With all due respect I'm not surprised. My media buying agency had tried buying traffic from them about a year ago and the quality of the traffic we got was shockingly bad. Support was not at all helpful. We were left thinking that they either had no measures to combat click fraud in place, or that they had no problem with selling that kind of traffic.<p>Common problem unfortunately in the media buying business, but not a foundation to build a long-lasting company on for sure. Word gets around.
This thread suggests that it's probably fun to say: good riddance to the fuckers! (And you <i>might</i> say "good riddance, you fucker" if you were on FuckedCompany...)<p>I've met pud and talked with him in an entrepreneurial setup, and I was truly impressed by his early-stage insight. Seriously, he's smart and savvy, so there, but for the grace of God, go I, etc. Rather than piling-on in a FuckedCompany-like sense, I think it's more interesting to think about the trajectory of a company founded by a bright and very in-tune entrepreneur.<p>Looking for lessons:<p><pre><code> * What do you think went wrong?
* What are artifacts of the failure you can enumerate?
* What would you have done differently?
* How did their competitors excel?</code></pre>
After being banned from Google Adsense (I still don't know the reason why) I have used Adbrite as an alternative. It's no surprise they are shutting down. The ads they deliver are borderline suspicious and they don't make publishers any money at all. I have earned $0.07 with Adbrite whereas I could have earned $60 in the same time frame with Google Adsense.<p>Does anyone know good alternatives?
They had over $40 million in investment capital according to Crunchbase (<a href="http://www.crunchbase.com/company/adbrite" rel="nofollow">http://www.crunchbase.com/company/adbrite</a>), with $5 million of it within the last 8 months.
No regret. I tried out AdBrite once and when I wanted to cash out the $130 I had earned back when I was a student, they told me they couldn't pay me out because they hadn't received the money yet, and that was that. Nothing I could do. This was 6 months after the pageviews in question ran, so it's not like they didn't have time.
Best of luck to the adbrite team. Unfortunately, this happens. Also, if any adbrite developers are interested in coming to Minneapolis, we'll expedite interviews :-)<p>Contact info in my profile.
AdBrite was a great network. Their payout rates were by far the best of any network I've tried.<p>Full-page ads were a killer revenue source, I would get 4x the amount I would have gotten on Adsense.
I tried out Adbrite last year for an ad placement at footer of one of my websites because I couldn't put any more Adsense on the page, it wasn't too bad but it was nothing compared to how much Adsense generated. It was still better than Clicksor and Bidvertiser. The thing I didn't like with Adbrite was that they had too many "spammy" advertisements.<p><a href="http://i.imgur.com/ZvN347V.png" rel="nofollow">http://i.imgur.com/ZvN347V.png</a>
I received this email a few minutes back. It is sad to see this happening and that too on such short notice. Used to use it along with Adsense, and it was the only good alternative.<p>I am certainly going to miss the feature where they automatically swapped their ad-code to any competitors if theirs din't cross the minimum CPC threshold.<p>If I recall correctly, the CEO/Founder of Adbrite is a member of HN. Maybe he can shed some light.
infos: <a href="http://allthingsd.com/20130128/sales-talks-fell-through-so-ad-exchange-adbrite-shuts-down/" rel="nofollow">http://allthingsd.com/20130128/sales-talks-fell-through-so-a...</a><p><pre><code> but sales talks “unfortunately fell through a couple weeks ago.”
</code></pre>
I wonder how often this happens. Just this week another company (own3d.tv) suffered the same fate.
I had a top 3 site on adbrite and was making almost six figures per year around 2004. I got banned without any warning. It was fun while it lasted. Their whole system sucked. They banned me because they wanted me to charge more. Their system allowed a huge backlog of ads that I had to display when my site got popular and prevented me charging more.
I tried AdBrite once, that was the only time I used them. The traffic they sent was junk and I am almost sure they had no click-fraud detection in place so most of the clicks were fraudulent. Good on them for staying in business this long though, surprised they lasted all this time.
C'mon people! Let's give these guys a break. They had a vision for something great and they tried their best to make it happen. Not every business succeeds, in fact almost many fail. They had the guts, the vision and the nerve to be great.