1. The short answer
OnFire does not target advertising. Which ad you see is chosen at random from the ads currently running. We do not profile you to decide what to show you.
Every ad is labelled, shows who placed it, and can be hidden. Nothing about your age, your gender, your interests, your behaviour or your identity is used to select an ad for you.
2. How to recognise an ad
Every ad in your feed carries a "Sponsored" label. Alongside it you see the name and profile picture of the advertiser who placed it. Sponsored products in shopping rails appear under a "Sponsored Products" heading, and ads in the video feed carry their own badge.
The label is on the ad itself, in the place you are looking, rather than hidden in a menu.
3. Who paid for it
The advertiser shown on an ad is the OnFire account that created it and paid for it. On OnFire these are always the same: we have no concept of one party placing an ad on behalf of a different party who pays.
So the name you see on the ad is both the advertiser and the payer. If that ever changes — for example if we allow agencies to buy on behalf of clients — we will show both, and update this page first.
4. How we choose which ad you see
At random, from the pool of ads that are currently active and have passed review.
That is the entire mechanism. There is no auction, no relevance score, no profile lookup, and no ranking. Every user is eligible to see every running ad, and the one that appears in a given slot is picked by chance.
Ads appear at intervals as you scroll, with the spacing varied so they do not fall in a predictable pattern.
5. What advertisers can and cannot ask for
This section is unusually blunt, because the honest description is not the flattering one.
When someone creates an ad on OnFire, the advertising tools ask them to choose an audience: an age range, a gender, interests from a fixed list of thirty, and a location radius on a map.
None of those choices affects who sees the ad
Age and gender selections never leave the advertiser's device — they are not sent to us and there is nowhere in our database to store them. Interests and location are stored, but they are never consulted when an ad is served. Ads are selected at random regardless of what was chosen.
In practice, every ad currently running on OnFire has an empty interest list anyway.
We are telling you this because the alternative — describing an audience-targeting system as though it worked — would misrepresent what happens to your data. It also means advertisers are currently offered controls that do nothing, which we are addressing separately.
6. Sensitive personal data
We do not use sensitive personal data to select ads, and we could not: no ad selection uses personal data of any kind.
For completeness, the fixed list of thirty interest categories offered to advertisers covers technology, lifestyle, entertainment, sport, food and dining, and business. None of them reveals racial or ethnic origin, political opinions, religious or philosophical beliefs, trade union membership, health, sex life or sexual orientation. The closest is a general "Health & Wellness" lifestyle category, which describes the advertiser's product rather than any characteristic of a viewer.
OnFire also collects no biometric data of any kind. There is no face recognition, no faceprint or voiceprint, no gait or behavioural biometric, and no biometric identifier is derived from photographs, videos or voice notes anywhere in the product. Nothing of that sort exists to be used for advertising, ranking, age estimation or anything else. We state it explicitly because it is the kind of thing users reasonably assume a social product does.
7. Advertising and young people
Platforms are prohibited from showing advertising based on profiling where they are aware that the user is a minor.
OnFire does not show profiling-based advertising to anyone, so it does not show it to young people either. The youngest age bracket our advertising tools offer is 18–24; there is no under-18 option, and as explained above the bracket has no effect regardless.
8. Your controls
Every ad has a menu offering:
- Hide this ad — removes it from your view.
- Report this ad — sends it to us for review. See Reporting Illegal Content.
9. If this changes
If OnFire begins targeting advertising in any way — by interest, by location, by behaviour, or by anything else — we will update this page before that change reaches users, and we will explain what is used and how to control it.
Questions about advertising on OnFire: [email protected].