12 ms·

The Deck ad network is shutting down

227 points by protomyth 10y ago

pgrote 10y ago
uBlock Origin will block the article by default. It seemed like a straight-forward business with little overhead considering there wasn't anything invasive or highly technical about the advertising units. Is there a market for that type of advertising online?
- draw_down 10y ago
  > uBlock Origin will block the article by default. Seems short-sighted! And, also, an indication of where things are today.
  - gorhill 10y ago
    There is no shortsightedness involved, it's just a false positive from one of the filter lists. When false positives are reported, they get fixed. This fixes the false positive: @@||decknetwork.net^$first-party
    - joshmanders 10y ago
      Or browse in blacklist mode. That's what I do and recommend to most... I love uBlock Origin, but I wish it was blacklist mode by default.
aresant 10y ago
Monetizing content with DISPLAY ads is no joke. The sheer number of tools display networks have at their fingertips to try to unlock value from your visitor's eyeballs are astounding - RTB exchanges / re-targeting / user profiling / etc / etc. And even with all of that most content producers can't make a living off of their cut. I always loved the simplicity of The Deck, but their end was inevitable.
- jonathankoren 10y ago
  Yup. Reading their post, it appears they didn't want to play the contemporary adtech game because it felt scummy, so they became unprofitable and quit.
  - wimagguc 10y ago
    Publishers massively overvalue their inventory and don't understand how their million views are worth only buttons. Ad networks can't pay more because they don't get paid more from the advertisers. The key is that no one clicks on banners any more, so it really is a race to the bottom.
    - jonathankoren 10y ago
      Did people ever click on banners after like 2002? CTR on these things are abysmal. The whole ad business reeks of desperation. However, it does pay the bills, so I guess it actually works.
      - fictioncircle 10y ago
        It works with intent but "intent" is really only available to Bing, Google, etc. where the user is searching for something _specific_ to purchase. For instance someone googling reviews of Samsung Dryers probably is considering buying a dryer of some kind. The further you get from that initial intent the less valuable your ads are until they are basically worthless.
      - DLarsen 10y ago
        CTR isn't the only KPI by which ads are sold. These days, publishers understand that ads still influence even if normal users don't actually click. When a purchase is preceded by an impression from my ad network, in some cases I can get credit for a portion of it.
        jonathankoren 10y ago
JusticeJuice 10y ago
This is a shame. I really liked the deck - it was one of the few ad networks I actually wanted to get on my site. They had both really high quality ads, and really high quality publishers. This is also a pretty big blow to the publishers - they'll feel the revenue loss, and there isn't an equivalent network to take their place. I'm sure they'll find something though.
- beaconstudios 10y ago
  does Carbon (https://carbonads.net/ https://carbonads.net/) not provide a similar offering?
  - livestyle 10y ago
    Yes. Very similar.
draw_down 10y ago
It's worth noting because this was an ad network that tried to do the job the right way. The heyday of the indie blog was already over, this is just a reflection of that. It worked for a while, and the wold has moved on. It's not a matter of "grinding it out" or persistence, the market factors have simply changed. I wonder what Daring Fireball (AFAIK by far the site with largest readership on the Deck) will do. I'm sure that's still quite a profitable enterprise, to be clear.
- mortenjorck 10y ago
  Gruber already appears to do some inventory management himself (see the occasional posts about unbooked RSS sponsorship opportunities), so I assume he'll just have to take on the rest of it. He probably has enough relationships with advertisers for now that he won't have to start hustling yet, but I'd imagine he'll eventually want to work with a contractor to sell spots.
  - draw_down 10y ago
    Yeah, that's true. As far as I know he also did the ad management for his podcast himself, so maybe he can just do that for display ads too. Makes sense.
- scarface74 10y ago
  Not quite the same thing, but it is sort of heartening that Marco Arment -- of Tumblr, Instapaper, and now Overcast fame -- was able to build out his own non-scummy ad buying platform for his Overcast app. It seems to be doing quite well. https://overcast.fm/account/buy_ad https://overcast.fm/account/buy_ad
  - petercooper 10y ago
    I know one person who ran a listing so far and they are very happy. It's about putting the right sort of "ad" in the right place. Advertising podcasts in an ad where people are listening to podcasts is a no-brainer and engagement should be high. Advertising arbitrary services, even if they're good, on arbitrary blogs seems trickier to price and sell. But with the quality of the sites in the network, I'm sure they could all individually find the right, complementary type of advertising to continue to fund them.
bgarbiak 10y ago
