The Deck advertising network shutting down
March 29, 2017 6:31 PM   Subscribe

"Things work, until they don't." The Deck Network used by many independent web sites, including Metafilter, to make advertising revenue is shutting down.

They site multiple reasons like rise of mobile, pervasive tracking, indie sites perishing.
posted by zeikka (56 comments total) 11 users marked this as a favorite
 
the only ad network I've ever white-listed.
posted by strange chain at 6:36 PM on March 29, 2017 [32 favorites]


Yeah, me too.
posted by jadepearl at 6:38 PM on March 29, 2017


If you want you can take it to MetaTalk.
posted by Going To Maine at 6:40 PM on March 29, 2017 [1 favorite]


:(
posted by freakazoid at 6:48 PM on March 29, 2017


Good ideas are not always successful ideas. Nor are bad ideas always failures...
posted by jim in austin at 7:36 PM on March 29, 2017 [6 favorites]


.
posted by potrzebie at 7:38 PM on March 29, 2017


As far as I can tell the economic model right now is a bunch of rich people pouring money into certain vanity places in hopes that it takes off and write the rest off as a loss and everyone involved is just running from business to business, every eight months or so, hiring thier friends until this particular money spigot dries up in a year.

No one has clicked on an ad ever.

This all screams long overdue bubble based on everything being overdepenant on a small number of players - I'm old enough to remeber when the whole dream of the web was removing the middleman, not adding ten thousand more rentiers.

My only hope is that the soon to be inevitable collapse of online publishing takes social media with it,
posted by The Whelk at 7:39 PM on March 29, 2017 [50 favorites]


METAPOCALYPSE NOW
posted by indubitable at 7:39 PM on March 29, 2017


No one has clicked on an ad ever.

I've served 157m ads this year and 0.74% of people who saw them clicked. 0.56% of those that clicked will eventually buy something. Overall I get $2.70 for every dollar I spend on ads. In some contexts I'll get back over $6 for every dollar spent. I've contributed $1.2m to advertising this season and some of that goes to sites like Metafilter but a lot of it goes to Google's bottom line. None of it goes to Breitbart.

Online ads don't have to be a scam, and businesses can be successful through online advertising, but as MeFi has shown before, when most of your revenue comes from one source then you are at the mercy of that source.
posted by furtive at 8:01 PM on March 29, 2017 [39 favorites]


"No one has clicked on an ad ever. "

Not only have I clicked on Deck ads from MeFi, I've bought things from the advertisers.

But I think this is about the only place that I've ever done so, and it's because they served ads of things that I happened to be looking for at that moment (Field Notes sticks out).

One of the general fears that I have is that advertising is worth much, much, much less than most people (especially in content or advertising) assume, and that better tracking of advertising and consumer behavior will demonstrate that in general very few advertisements earn enough money to justify them.
posted by klangklangston at 8:02 PM on March 29, 2017 [15 favorites]


I've trained myself to avoid ads to the point that when I Google something and the first result is an ad, and the second hit is the exact same page but not an ad, I click on the second link.
posted by thecjm at 8:10 PM on March 29, 2017 [43 favorites]


Good ideas are not always successful ideas. Nor are bad ideas always failures...

And not everything that ends was a failure.
posted by ODiV at 8:23 PM on March 29, 2017 [13 favorites]


better tracking of advertising and consumer behavior will demonstrate that in general very few advertisements earn enough money to justify them.

There's the old saw "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half."

It may be people increasingly know more about which "half" doesn't seem to bring a return.

Years ago I remember reading the idea that a certain amount of opacity about true risk was one of the things that kept the financial system working as an engine for development -- people wouldn't be willing to invest capital if risks passed a certain threshold of transparency. That was a little startling to me, because I'd generally assumed up to that point that more perfect information would result in things being better. Not at all sure about that, these days.
posted by wildblueyonder at 8:26 PM on March 29, 2017 [18 favorites]


I mean when it comes to finance, publishing or adverisitng sales everyone I trust who has a detailed knowledge of it says it's such a carefully oriented house of cards dependent on a handful of players that it's long overdo for enother collapse and has zero flexibility in the long term.

But hey it's not like the entire economic system of the country isn't about creating and exploiting bubbles and crashes.
posted by The Whelk at 8:41 PM on March 29, 2017 [5 favorites]


All this time I thought they were advertising ducks, so I paid no attention. (I'm a goose guy myself.)
posted by not_on_display at 8:47 PM on March 29, 2017 [2 favorites]


That is sad. Seems like all the non-dicks fail, while the dicks prosper enough to reach new heights of mega-dickery.
posted by Samizdata at 9:05 PM on March 29, 2017 [6 favorites]


It's almost like the dicks have optimized the systems to favor ...the dicks
posted by The Whelk at 9:26 PM on March 29, 2017 [20 favorites]


No one has clicked on an ad ever.

