Love or hate Gruber, it's hard to argue with his approach to advertising. A single Deck ad and weekly, NPR-style "brought to you by" posts give a distilled exposure to his advertisers completely unlike any ad-chocked site, placements that I'd imagine must command significantly more than banners that have to compete for attention with a wall of ads. The added benefit being that it doesn't look like a chaotic mess.

I wouldn't be surprised if a single ad on DF is only slightly cheaper than the entire wall of ads on a lot of similarly-ranked sites.