Things change. In 2014, display advertisers started concentrating on large, walled, social networks. The indie “blogosphere” was disappearing. Mobile impressions, which produce significantly fewer clicks and engagements, began to really dominate the market. Invasive user tracking (which we refused to do) and all that came with that became pervasive, and once again The Deck was back to being a pretty good business. By 2015, it was an OK business and, by the second half of 2016, the network was beginning to struggle again.
Before I comment on this, it’s worth noting that I’ve had issue with the Deck Network for a while in that all of the Deck’s bloggers seemingly linked to each other far more than they did to sites outside of the network. Was this a stipulation of their contract? I’ll be told that wasn’t the case but look at the blog roll. If you read one of these, you read them all. It’s a bit incestuous.
The bit above written by Jim is spot on though. I don’t know how independent for-profit ad networks or blogs are operating w/o selling their soul. Facebook & Google won everything. They are 99% of the ad-market. There’s no space for anyone else. I mostly browse the web without any blatant advertising. I don’t use Facebook or Google and I consume all of my news via RSS.
Everyone else uses Facebook or Google and those companies won the war. Unfortunately, the web grew and went mainstream without anyone actually learning about tech. The title of “geek” never spread but the use of the web did. When your grandmother joined Facebook, she didn’t know about security updates, malware, fake-news, suggested links (aka ads) or how to clear cookies. She got an iPad and went to Facebook and essentially lived there. She’s not a geek and the lack of education about the web & internet among the near 100% majority of its users has caused the web to rot. Knowledge is power and these companies aren’t doing their part to educate their users.
Ask your Mom about Data Portability and Open Web Standards and Independent websites and she’ll scratch her head. I wish things had ended up differently but they didn’t and here we are. All us geeks can do is resist the two biggest power-players who have no respect for the users, only the advertisers.