The Deck Shuts Down
Things change. 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. Invasive user tracking (which we refused to do) and all that came with that became pervasive, and once again The Deck was back to being a pretty good business. By 2015, it was an OK business and, by the second half of 2016, the network was beginning to struggle again.
Here are just a few of the things that make me proud to have been part of The Deck:
- We never allowed animated ads. (Remember when that was the main problem with online ads?)
- We never allowed user tracking or JavaScript payloads. The Deck respected your privacy (and your bandwidth).
- We had great sponsors who made great products and services (and designed great looking ads).
Perhaps most importantly, we never showed more than one ad per page. […] Exclusivity has tremendous value, and most web publishers still haven’t gotten that. And on the web, an ad doesn’t have to be big to be exclusive and to occupy valuable real estate.
Having a Deck ad on a site was a subtle indicator that it was trustworthy and that it had a good reputation. That’s something that almost nothing else — let alone an advertising network — has yet been able to achieve to the same degree.
The Deck going away is a loss made all the more frustrating by the fact that there isn’t really an alternative to it. Writers will always find a way to write, though. My hope is that the next generation of writers will find a way to put their words on the web on their own terms. Social doesn’t offer that. Blogging always has, and always will.
I will replace The Deck, at least in the short term, with an ad network with a similar look and feel, while I assess what the long-term plan should be.
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Yeah... no huge surprise here. I think they might've been a little TOO selective in the sites they allowed in. I emailed them several times go try and get Mac Kung Fu on their list of sites but they didn't even bother replying. I had the right kind of reader, for sure, and my site layout isn't too shoddy.
It was one of those things in the Mac world that's a bit of a private members' club. I come up against this quite a bit. Well, I did, until I stopped both trying and caring. :-(