CodeFund

» see codefund.io as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

CodeFund sold advertising to developers on the sites developers actually read: project documentation, open source homepages, the pages you land on at two in the morning when something will not compile. The entire premise was a refusal. No cookies, no tracking, no remarketing, no profiles, nothing sold on to anyone. An ad was matched to the page it sat on rather than to the person reading it, which is how advertising worked before it learned to follow people around, and which turns out to work fine on a page about Rails routing.

The money went to maintainers. That was the point of it, not a side effect: open source projects are read by millions and funded by almost nobody, and Eric Berry's bet was that the readership itself was the asset and that an ethical network could turn it into rent money for the person doing the work. Over its life CodeFund paid out more than $670,000 to developers and app builders around the world.

It ran small and ran hot. The goodbye page lists the numbers the way an engineer would: over 500 million ads served, a million advertisements a day, three million web requests a day, 60 millisecond average response times, two million background jobs a day and more than a billion in total, all hosted on Heroku for under $1,500 a month. Berry and his co-founder Nate Hopkins were also openly proud that the whole thing was one of the larger open source Rails codebases around. It is a strange thing to boast about in an ad network and exactly the right thing to boast about in this one.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the first death ~

CodeFund died twice and the first time was faster. Berry launched it in 2017 as Code Sponsor, placing ads in GitHub repository readmes, and GitHub took the view that this was not what its platform was for. The legal exposure was enough to close it. What saved the idea was Gitcoin picking it up, with ConsenSys behind that, and the farewell letter thanks both by name for taking a chance and providing a runway. The rebuilt version kept the model and moved off GitHub's property.

~ the numbers in the goodbye ~

The closing letter went up on codefund.io at 23:59 UTC on 30 June 2020, five minutes after Berry posted it to Hacker News, and the homepage dropped from eleven kilobytes to under three in that single capture. "The time has come for us to shut down CodeFund. As many others, we were unable to survive the economic downturn." Spring 2020 took the advertising market down across the board, and a network whose publishers were volunteer-run documentation sites had no large brand budgets to fall back on.

What the letter does next is unusual. It thanks the advertisers for taking a risk on a small project when more established alternatives existed. That is a company conceding its own weakest point on the way out. Then it posts the engineering stats, and then it says the team is available for hire.

~ what it proved ~

Half a billion impressions were served without a single profile being built, and the business was not killed by that choice. It was killed by a pandemic that took every advertising budget with it. That distinction matters, because the industry's standing argument has always been that surveillance is the price of a free web and anything less cannot pay. CodeFund ran for three years paying real money to real maintainers, and its server bill was under $1,500 a month.

The baton went to EthicalAds, run by the Read the Docs team, which does the same job on the same principle and is still running. codefund.io does not resolve anymore.

~ the funny part ~

Twenty years of reading documentation for a living, and the name CodeFund meant nothing to me until I went looking for it. That is what the placement was built to do. One small box, a line of text, parked on the rail of a page about something else and engineered not to interrupt. It presumably worked on me for years without ever earning a second of attention, which was the entire specification.

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