Whenever I noticed that a site I'm visiting is "powered" by DECK, I was whitelisting it in the adblock. I hate ads, but I totally get that they keep things going in the Net, and so if there have to be ads they should be like the DECK: no tracking, no profiling, no being invasive. It's really a shame that an opposite of that triumphs today. In the long term it's gonna be painful for the users, for publishers, for the net, for advertisers as well. Probably for everyone, except for Facebook and Apple.
- wkoszek 10y ago
  Me too. I liked Deck and Carbon ads.
  - floatboth 10y ago
    Carbon is still there… owned by BuySellAds who also bought Fusion and absorbed it into Carbon, or something. (Fusion's website redirects to Carbon.)
    - toddynho 10y ago
      We're very much alive! Thriving, even. And yes, we merged AdPacks, Yoggrt, Fusion, and Carbon into just Carbon. Been growing the network ~20-30% or so year over year. The simplicity of the model still works well. Where we deviated from The Deck's model is that we made some changes a few years ago that are working quite well. On the advertiser side we started selling on a cost per thousand impression basis vs a fixed monthly price per "slot". And on the publisher side we started paying them a dynamic rate based on traffic and performance of the ads vs. a fixed monthly amount. Hope that doesn't come across the wrong way - just a fundamental difference that I believe is one of the reasons why an otherwise incredibly similar business can work well for one, but not for the other.
      - sah2ed 10y ago
        Interesting. It appears you guys had seen the writing on the wall and had adapted your business model accordingly. Thanks for your insider's take but who was the originator of the old business model? The Deck or Carbon?
NelsonMinar 10y ago
Metafilter used this ad network: http://metatalk.metafilter.com/24390/Fond-farewell-to-ads-from-The-Deck http://metatalk.metafilter.com/24390/Fond-farewell-to-ads-fr... So did Waxy: https://twitter.com/waxpancake/status/847188783724322816 https://twitter.com/waxpancake/status/847188783724322816
- NelsonMinar 10y ago
  Also Daring Fireball: http://daringfireball.net/2017/03/the_deck_adieu http://daringfireball.net/2017/03/the_deck_adieu
ummjackson 10y ago
Shame to hear this... although I guess there is less demand now with hyper-targeted invasive social ads. Working with The Deck previously, Jim was always such a pleasure to deal with and it felt a lot more personal as a network vs. Google or the big social networks. RIP.
eldavido 10y ago
This seems to fit the narrative of a broader wave of consolidation hitting the old-school web. Like it or not, there are real advantages to walled gardens like facebook. To ad buyers, it's a single platform where one can target the entire world person-by-person -- even across multiple devices (iPad, phone, laptop), with hyper-accurate segmentation and user tracking, strong identity services with all the abuse/spam prevention and payment capability that enables, multi-lingual, optimized CDN-based distribution to ensure all content is fast and cheaply delivered to every corner of the globe (an especially big deal given the rise of video ads), mobile-first UX that works across every conceivable handset including iOS and every esoteric variant of Android, etc. I'm not pleased about a lot of this, but it's a mistake to deny what's happening.
- cookiecaper 10y ago
  You don't need a walled garden for that. You would need some client-side listeners. Walled gardens arise because our legal system incentivizes it. Network effects are unnatural online. There is no barrier to access or information flow here -- put simply, there are no real walls to protect the garden. They're all artificially imposed barriers. With improved laws, no one would be able to hold the web-accessible data hostage, and competition would be based on consumer-facing concerns like user experience and customer service. Until we get to that point, which makes up the foundation of all competition in the physical world, the potential of the internet will continue to be squandered. It's very important to wake people up to these issues, since no one really seems to discuss them.
  - caseysoftware 10y ago
    > Network effects are unnatural online. I find this line ironic since the Network Effect (or Metcalfe's Law) was created to describe literal computer networks. Network effects don't happen in the physical world nearly as easily because the bar, grocery store, or whatever is limited by geography. They can only address a population within a certain radius and can't grow beyond it. Transportation hubs - like airports - may be an exception because the more places you can get from one airport, the more likely you are to use that airport.. if you even have a choice.
forsaken 10y ago
This makes me sad. We based our Ethical Advertising concept that we're doing on Read the Docs (http://docs.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ethical-advertising.html http://docs.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ethical-advertising.htm...) on their inspiration. We don't have nearly as much mobile traffic (only ~6%), so hopefully we will be able to make it work, but this doesn't fill me with confidence.
- toddynho 10y ago
  You should join us at Carbon :)
  - angry-hacker 10y ago
    Your site is down :(
    - toddynho 10y ago
      More likely your ad blocker. No alerts, seems fine over here and here: http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/carbonads.net http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/carbonads.net.
