I. Know thy buyer
You get a click. They keep the person.
On most networks the platform holds the customer relationship and rents you access to it. On GHAN the person installs from your download URL, activates your licence, and appears in your billing system. GHAN never sees your users and holds nothing you would have to ask for back.
II. Never be priced out
Revised 22 September 2026. This rule previously read "never enter an auction".
In a search auction the clearing price is the only price. When a better-funded competitor enters your keyword, the floor rises under you until you cannot buy at all. That is the harm — not price discovery itself.
So GHAN guarantees a floor that never rises, published in code, that any approved advertiser can always buy at. Above the floor there is a second-price market for priority in contested inventory, and thirty percent of every category is reserved at floor and never auctioned.
You can always buy. You can never be outbid out of the network. The market sets what contention is worth, and it does it on top of a guarantee rather than instead of one. See bidding.
III. Pay only for the real
They charge on tap. The user vanishes and that is your problem.
On GHAN, money moves into escrow when an install is claimed and only leaves it if the install is still in use 48 hours later. No real usage, full refund, automatically, with no dispute process because none should be needed.
This is the rule that removed installer-time placements and payment-on-the-install-event from the product — which is to say, most of what the previous generation of desktop networks sold.
IV. Face no rival
You pay a platform to show your competitor's advertisement to your own users.
Never here. Category exclusions and named-app exclusions are enforced in the SDK, in the build you compiled and signed. GHAN cannot override them from the server, because there is no server field that does.
The one exception is uninstall_intent, where same-category placements are allowed by default — the person is leaving, and an alternative is genuinely a service to them at that moment. You can turn it off.
V. Earn while thou spends
Spend on Google and the money flows one way, out, forever.
Serve placements and you earn 70 percent of what cleared — or 84 percent of it in value if you take credits. An app that serves as much as it buys never touches a card. That is the intended steady state, and the credit bonus exists to make it the cheapest one.
VI. Appear at the perfect moment
A rectangle between baby photos and political rants.
Or: inside a relevant desktop application, at a moment that application chose, right after the person finished a task successfully. GHAN has five lifecycle slots and none of them is an installer. The host app calls a slot or nothing renders.
VII. Own what thou builds
Stop spending on a platform and you lose everything you built there.
The SDK ships in your own signed release. The kill switch is one call. Your users are yours, your licences are yours, your list is yours. Leave tomorrow and take all of it: stop calling ghan.slot, request a payout, ship the next build without the dependency. Nothing about GHAN is load-bearing in your product.
VIII. Never punish the small
A EUR 100,000 monthly buyer gets premium placement and a EUR 500 buyer gets scraps.
Not here. The floor is the same price for everyone, there is no enterprise tier, there is no volume discount, and there is no rate you can negotiate that is not on the pricing page. The reserved thirty percent exists precisely so that scale cannot buy out the whole of a category.
Five thousand passionate users beat five hundred thousand passive ones, and the pricing should not pretend otherwise.
What these cost
A manifesto that costs nothing to keep is a marketing page. These are the prices:
- III removed the highest-volume inventory on desktop and the fastest-clearing revenue model, and made GHAN carry 48 hours of settlement risk.
- IV removed competitor placements, which are the highest-converting inventory an advertising network has.
- VIII removed the enterprise tier, the volume discount and the negotiated rate — which is to say, the entire enterprise sales motion.
- II, in its revised form, caps how much a contested category can ever earn the network, because thirty percent of it is permanently sold at floor.
If a future version of GHAN quietly drops one of these, this page is the record that it did.
Questions people ask about this
Why did Commandment II change?
It originally read "never enter an auction". That was half right and imprecisely aimed. What harms a small desktop app is not price discovery, it is that in a search auction the clearing price becomes the only price, so the floor rises until you cannot buy at all. The rule now reads "never be priced out", and it is kept by a published floor that never rises plus a reserved tranche of inventory that is never auctioned. The protection is stronger than the original wording and the market above it is real. See /bidding/.
Are these enforceable or just marketing?
Some are enforceable by implementation, which is the only kind that survives revenue pressure. "Face no rival" is a category exclusion enforced in the SDK in your own build. "Pay only for the real" is the 48-hour clearing rule in the ledger. "Never be priced out" is a floor constant in code with a reserved inventory tranche. Others - "know thy buyer", "own what thou builds" - are commitments, and they are written here so a partner can hold GHAN to them in public.
What has a commandment actually cost GHAN?
Commandment III removed installer-time placements and payment on the install event, which is most of the volume and most of the revenue the previous generation of networks had. Commandment IV means GHAN cannot sell a competitor placement into your app, which is the highest-converting inventory an ad network has. Commandment VIII means a EUR 100,000 buyer and a EUR 500 buyer get the same floor price, so there is no enterprise tier to sell.
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