Amidst the kerfluffle of Peace being pulled from the App Store after a couple days, there was a mention of how it also blocked the Deck Network ads.
Most people in tech have seen Deck ads, but few outside the ‘hard core’ geeks know of it, and it’s for good reason. It’s an invite only ad system that makes ads that don’t slow your site down.
Manually curating ads, they restrict users to show one and only one ad on the site, perhaps not on all pages of a site, but just the one ad.
In essence, buying a month on The Deck gives you an exclusive showing on three percent of all the pages viewed for that month across all fifty-two sites and services. And there won’t be Google or other third-party ads diluting your exposure. The Deck ad is the only ad on the page.
It’s a phenomenal amount of work. And that would be why only fifty-odd sites are in. Peace happens to be on that network. But let’s put aside the whole ethics and morality of ad-blocking for a day.
The idea behind the Deck Network is everything I want an ad network to be. They pride themselves of relevancy to their network and only show ads relevant to the network. They only show ads they’re okay with seeing. As mentioned before, it’s an incredible amount of work, but it’s exactly what you’d want to see in an ad network. Ads that people would rather be relevant than, nessecarily, make money.
That’s really kind of the same reason as my I like Project Wonderful so much. With Project Wonderful, though, the quality of the ads is a little crowd sourced. If enough of us report an ad, it will likely get pulled but it will always be reviewed. With The Deck, it’s the other way. Nothing gets in that isn’t vetted first.
The amount of work that goes into that is exactly why, every time anyone says “I’ll pay you to put my ad on your site” I say “No thanks.” The whole mess of running my own ads, having them expire and rotate and change, is a hassle I don’t want to mess with. I don’t want to spend my time running ads, and I’m a one-woman-show here, folks.
The balance between making money and having relevant ads is tricky. I think, for the tech world, The Deck gets it right. But I doubt any of us will ever be on it.