      - angry-hacker 10y ago
        Indeed, it was blocked by my mobiles hosts file
  - tannhaeuser 10y ago
    But the Carbon site says it's invite-only. Also, how do you go about advertising on a site with user sub-sites using Carbon?
    - toddynho 10y ago
      That was an invite. I'm not sure I understand your question. We put the sites in "circles" and advertisers buy a specific circle.
tambourine_man 10y ago
Such a shame. A bad week for the web
slackoverflower 10y ago
I guess being humane doesn't really work in the advertising industry.
Exuma 10y ago
lol @ 7 billion ad impressions during the entire lifetime of an AD NETWORK. I get 1.5 billion ad impressions a month on my 1 site alone.
- livestyle 10y ago
  What's your site? Curious.
- omarchowdhury 10y ago
  I'll bet money the CPM Deck sold their ads is magnitudes greater than what you're selling for.
mattl 10y ago
This is sad. I based my idea for a free software friendly ad network on this, and pitched it back in 2009. It became AdBard, and for a while it was quite popular in the free software space. http://www.fsf.org/news/ad-bard http://www.fsf.org/news/ad-bard A big problem for free software sites is finding ads that respect the users freedom while promoting products which are not harmful to computer users.
code4tee 10y ago
Clicked on the link to read the post and it said the page was blocked by my ad blocker... oh the irony! More seriously, sad to see them go but this does reflect the reality of a market shift in this space.
pkamb 10y ago
This was a fun weekend hack experimenting with the iOS 9 content blocker extension framework. Never got that link on Daring Fireball though! http://swabthe.com/ http://swabthe.com/
- jgruber 10y ago
  You built a content blocker that only blocked The Deck?
  - TylerE 10y ago
    You are obviously missing the sarcasm.
    - packetslave 10y ago
      You are obviously missing who jgruber is.
      - TylerE 10y ago
        Should I care? I don't buy into personality cults.
        iamdave 10y ago
        Never got that link on Daring Fireball though! Should I care? Hint: Click his username, and read his profile. We'll wait.
        Xylakant 10y ago
        In this case, yes. Not because of personality cults, but because jgruber is the person behind DF.
      - Vinnl 10y ago
        For those who also didn't know: Daring Fireball is apparently a blog about Apple that is authored by jgruber: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gruber#Daring_Fireball https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gruber#Daring_Fireball I still don't know how jgruber's comment is supposed to catch the sarcasm, but that's probably something going over my head as well. Edit: From another comment, apparently Daring Fireball is also largest platform to host Deck ads.
mxuribe 10y ago
This is sad really...Its the walmart effect happening here (where a bigbox store comes into town and crushes the little, local shop).
parennoob 10y ago
Could anyone in the know comment on whether their invite-only nature contributed to this? I have wanted to have Deck Network ads on my sites forever, but there was no real way to do so. They seemed to be restricted to inviting only Apple-themed blogs and sites, plus maybe their peripheral network. I wonder if having a somewhat more clear and easy vetting process would have helped expand their reach somewhat.
- livestyle 10y ago
  What are your sites?
th0ma5 10y ago
I remember looking to host their ads and it was more like they would call you not the other way around. Was this always the case?
tempodox 10y ago
The Deck consistently presented the most sensible ads I've seen out there. Sorry to see it go.
twsted 10y ago
It was probably the only ad network I have whitelisted on every adblocker I use.
ollieco 10y ago
> In 2014, display advertisers started concentrating on large, walled, social networks. The indie “blogosphere” was disappearing. Mobile impressions, which produce significantly fewer clicks and engagements, began to really dominate the market There was a recent discussion on HN about how difficult it is to promote a blog now (compared to a few years ago). I think this statement by Deck further emphasises the fact that independent blogs are seeing a decline in readership.
tinkerdol 10y ago
Anyone have recommendations for video ad providers? I would like to embed ads to play before a stream starts, but would also like to do it in the most ethical way possible.
LeicaLatte 10y ago
Has Deck considered making video ads? I ended up liking their take on 'banner ads'. Curious to see what they might have done with video.
protomyth 10y ago
Was The Deck still invite only and if so can someone explain the value in that? That elitism could be a selling point, but if you are charging monthly, it just seems a turn off for expansion because they won't grow with you but only come in when you are established.
brianbreslin 10y ago
I wonder how much their content providers moving over to platforms like Medium hurt their business? Aside from the fact so few people are clicking on traditional display ads anymore. We really shouldn't be looking down on this business. They managed to outlive a TON of companies (10 years is great on the internet), and I'm sure provided livelihoods for a fair number of people both at Coudal and their partner blogs who they were monetizing. Kudos to them!

