"Ad"fully Awful

<i>It makes me happy to see more advertising networks such as The Deck and InfluAds spring up.</i><p>If you run the numbers on the rate card, number of advertisers, and number of impressions (all public knowledge), The Deck works out at somewhere around $2.50 CPM and I bet not all advertisers are paying ratecard. $2.50CPM won't pay anyone's wages on a niche site unless they're getting silly traffic. I love The Deck philosophically but from a business point of view, I wouldn't run their ad unit even if I were invited.<p>Not many people outside of media circles are talking about the real trend that's going on nowadays (although Monocle magazine keeps sharing the secrets, but their circulation is small ;-)): advertising/editorial crossover and product development. The real money is in building audience loyalty and producing your own premium products or services targeted at them (and not a paywall that just locks up the previously free stuff). Keep an eye out for sites that advertise their own stuff (training courses, merchandise, reports, premium subscriptions) rather than other people's - it's a growing trend.

You're way <i>way</i> off the mark with your thoughts on these new "ad networks". DF is not a good example, gruber is a brand, DF isn't just a website and his use of a small ad network is proof of nothing. He would make a lot more with adsense etc, but money isn't his goal. You have to assume money <i>is</i> someone's goal when they run adverts, otherwise why run adverts?<p>We tried out one of the fancy curated ad networks (projectwonderful) and if our experience is anything to go by they suck, they absolutely suck. Unless you are in a very specific niche they will not do anything but make your revenue tank.<p>There's a reason these advert displays are not widely popular, it's because they pay nothing. Sure on a blog with a few thousand visits what's the difference between $100 and $50? Larger sites will hurt a lot.

Advertising is awful because the incentive system is fundamentally broken. The only thing a publisher has to risk by showing crappy ads is you going to another site. Even the sites with the most annoying ads will only lose a small percentage of visitors if the ads become more annoying. They have nothing to gain by making ads appealing.<p>The problem with online advertising is that the system is entirely skewed to the advertisers. Since they are the ones injecting money into the system, they get whatever they want. If they want to annoy you, then they get to annoy you. And there's nothing wrong with that. They <i>are</i> the customers.<p>The Deck is really cool, and so is InfluAds. But those solutions don't seem to scale. Exclusivity doesn't solve the underlying problem, it just passes it along to someone else.<p>The solution to the problem lies in finding a way to make money from a website that doesn't involve doing whatever an advertiser tells you to do. The details of this solution are left as an exercise for the reader.

Use adblock[1] or advertban[2] if you are annoyed by ads. IMHO, neither publishers nor advertisers loose a penny if you _consciously_ use ad blocking solutions, because this means the probability of your _intentional_ click on annoying ads tends towards zero even if you'll see all these ads. In other words, you don't belong to the target audience of these ads. [1] <a href="https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/adblock-plus/" rel="nofollow">https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/adblock-plus/</a> [2] <a href="https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/adban/" rel="nofollow">https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/adban/</a>

tl;dr version: many websites have far too many adverts.

I'll happy run the deck ads, its pretty much invite only though right? The reason the Internet is covered in adsense is because pretty much everyone can join and the cpc from my experience is better than similar providers.

As always I would like to hear the community comments on my article.<p>Cheers