The Deck

» see decknetwork.net as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

The Deck sold twenty advertising slots a month. Not twenty per site: twenty across the entire network, and when they were gone they were gone until the first of the next month. One slot bought you a small still image in the corner of Daring Fireball, Kottke and dozens of other sites that designers and developers opened every morning. That was the whole product, and it is remarkable how much weight it carried.

Jim Coudal started it in early 2006 out of Coudal Partners in Chicago, together with Jeffrey Zeldman and 37signals. Daring Fireball was the fourth site to join, in early February of that year, and Jason Kottke and Andy Baio were not far behind. Nobody signed a contract. The network's own farewell page says that every affiliate deal was made on a simple agreement to participate, and that the few disputes which came up got handled with common sense.

The reading was global and the selling was not. Those sites had an audience in every country with a broadband connection, and the ad in the corner was usually a conference in Seattle or a font license priced in dollars. From Ankara the network looked like a window onto a market you could watch without ever being counted in it. The Deck was honest about this in its own pitch, which promised advertisers a targeted and influential audience, and targeting is a polite word for leaving people out.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the rules it wrote for itself ~

No animation and no user tracking. One ad per page, and nothing in the payload that ran code in your browser. The network published a privacy page under the heading "We're fine with knowing nothing", which in 2017 was already an eccentric thing for an advertising business to put in writing.

There was a buying rule too, and it was stranger than the technical ones. The Deck would not accept an ad unless somebody there had paid for or used the product being sold. That is an absurd way to scale a business and a very good way to make readers trust a box of pixels. John Gruber's account of the arrangement is that enough of them did trust it to whitelist The Deck in their ad blockers, which is close to the only time that has happened to a display network.

~ things work, until they don't ~

The decline is told in Coudal's own words on the farewell page, and he dates it precisely. The first couple of years were a struggle. By 2008 it was an OK business and by 2009 a pretty good one, and it stayed that way through 2013. Then 2014: display advertisers concentrated on the large walled social networks, and the indie blogosphere started thinning out. Mobile impressions came to dominate in the same stretch, in a market where they convert far worse than desktop ones do.

Invasive tracking became the industry default around the same time, and The Deck would not do it. That put the network back to being a pretty good business instead of a very good one. By 2015 it was an OK business again, and in the second half of 2016 it began to struggle for the second time in its life. The second struggle was the one it did not come out of.

~ the day the page changed tense ~

The Internet Archive holds the switch to the hour. On 9 March 2017 the homepage still carried a live counter: "The Deck delivered 45,751,899 ad impressions during February." Twenty days later, at 20:23 UTC on 29 March, that line was gone and the page had been rewritten. It was edited again three hours after that. The new sentence reads "During its lifetime, The Deck served up somewhere north of 7.5 billion ad impressions."

The farewell page then sat there, unchanged, for two and a half more years. The last archived copy of it is from 6 August 2019. When the crawler came back on 8 January 2021 the host answered with something else entirely: a page from DNS Made Easy explaining that this domain's DNS hosting service had expired, and asking the administrator to log in and renew. Nobody did.

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