I agree that I've never tapped or clicked on my television or radio yet somehow there are still commercials there!
posted by paulcole at 10:09 PM on March 29, 2017 [6 favorites]


Huh, well I guess this might be a good time to donate to metafilter then. Only mentioning this because I've literally never thought about giving money to the site, but sure enough there's a big Fund Metafilter link at the bottom of the page.
posted by mammal at 10:36 PM on March 29, 2017 [3 favorites]


I've trained myself to avoid ads to the point that when I Google something and the first result is an ad, and the second hit is the exact same page but not an ad, I click on the second link.

It never occurred to me that anyone would do any different. I guess I'm doing this wrong, in the very, very rare times I've seen an ad that was interesting I just open another tab and look the thing up. I've never thought about clicking on an ad.
posted by bongo_x at 11:10 PM on March 29, 2017 [1 favorite]


And I tried to read the article but it was blocked by my ad filter.
I'm ruining the internet.
posted by bongo_x at 11:12 PM on March 29, 2017 [3 favorites]


Daring Fireball also has some thoughts about it.

I never paid the deck ads much mind myself, but that post mentions the RSS ads that site runs. Those, not the Deck, are the only online ads I've bought stuff from. They're a great model, albeit one that wouldn't' work for Metafilter.
posted by vibratory manner of working at 1:47 AM on March 30, 2017 [4 favorites]


  I've served 157m ads this year and 0.74% of people who saw them clicked. 0.56% of those that clicked will eventually buy something

So that's 6,500 sales from 157,000,000 impressions. Equivalent to flyering everyone in Canada to sell to one Toronto subway train load.

I think I bought something from a ThinkGeek ad once in 2003 (Penguin caffeinated mints, maybe?) but in my defence I was amongst coderbros and quite drunk at the time.
posted by scruss at 2:26 AM on March 30, 2017 [5 favorites]


Hacker news discussion here
Wonder if it would be worth developing shared whitelists for ethical ad sites, or if that ship has sailed.
posted by Svejk at 3:25 AM on March 30, 2017 [3 favorites]


I have bought from groups who sponsor podcasts, and it is because I hear the mention over 30 times so it sticks with me until the moment I need a thing. web ads don't often work that way for me. I have spent a record amount on media and open source software like MeFi and WFMU and Snap Judgement and ITerm via patreon etc.

i doubt i rep any big trends though. I'll bump my MeFi monthly and hope for the best. Maybe MeFi could do a pledge drive once a year.
posted by drowsy at 3:53 AM on March 30, 2017 [5 favorites]


I suspect this is the year we all grow up and start subscribing to the things we want to have around in a few years, having learned that free things go away.
posted by MikeWarot at 3:55 AM on March 30, 2017 [10 favorites]


strange chain: "the only ad network I've ever white-listed."

Same here. There are an increasing number of site that will refuse to load because I have uBlock turned on and will demand that I whitelist them but then if I do that, they assail my eyes with giant animated ads that fill half my browser (I'm looking at you allmusic). I don't have a problem with ads, just giant intrusive animated ones and the Deck ads are some of the few that I can tolerate.
posted by octothorpe at 3:57 AM on March 30, 2017 [2 favorites]


There's a dutch news site (that I frequent less and less, but that's not the point now) that also buggers me about turning off my adblocker. The same news site has been in the news several times already for serving up malware with their ads. Why on heavens good earth would I even consider taking such a request to turn off blocking seriously?

I think we're way beyond "it's annoying and flashy and makes noise" and stuff like that - it's basic internet hygiene to have an adblocker. The big networks are consistently unable to keep out the malware authors, and thus deserve to be blocked at the core routers of the internet exchanges for all I care.
posted by DreamerFi at 4:14 AM on March 30, 2017 [9 favorites]


.
posted by acb at 5:06 AM on March 30, 2017 [1 favorite]


The big networks are consistently unable to keep out the malware authors, and thus deserve to be blocked at the core routers of the internet exchanges for all I care.

Technically speaking, there is little difference between a behavioural ad network and a malware botnet. Both consist of code pushed to other person's machines, contacting command-and-control servers. Both operate without the target's informed/uncoerced consent, and against their interests.
posted by acb at 5:17 AM on March 30, 2017 [7 favorites]


There's a dutch news site (that I frequent less and less, but that's not the point now) that also buggers me about turning off my adblocker.

