toddynho

That was an invite.

I'm not sure I understand your question. We put the sites in "circles" and advertisers buy a specific circle.

I believe most businesses have to naturally change and adapt as time goes on. 10 years is a long time, and I expect our model will have to continue to evolve and change to make it another 10 years.

The Deck was first.

Carbon Ads has pretty solid CTR, ads perform, advertisers renew, etc. It's not all doom and gloom for online advertising when you respect users and work hard to combine quality advertisers and publishers.

You should join us at Carbon :)

We're very much alive! Thriving, even. And yes, we merged AdPacks, Yoggrt, Fusion, and Carbon into just Carbon. Been growing the network ~20-30% or so year over year. The simplicity of the model still works well.

Where we deviated from The Deck's model is that we made some changes a few years ago that are working quite well. On the advertiser side we started selling on a cost per thousand impression basis vs a fixed monthly price per "slot". And on the publisher side we started paying them a dynamic rate based on traffic and performance of the ads vs. a fixed monthly amount. Hope that doesn't come across the wrong way - just a fundamental difference that I believe is one of the reasons why an otherwise incredibly similar business can work well for one, but not for the other.

Sounds like a scientific experiment with no bias. Awesome.

I'd argue that the free market is working. Ad blockers are giving consumers a vote and empowering them to force the system to work better for them.

On the web, ads do make the world go 'round. Like it or not, that is a fact.

It's fair to be skeptical about anything anyone in ad tech says. However, there's no intent hidden in the idea of "integration" in the article that is suggesting that it's because we want ads to be non-blockable. Integration != non-blockable. Integration == better overall user experience to us.

Contextual != even more tracking. We currently do not do any kind of contextual targeting that is using algorithms or involves dropping a tracking pixel at BuySellAds. We do it the good old fashioned way... "website is about C++, let's show them an ad from a company trying to target developers!". That's what we mean by contextual.

Hopefully this added context is helpful :)

Or you could just start using Flipboard, Instapaper, Pocket, or the 17 other news reading apps.