227 points by protomyth 10y ago

uBlock Origin will block the article by default. It seemed like a straight-forward business with little overhead considering there wasn't anything invasive or highly technical about the advertising units. Is there a market for that type of advertising online?

draw_down 10y ago
> uBlock Origin will block the article by default. Seems short-sighted! And, also, an indication of where things are today.
- gorhill 10y ago
  There is no shortsightedness involved, it's just a false positive from one of the filter lists. When false positives are reported, they get fixed. This fixes the false positive: @@||decknetwork.net^$first-party
  - joshmanders 10y ago
    Or browse in blacklist mode. That's what I do and recommend to most... I love uBlock Origin, but I wish it was blacklist mode by default.

aresant 10y ago

Monetizing content with DISPLAY ads is no joke. The sheer number of tools display networks have at their fingertips to try to unlock value from your visitor's eyeballs are astounding - RTB exchanges / re-targeting / user profiling / etc / etc. And even with all of that most content producers can't make a living off of their cut. I always loved the simplicity of The Deck, but their end was inevitable.

jonathankoren 10y ago
Yup. Reading their post, it appears they didn't want to play the contemporary adtech game because it felt scummy, so they became unprofitable and quit.
- wimagguc 10y ago
  Publishers massively overvalue their inventory and don't understand how their million views are worth only buttons. Ad networks can't pay more because they don't get paid more from the advertisers. The key is that no one clicks on banners any more, so it really is a race to the bottom.
  - jonathankoren 10y ago
    Did people ever click on banners after like 2002? CTR on these things are abysmal. The whole ad business reeks of desperation. However, it does pay the bills, so I guess it actually works.
    - fictioncircle 10y ago
      It works with intent but "intent" is really only available to Bing, Google, etc. where the user is searching for something _specific_ to purchase. For instance someone googling reviews of Samsung Dryers probably is considering buying a dryer of some kind. The further you get from that initial intent the less valuable your ads are until they are basically worthless.
    - DLarsen 10y ago
      CTR isn't the only KPI by which ads are sold. These days, publishers understand that ads still influence even if normal users don't actually click. When a purchase is preceded by an impression from my ad network, in some cases I can get credit for a portion of it.
      - jonathankoren 10y ago