That sounds like a pain in the bum.
posted by acb at 5:18 AM on March 30, 2017 [3 favorites]


The big networks are consistently unable to keep out the malware authors

Consistently unwilling to do so: they could easily reduce malware to extremely rare levels but that would require spending money up front and turning down the sleazier customers. That will never happen as long as they can push the costs off onto the general public.
posted by adamsc at 5:35 AM on March 30, 2017 [3 favorites]


> My only hope is that the soon to be inevitable collapse of online publishing takes social media with it

Never have I favorited a comment so hard.
posted by Sutekh at 5:38 AM on March 30, 2017 [2 favorites]


I suspect this is the year we all grow up and start subscribing to the things we want to have around in a few years, having learned that free things go away.

Subscription is a model that enforces a stratification of haves and have-nots, though. Not everyone has the spare cash-flow to subscribe to every damned thing that's important to them. My own "world wide" web exposure would be reduced to, maybe, three or four sites if subscription were the model.
posted by Thorzdad at 5:40 AM on March 30, 2017 [12 favorites]


Chase Had Ads on 400,000 Sites. Then on Just 5,000. Same Results.

Now, as more and more brands find their ads popping up next to toxic content like fake news sites or offensive YouTube videos, JPMorgan has limited its display ads to about 5,000 websites it has preapproved, said Kristin Lemkau, the bank’s chief marketing officer. Surprisingly, the company is seeing little change in the cost of impressions or the visibility of its ads on the internet, she said. An impression is generally counted each time an ad is shown.
...
JPMorgan started looking into preapproving sites, a strategy known as whitelisting, this month after The New York Times showed it an ad for Chase’s private client services on a site called Hillary 4 Prison. It was under a headline claiming that the actor Elijah Wood had revealed “the horrifying truth about the Satanic liberal perverts who run Hollywood.”

posted by gwint at 5:42 AM on March 30, 2017 [11 favorites]


It takes a lot to shock me these days but it is shocking to me that Chase (or companies their size and supposed respectablity) wouldn't have always whitelisted their ads.
posted by MCMikeNamara at 5:54 AM on March 30, 2017 [5 favorites]


13 years ago, I paid $5 to join. Since then my financial support of Metafilter has been non-existent despite it being my favorite place on the net.

It's easy to take good things for granted, but that's no excuse.

I'm poor, but I can kick in $5 a month, and as of a minute ago that's what I'm doing. I'm sorry it took the end of the ad network that supported the site to do that, it shouldn't have and if more people like me would step up and do what we should, MeFi wouldn't need ads.

I don't know if a member supported site is possible, I know paying for the mods, the bandwidth, the servers, the programmer, and so on isn't cheap and I know my $5 a month isn't much at all. But maybe it is possible?

I'd be interested, though of course the owners are under no obligation to tell us, what the budget is like and how much is coming from ads vs supporters.
posted by sotonohito at 6:05 AM on March 30, 2017 [5 favorites]


The Whelk: "No one has clicked on an ad ever. "

I am the happy, if slightly embarrassed, holder of a 2nd-year subscription to Field Notes notebooks, thanks to their ads via The Deck via Metafilter, which I clicked on, through, and bought.

So there.
posted by chavenet at 6:17 AM on March 30, 2017 [5 favorites]


I've served 157m ads this year and 0.74% of people who saw them clicked. 0.56% of those that clicked will eventually buy something.

Why is it a given that we must click on ads? For decades, I've gotten a Time magazine in the mail where there are tiny articles totally surrounded by a million huge ads, and I mostly ignore them. But, they pay the bills for Time magazine. Why isn't this model working anymore?
posted by Melismata at 7:16 AM on March 30, 2017 [5 favorites]


I had to black-list them after they ran a very racy campaign for a clothing manufacturer - I didn't feel comfortable having it on my huge monitor in the office. I nuked the otherwise agreeable ads on Fark for the same reason. I'm not a prude, but I don't want to subject my kid at home or coworkers in the office, many of them women, to bikini models in come-hither poses hucking products not actually involving a pleasant day at the beach.
posted by Slap*Happy at 7:25 AM on March 30, 2017 [3 favorites]


No one has clicked on an ad ever.

