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.

More likely your ad blocker. No alerts, seems fine over here and here: http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/carbonads.net.

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.

BuySellAds - REMOTE, FULL-TIME

Full-Stack Dev: https://weworkremotely.com/jobs/1554

Nice post!

I wrote an answer on Quora for "How much do content producers who are apart of "The Deck" ad network make monthly?" which also gets into some additional details: http://www.quora.com/How-much-do-content-producers-who-are-a...

(disclosure: I'm the Founder of BuySellAds who owns Carbon Ads)

FWIW, when it comes to privacy, BuySellAds (and by extension Carbon Ads) is probably one of the few companies who don't actually do anything we don't tell you about with users' browsing data. We use it for forecasting what's available to be sold - that's it.

We also wrote a handy tutorial that will help folks determine what % of visitors are using AdBlock: http://support.buysellads.com/knowledge_base/topics/how-to-f...

That is a fabulous deal. Whomever handled that negotiation/purchase deserves some donuts.

Thanks for recommending BSA!

Is there some place to get it cheaper? Just for rule of thumb checking AWS (with their new pricing) it would cost ~$72/year for the 200GB storage alone, without factoring in any cost for transferring data, requests, etc.

I'm curious if there is a way to get storage cheaper than their existing $50 for 200GB/year. And yes, I know Flickr is free, but I mean from some place where the pricing isn't in exchange for some "to be determined later" monetization angle.

Backed, if for no other reason than to support something I've used on countless projects for years.

It will be interesting to see the new weights/styles, and better scaling of BlackTie.

Good luck Dave!

I started BuySellAds (http://buysellads.com) while employed full-time at HubSpot (http://hubspot.com). A few years after leaving, my company ended up on the Inc 500 (http://www.inc.com/profile/buysellads) and we're still doing quite well.

- I had the project specifically spelled out in my employment agreement with them since I had already been working on it for a while. I started working for them because I genuinely believed in their mission, and there was a certain allure of a steady paycheck after freelancing for a while. I made the decision to leave after about a year of trying to juggle both.

- By the time I left HubSpot was 50 people and they had plenty of funding, so while perhaps they would have liked for me to stick around, there's nothing I did that has ultimately contributed to them becoming the billion dollar company they are today (a nice humbling lesson for the youngster I was back then...).

- I actually think doing this (as long as you can keep it clean legally and actually own what you're building in your spare time) far outweighs quitting your job before starting a company. I wrote a post on Quora about this in a little more detail (http://www.quora.com/I-plan-to-quit-my-job-at-a-software-com...)

You're right - we have some non-ssl'd pages that you're allowed to login from - something we've gotta fix.

Indeed, there are many folks doing this very successfully. It's certainly not for everyone though, and does require a bit of work. We actually work with a bunch of folks who are doing this successfully over at a side-project of ours: http://syndicateads.net

Through our marketplace we don't track any personal or sensitive info about users, or use it to figure out which ads to display. The most sensitive info we use to show ads would be geo-location (just country...). Advertisers are selecting the sites they want to advertise with based on the sites topical area vs. us coming up with some magical algorithm that matches an ad with a user.

We've had some folks request to be paid out in Bitcoin. We're open to doing this once we have a handful more (or so) ask for it... the tricky thing is that you then have to play the exchange rate game and withdraw money from BuySellAds when it's "favorable" for you to do so, since the advertisers aren't actually paying you in Bitcoin.

Very cool - always great to hear about people doing well with our Unreserved program! Thank you for sharing with the HN crowd.

For the sanctity of the business world we live in I sure as heck hope it's not true.

What's scary about that is that your advertisers' perception seems to be hurting your business, but for something that (by all reasonable imagination on my side...) shouldn't actually be true.

I'd love to see if we can help debunk your advertisers' fears.

That's a great spot to be in Steve, I'd love to chat :)

Tell me about... cough someone at AdBlock please write a smarter regex for the default filter... cough

There have been ads getting through some of the exchanges that automagically open the AppStore or iTunes without you clicking or tapping anything...

Our policy is basically to just never be shady... shady stuff is best left for other folks who enjoy making a quick buck. We just don't deal with shady stuff like this.

Well, Rubicon for example has 700 sell-side partners [1]... so, very large. PubMatic, I believe, is similar.

Your other options for mixing stuff in with AdSense would be to find some fairly targeted affiliate programs; however, it's tedious and requires quite a bit of upkeep.

[1] http://www.adexchanger.com/platforms/as-ipo-dust-settles-rub...