JusticeJuice 10y ago

This is a shame. I really liked the deck - it was one of the few ad networks I actually wanted to get on my site. They had both really high quality ads, and really high quality publishers. This is also a pretty big blow to the publishers - they'll feel the revenue loss, and there isn't an equivalent network to take their place. I'm sure they'll find something though.

beaconstudios 10y ago
does Carbon (https://carbonads.net/ https://carbonads.net/) not provide a similar offering?
- livestyle 10y ago
  Yes. Very similar.

draw_down 10y ago

It's worth noting because this was an ad network that tried to do the job the right way. The heyday of the indie blog was already over, this is just a reflection of that. It worked for a while, and the wold has moved on. It's not a matter of "grinding it out" or persistence, the market factors have simply changed. I wonder what Daring Fireball (AFAIK by far the site with largest readership on the Deck) will do. I'm sure that's still quite a profitable enterprise, to be clear.

mortenjorck 10y ago
Gruber already appears to do some inventory management himself (see the occasional posts about unbooked RSS sponsorship opportunities), so I assume he'll just have to take on the rest of it. He probably has enough relationships with advertisers for now that he won't have to start hustling yet, but I'd imagine he'll eventually want to work with a contractor to sell spots.
- draw_down 10y ago
  Yeah, that's true. As far as I know he also did the ad management for his podcast himself, so maybe he can just do that for display ads too. Makes sense.
scarface74 10y ago
Not quite the same thing, but it is sort of heartening that Marco Arment -- of Tumblr, Instapaper, and now Overcast fame -- was able to build out his own non-scummy ad buying platform for his Overcast app. It seems to be doing quite well. https://overcast.fm/account/buy_ad https://overcast.fm/account/buy_ad
- petercooper 10y ago
  I know one person who ran a listing so far and they are very happy. It's about putting the right sort of "ad" in the right place. Advertising podcasts in an ad where people are listening to podcasts is a no-brainer and engagement should be high. Advertising arbitrary services, even if they're good, on arbitrary blogs seems trickier to price and sell. But with the quality of the sites in the network, I'm sure they could all individually find the right, complementary type of advertising to continue to fund them.

bgarbiak 10y ago

Whenever I noticed that a site I'm visiting is "powered" by DECK, I was whitelisting it in the adblock. I hate ads, but I totally get that they keep things going in the Net, and so if there have to be ads they should be like the DECK: no tracking, no profiling, no being invasive. It's really a shame that an opposite of that triumphs today. In the long term it's gonna be painful for the users, for publishers, for the net, for advertisers as well. Probably for everyone, except for Facebook and Apple.

wkoszek 10y ago
Me too. I liked Deck and Carbon ads.
- floatboth 10y ago
  Carbon is still there… owned by BuySellAds who also bought Fusion and absorbed it into Carbon, or something. (Fusion's website redirects to Carbon.)
  - toddynho 10y ago
    We're very much alive! Thriving, even. And yes, we merged AdPacks, Yoggrt, Fusion, and Carbon into just Carbon. Been growing the network ~20-30% or so year over year. The simplicity of the model still works well. Where we deviated from The Deck's model is that we made some changes a few years ago that are working quite well. On the advertiser side we started selling on a cost per thousand impression basis vs a fixed monthly price per "slot". And on the publisher side we started paying them a dynamic rate based on traffic and performance of the ads vs. a fixed monthly amount. Hope that doesn't come across the wrong way - just a fundamental difference that I believe is one of the reasons why an otherwise incredibly similar business can work well for one, but not for the other.
    - sah2ed 10y ago
      Interesting. It appears you guys had seen the writing on the wall and had adapted your business model accordingly. Thanks for your insider's take but who was the originator of the old business model? The Deck or Carbon?