Ah, at long last I can speak from some work experience. I work for an online ad company that runs incentivized ads (i.e. watch a video or visit a site, get a reward). People click on these all the time (enough to keep the company I work for and our competitors in business). Not only that, they click on the follow-on links after the ad (i.e. share this with friends, go visit the website for more info, etc.). We run a different sort of business from the scammers because we're showing ads to people who have chosen to see the ad and we control our distribution so that we're not running on shady sites.
posted by kokaku at 8:15 AM on March 30, 2017 [1 favorite]


The only ads I have whitelisted besides the Deck are from Project Wonderful, which was set up to promote webconics from other webconics (devised by Ryan North of Dinosaur Comic and Squirrel Girl fame) that allowed sites to pre-approve ads. It seems to work with it's limited application. Seems like something that would apply in the semi-closed system at MeFi.
posted by oneswellfoop at 8:54 AM on March 30, 2017


I suspect this is the year we all grow up and start subscribing to the things we want to have around in a few years, having learned that free things go away.

That's all true, except looking at the world around me right now I'm pretty skeptical this is the year we all grow up. I do think lots of things are going away though.
posted by bongo_x at 9:58 AM on March 30, 2017 [1 favorite]


I've trained myself to avoid ads to the point that when I Google something and the first result is an ad, and the second hit is the exact same page but not an ad, I click on the second link.

I do this for a different reason. If I'm googling with the intent of buying something, I am probably at least somewhat positively inclined towards the vendor. That ad link on google was probably purchased on a pay-per-click basis, and if I click, I'll be costing the company money that they didn't need to spend, because I was already looking for them. Best I leave it and let the paid click go to another customer who needed the extra push.
posted by Karmakaze at 10:13 AM on March 30, 2017 [3 favorites]


Online advertising does need a new model. That said, podcast advertising seems to have figured out a nice model. I listen to a bunch of podcasts, and I've been happy to try out some of the products they advertise, based on the hosts' personal endorsements.

Let's see:
- Our guest room mattress is from Casper. Would do it again for the next mattress we replace.
- I've switched to Harry's razors and blades, and have stuck with them.
- I ended up liking Squarespace enough to host a club site (after an AskMe, even).
- And I registered the domain with Hover, which was cleaner than the other registrations I have with [...], even if it cost a few bucks more.
- I don't have time for audiobooks, else I'd try Audible. And we have an institutional subscripton to Lynda, which I've browsed based on the ads.

So - well, that works.

On the other hand, the guys at Pod Save America really need to tone it down. For the first time, I'm skipping ads on a podcast, even if I have to fumble around in the cold and take off my mitten to fiddle with the touchscreen controls.

I can't say much about the Deck one way or the other but at least the current model seems workable in the podcast world.
posted by RedOrGreen at 10:48 AM on March 30, 2017


The Whelk: "It's almost like the dicks have optimized the systems to favor ...the dicks"

Yeah, because they are dicks. Sadly, every species wants to propagate.
posted by Samizdata at 11:04 AM on March 30, 2017


DreamerFi: "There's a dutch news site (that I frequent less and less, but that's not the point now) that also buggers me about turning off my adblocker. The same news site has been in the news several times already for serving up malware with their ads. Why on heavens good earth would I even consider taking such a request to turn off blocking seriously?

I think we're way beyond "it's annoying and flashy and makes noise" and stuff like that - it's basic internet hygiene to have an adblocker. The big networks are consistently unable to keep out the malware authors, and thus deserve to be blocked at the core routers of the internet exchanges for all I care.
"

I was discussing this with a friend the other day, and the only real idea I had was some sort of legal mandate making sites offer a surety bond that can be claimed against if malvertising from that site does damage. I mean, if I uploaded malware to their site, I would be punished. Why not the obverse?
posted by Samizdata at 11:07 AM on March 30, 2017 [1 favorite]


thecjm: "I've trained myself to avoid ads to the point that when I Google something and the first result is an ad, and the second hit is the exact same page but not an ad, I click on the second link."

Slap*Happy: "I had to black-list them after they ran a very racy campaign for a clothing manufacturer - I didn't feel comfortable having it on my huge monitor in the office. I nuked the otherwise agreeable ads on Fark for the same reason. I'm not a prude, but I don't want to subject my kid at home or coworkers in the office, many of them women, to bikini models in come-hither poses hucking products not actually involving a pleasant day at the beach."

Yeah, well, the other day I was looking at the availability of mods for the game Overwatch. I got a sidebar ad from Google for "hugging" pillows featuring barely censored nude pics of Mei, of course with an attached pic of the product. (Obviously Google doesn't know me THAT well, or they would know how much I loathe the Most Annoying Hero Ever).

