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The Deck ad network is shutting down

decknetwork.net

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Re: The Deck ad network is shutting down

#11

Post by mortenjorck »

draw_down wrote: post #5

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 s…

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.

Re: The Deck ad network is shutting down

#12

Post by draw_down »

mortenjorck wrote: post #11
draw_down wrote: post #5

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 s…

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.

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.

Re: The Deck ad network is shutting down

#14

Post by ummjackson »

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.

Re: The Deck ad network is shutting down

#15

Post by gorhill »

draw_down wrote: post #6
pgrote wrote: post #2

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?

> uBlock Origin will block the article by default. Seems short-sighted! And, also, an indication of where things are today.

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

Re: The Deck ad network is shutting down

#16

Post by fictioncircle »

jonathankoren wrote: post #10
wimagguc wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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.

Re: The Deck ad network is shutting down

#17

Post by eldavido »

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.

Re: The Deck ad network is shutting down

#18

Post by scarface74 »

draw_down wrote: post #5

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 s…

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

Re: The Deck ad network is shutting down

#19

Post by DLarsen »

jonathankoren wrote: post #10
wimagguc wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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.

Re: The Deck ad network is shutting down

#20

Post by forsaken »

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.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.

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