NelsonMinar 10y ago

Metafilter used this ad network: http://metatalk.metafilter.com/24390/Fond-farewell-to-ads-from-The-Deck http://metatalk.metafilter.com/24390/Fond-farewell-to-ads-fr... So did Waxy: https://twitter.com/waxpancake/status/847188783724322816 https://twitter.com/waxpancake/status/847188783724322816

NelsonMinar 10y ago
Also Daring Fireball: http://daringfireball.net/2017/03/the_deck_adieu http://daringfireball.net/2017/03/the_deck_adieu

ummjackson 10y ago

Shame to hear this... although I guess there is less demand now with hyper-targeted invasive social ads. Working with The Deck previously, Jim was always such a pleasure to deal with and it felt a lot more personal as a network vs. Google or the big social networks. RIP.

eldavido 10y ago

This seems to fit the narrative of a broader wave of consolidation hitting the old-school web. Like it or not, there are real advantages to walled gardens like facebook. To ad buyers, it's a single platform where one can target the entire world person-by-person -- even across multiple devices (iPad, phone, laptop), with hyper-accurate segmentation and user tracking, strong identity services with all the abuse/spam prevention and payment capability that enables, multi-lingual, optimized CDN-based distribution to ensure all content is fast and cheaply delivered to every corner of the globe (an especially big deal given the rise of video ads), mobile-first UX that works across every conceivable handset including iOS and every esoteric variant of Android, etc. I'm not pleased about a lot of this, but it's a mistake to deny what's happening.

cookiecaper 10y ago
You don't need a walled garden for that. You would need some client-side listeners. Walled gardens arise because our legal system incentivizes it. Network effects are unnatural online. There is no barrier to access or information flow here -- put simply, there are no real walls to protect the garden. They're all artificially imposed barriers. With improved laws, no one would be able to hold the web-accessible data hostage, and competition would be based on consumer-facing concerns like user experience and customer service. Until we get to that point, which makes up the foundation of all competition in the physical world, the potential of the internet will continue to be squandered. It's very important to wake people up to these issues, since no one really seems to discuss them.
- caseysoftware 10y ago
  > Network effects are unnatural online. I find this line ironic since the Network Effect (or Metcalfe's Law) was created to describe literal computer networks. Network effects don't happen in the physical world nearly as easily because the bar, grocery store, or whatever is limited by geography. They can only address a population within a certain radius and can't grow beyond it. Transportation hubs - like airports - may be an exception because the more places you can get from one airport, the more likely you are to use that airport.. if you even have a choice.

forsaken 10y ago

This makes me sad. We based our Ethical Advertising concept that we're doing on Read the Docs (http://docs.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ethical-advertising.html http://docs.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ethical-advertising.htm...) on their inspiration. We don't have nearly as much mobile traffic (only ~6%), so hopefully we will be able to make it work, but this doesn't fill me with confidence.

toddynho 10y ago
You should join us at Carbon :)
- angry-hacker 10y ago
  Your site is down :(
  - toddynho 10y ago
    More likely your ad blocker. No alerts, seems fine over here and here: http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/carbonads.net http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/carbonads.net.
    - angry-hacker 10y ago
      Indeed, it was blocked by my mobiles hosts file
- tannhaeuser 10y ago
  But the Carbon site says it's invite-only. Also, how do you go about advertising on a site with user sub-sites using Carbon?
  - toddynho 10y ago
    That was an invite. I'm not sure I understand your question. We put the sites in "circles" and advertisers buy a specific circle.

tambourine_man 10y ago

Such a shame. A bad week for the web

slackoverflower 10y ago

I guess being humane doesn't really work in the advertising industry.

