The death of a philosophy towards online advertising.
Here are just a few of the things that make me proud to have been part of The Deck:
- We never allowed animated ads. (Remember when that was the main problem with online ads?)
- We never allowed user tracking or JavaScript payloads. The Deck respected your privacy (and your bandwidth).
- We had great sponsors who made great products and services (and designed great looking ads).
Perhaps most importantly, we never showed more than one ad per page. From the beginning of web advertising, publishers have seemingly been in a race to cram as many ads per page as they can. In print magazines and newspapers, there are ads like that too, but theyre the low-rent pages in the back of the book. The real money in print comes from the prestigious ads that are exclusive. The back cover. The inside front cover spread. The full page opposite the table of contents. Exclusivity has tremendous value, and most web publishers still havent gotten that. And on the web, an ad doesnt have to be big to be exclusive and to occupy valuable real estate.