are stepping away from large corporations and building something of their own. Small businesses, independent makers, sole traders, side hustles turning into companies. Yes, many of them sell variations of the same thing. But amongst them are the gems: the products, the services and the people you genuinely want to know about. Without a fair platform to carry their message, you would simply never meet them, especially in those fragile early years where word of mouth alone is not enough.
We hold a slightly bigger dream too. If advertising were done well at a global scale, the income it generates could be a force on the level of public taxation. Consider Google, a single company sitting on more cash than the GDP of several nations. Imagine instead a model where advertising space was held in trust, and the proceeds flowed back into communities rather than into shareholder pockets. That is a long road, and we are an early step on it. If AdGrove ever grows large enough to make a serious dent in that picture, we will.
In the meantime, we live our values in the unglamorous details. AdGrove offers some of the cheapest video-based advertising on the web for premium markets, so smaller brands can actually afford to be seen. We pay publishers 90% of every penny spent, because they are the ones who built the audience. The remaining 10% is ours, and from that thin slice we also pay all the payment-processing fees ourselves. No clever deductions, no padded statements. Advertisers reach willing audiences. Publishers earn a fair share for sharing the message. That is what advertising is supposed to feel like.
A small, deliberately disruptive agency that builds software which gives back.
Posh Tonic is a tiny studio with an unusually stubborn principle: the things we build should hand value back to the people who use them. Most companies are designed, top to bottom, to extract. Attention, data, time, money, then more attention. We try to work the other way around. Every product we ship is asked the same awkward question at the start: how does this empower the user, and how can it return something tangible to them, beyond the obvious utility of the thing itself?
That principle shows up in unexpected places. Every game we make includes a way for players to earn real money from the time they spend in it. Our apps and websites tend to pool advertising revenue and redistribute it back into the user base, whether that takes the form of prizes, percentage shares, or community rewards. The face value of the product is only ever half the story. The other half is the income, the saving, or the opportunity it quietly hands back to the person on the other side of the screen.
AdGrove is the natural extension of that worldview onto the open web. Publishers should not be squeezed by ad networks that treat them as inventory. Advertisers should not be milked by middlemen who care more about take rates than reach. Viewers should not be ambushed by ads that nobody bothered to make watchable. So we built a platform that asks more of itself, and a great deal less of everyone else. That, in a sentence, is what Posh Tonic does.
Whether you have a campaign to run or an audience to monetise, AdGrove is ready when you are.