Exuma 10y ago

lol @ 7 billion ad impressions during the entire lifetime of an AD NETWORK. I get 1.5 billion ad impressions a month on my 1 site alone.

livestyle 10y ago
What's your site? Curious.
omarchowdhury 10y ago
I'll bet money the CPM Deck sold their ads is magnitudes greater than what you're selling for.

mattl 10y ago

This is sad. I based my idea for a free software friendly ad network on this, and pitched it back in 2009. It became AdBard, and for a while it was quite popular in the free software space. http://www.fsf.org/news/ad-bard http://www.fsf.org/news/ad-bard A big problem for free software sites is finding ads that respect the users freedom while promoting products which are not harmful to computer users.

code4tee 10y ago

Clicked on the link to read the post and it said the page was blocked by my ad blocker... oh the irony! More seriously, sad to see them go but this does reflect the reality of a market shift in this space.

pkamb 10y ago

This was a fun weekend hack experimenting with the iOS 9 content blocker extension framework. Never got that link on Daring Fireball though! http://swabthe.com/ http://swabthe.com/

jgruber 10y ago
You built a content blocker that only blocked The Deck?
- TylerE 10y ago
  You are obviously missing the sarcasm.
  - packetslave 10y ago
    You are obviously missing who jgruber is.
    - TylerE 10y ago
      Should I care? I don't buy into personality cults.
      - iamdave 10y ago
        Never got that link on Daring Fireball though! Should I care? Hint: Click his username, and read his profile. We'll wait.
      - Xylakant 10y ago
        In this case, yes. Not because of personality cults, but because jgruber is the person behind DF.
    - Vinnl 10y ago
      For those who also didn't know: Daring Fireball is apparently a blog about Apple that is authored by jgruber: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gruber#Daring_Fireball https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gruber#Daring_Fireball I still don't know how jgruber's comment is supposed to catch the sarcasm, but that's probably something going over my head as well. Edit: From another comment, apparently Daring Fireball is also largest platform to host Deck ads.

mxuribe 10y ago

This is sad really...Its the walmart effect happening here (where a bigbox store comes into town and crushes the little, local shop).

parennoob 10y ago

Could anyone in the know comment on whether their invite-only nature contributed to this? I have wanted to have Deck Network ads on my sites forever, but there was no real way to do so. They seemed to be restricted to inviting only Apple-themed blogs and sites, plus maybe their peripheral network. I wonder if having a somewhat more clear and easy vetting process would have helped expand their reach somewhat.

livestyle 10y ago
What are your sites?

th0ma5 10y ago

I remember looking to host their ads and it was more like they would call you not the other way around. Was this always the case?

tempodox 10y ago

The Deck consistently presented the most sensible ads I've seen out there. Sorry to see it go.

twsted 10y ago

It was probably the only ad network I have whitelisted on every adblocker I use.

ollieco 10y ago

> In 2014, display advertisers started concentrating on large, walled, social networks. The indie “blogosphere” was disappearing. Mobile impressions, which produce significantly fewer clicks and engagements, began to really dominate the market There was a recent discussion on HN about how difficult it is to promote a blog now (compared to a few years ago). I think this statement by Deck further emphasises the fact that independent blogs are seeing a decline in readership.

tinkerdol 10y ago

Anyone have recommendations for video ad providers? I would like to embed ads to play before a stream starts, but would also like to do it in the most ethical way possible.

LeicaLatte 10y ago

Has Deck considered making video ads? I ended up liking their take on 'banner ads'. Curious to see what they might have done with video.

protomyth 10y ago

Was The Deck still invite only and if so can someone explain the value in that? That elitism could be a selling point, but if you are charging monthly, it just seems a turn off for expansion because they won't grow with you but only come in when you are established.

brianbreslin 10y ago

I wonder how much their content providers moving over to platforms like Medium hurt their business? Aside from the fact so few people are clicking on traditional display ads anymore. We really shouldn't be looking down on this business. They managed to outlive a TON of companies (10 years is great on the internet), and I'm sure provided livelihoods for a fair number of people both at Coudal and their partner blogs who they were monetizing. Kudos to them!