That really disturbed me, as, from the time I have spent playing OW, I have heard many players (via voice chat) that are quite young.
posted by Samizdata at 11:16 AM on March 30, 2017 [1 favorite]


That said, podcast advertising seems to have figured out a nice model. I listen to a bunch of podcasts, and I've been happy to try out some of the products they advertise, based on the hosts' personal endorsements.

I once purchased some meUndies based on a host’s endorsement that they were the best underwear ever. And then, a few weeks later, the podcast changed sponsors and I was told that Mack Weldon had the best underwear ever, and I felt deeply betrayed.

All of which is to say that podcast advertising has reminded me that advertising’s fundamental goal is to make you buy things, often via deception, and it is worth hating on those grounds.
posted by Going To Maine at 11:59 AM on March 30, 2017 [3 favorites]


One of the only times an advertisement has directly worked to get me to buy the product was the ads for "Eggland's Best Eggs" that would often run in the break before final Jeopardy.

The message of the ad is a pretty boring, "Our taste better and are better for you, please try them." After seeing this ad every day for a year or so, I finally said, out loud at my TV, "FINE! I'll look up the information on your stupid eggs and see if they really are better for me."

It turns out that indeed they are MUCH better for me than regular eggs. And not in some weird marketing spin sort of way, just more good nutrients and fewer bad ones. Since they were honest about that, we did a blind taste test and they really do taste noticeably better!

So my take away has been that the ads that feel so manipulative have ruined things for honest ads and I see an ad whose message is a blunt, "Our thing is better and we have evidence." It might be worth at least some research. I've been slightly less cynical about that style of ad since then.
posted by VTX at 12:49 PM on March 30, 2017 [1 favorite]



I agree that I've never tapped or clicked on my television or radio yet somehow there are still commercials there!


Cause there's no way to track if ads on tv or radio lead to direct purchases, with online advertising you kind of can and it's way way less effective then people initslly thought.
posted by The Whelk at 12:50 PM on March 30, 2017 [2 favorites]


So my take away has been that the ads that feel so manipulative have ruined things for honest ads and I see an ad whose message is a blunt, "Our thing is better and we have evidence." It might be worth at least some research.

More doctors smoke Camels than any other cigzarette!
posted by Ogre Lawless at 1:39 PM on March 30, 2017 [1 favorite]


"On the other hand, the guys at Pod Save America really need to tone it down. For the first time, I'm skipping ads on a podcast, even if I have to fumble around in the cold and take off my mitten to fiddle with the touchscreen controls. "

I agree with this so much. Their style is informal and conversational, but the overly jokingly style of inserting ads to the podcasts is very annoying and devalues the message. They should learn from the Gimlet Media's way of doing it.
posted by zeikka at 8:46 PM on March 30, 2017 [1 favorite]


More doctors smoke Camels than any other cigzarette!

I'm less cynical, not less skeptical. :)

And that's not a blunt, honest message. They're selling you an important figure to aspire to by buying their product. They're not trying to sell it on the strength of the product itself but on the strength of the public's image of doctors.
posted by VTX at 10:12 AM on March 31, 2017


"And that's not a blunt, honest message. They're selling you an important figure to aspire to by buying their product. They're not trying to sell it on the strength of the product itself but on the strength of the public's image of doctors."

There was another post here a while ago about how an alternate to the targeted model is the profligate untargeted model, based on signaling that the value of the brand is so high that their prestige in being able to spend lots of money to demonstrate that is the message for the few people who can actually afford them. An example might be those (kinda weird) ads for, like the American Chemicals Council, or ones that are just for plastics, writ large.
posted by klangklangston at 1:23 PM on March 31, 2017


gwint: JPMorgan started looking into preapproving sites, a strategy known as whitelisting, this month after The New York Times showed it an ad for Chase’s private client services on a site called Hillary 4 Prison.

MCMikeNamara: It takes a lot to shock me these days but it is shocking to me that Chase (or companies their size and supposed respectablity) wouldn't have always whitelisted their ads.

The idea was that more eyeballs = more clicks, but it seems Chase realized that's not the case at all. In fact, it sounds like they're starting down the path that ends with something like The Deck: building a relationship with sites that host your ads, to better understand the users as the ad-hosting sites understand them, which Wired thinks is the way that ad-land can live with stronger privacy rules and regulations. But that means more personal coordination and less harnessing of big data - less techie, more human.
posted by filthy light thief at 11:13 AM on April 12, 2017 [2 favorites]


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