The Deck ad network is shutting down
decknetwork.net
decknetwork.net
Like it or not, there are real advantages to walled gardens like facebook. To ad buyers, it's a single platform where one can target the entire world person-by-person -- even across multiple devices (iPad, phone, laptop), with hyper-accurate segmentation and user tracking, strong identity services with all the abuse/spam prevention and payment capability that enables, multi-lingual, optimized CDN-based distribution to ensure all content is fast and cheaply delivered to every corner of the globe (an especially big deal given the rise of video ads), mobile-first UX that works across every conceivable handset including iOS and every esoteric variant of Android, etc.
I'm not pleased about a lot of this, but it's a mistake to deny what's happening.
Walled gardens arise because our legal system incentivizes it. Network effects are unnatural online. There is no barrier to access or information flow here -- put simply, there are no real walls to protect the garden. They're all artificially imposed barriers.
With improved laws, no one would be able to hold the web-accessible data hostage, and competition would be based on consumer-facing concerns like user experience and customer service.
Until we get to that point, which makes up the foundation of all competition in the physical world, the potential of the internet will continue to be squandered. It's very important to wake people up to these issues, since no one really seems to discuss them.
I find this line ironic since the Network Effect (or Metcalfe's Law) was created to describe literal computer networks.
Network effects don't happen in the physical world nearly as easily because the bar, grocery store, or whatever is limited by geography. They can only address a population within a certain radius and can't grow beyond it.
Transportation hubs - like airports - may be an exception because the more places you can get from one airport, the more likely you are to use that airport.. if you even have a choice.
The distinction is that it refers to physical networks (and iirc, referred initially to phone systems, not computer systems per se). At layer 1, the network effect is still very much valid and caused by the capabilities of the physical hardware. This is forgotten because today everyone is plugged into the same network. This was not always the case.
Because Metcalfe's Law exists, people have misunderstood it to apply to cyberspace and incorrectly believed it's simply the way things have to be. This is not so.
The compatibility concern at the core of real network effects, where the hardware buy will be dictated by what the most neighbors have, are not relevant once you have a physical hookup.
In cyberspace, layers 2 and up, there is no physical limitation on compatibility. There are only digits (hence the term "digital") upon which computations are made (hence "computers"). If the correct computations can be performed (i.e., if you possess hardware that can convert the electrical pulses to the expected digits and software (drivers, browsers, etc.) that can decode the digits to match expectations), the desired data can be presented.
Since network effects refer exclusively to physical compatibility, we only see this in the digital realm because it's artificially imposed. The law says that anyone who tries to extricate data from, e.g., Facebook will be severely punished, despite the fact that Facebook does not have a copyright interest in the data, and that as long as such extrication is done responsibly, it would have 0 impact on Facebook's ability to conduct its operations.
That's an artificial barrier that we've concocted, and it's the only mechanism by which network effects can work in cyberspace. Without the legal risk, people would read the data out from Facebook and recast, repopulate, etc. in alternate hypermedia. People would also make writable interfaces available. Facebook would then have to compete on its ability to provide a superior user experience, like most other businesses, not the availability of the data that they've misappropriated from users.
Social networks like Facebook have forced themselves between the open network and the data that used to be exposed to it, insisting that all traffic must be subject to their conditions. There's no reason to allow that!
Once the online marketplace is subject to the same types of competition that exist in the physical marketplace, i.e., once everyone is allowed to compete over the same core of knowledge, things are going to drastically improve.
Mind: I'd much rather this not be the case, but it simply is.
Metcalfe's function is, by the way, also incorrect. Very few networks are comprised of nodes of equal value, instead the nodal (and inter-nodal) value tends to follow a power function (Zipf's Law), with one suggestion being that the value function of a network with peer-to-peer connections then be:
V = n * log(n) (Tilly-Odlyzko).
C = k * n^2
What you're failing to consider is that the members of a network, including both the users and advertisers, are themselves components of that network, and have their own value and cost calculations to be applied. For large advertising networks, the fact that 1) larger markets with 2) more customers can be approached with 3) fixed costs for the advertiser and 4) efficiencies of scale for the network operator (e.g., Facebook or Google, approximately 2/3 of all online advertising), then there will automatically be an advantage to larger networks, provided k is sufficiently small.
There's nothing artificial about those barriers.
Incidentally, you can find network or dendritic structures in any system in which you have nodes or elements, and links or relationships: transport and communications systems, cities, even knowledge or information itself (think of the terms "knowledge web" or "information web").
I've never cared for Facebook and am finding Google increasingly evil and/or incompetent (and am torn as to whether that last is a good or bad thing on balance), but there's very little validity in claiming that the dynamics which have benefitted them are artificially imposed.
The Tilly-Odlyzko correction (the paper establishing it gives it as a "refutation" of Metcalfe's law) strikes me as eminently more sensible.
The cost function amendment is my own work.
The rationale for a constant cost function imposed, per node, on all nodes, is that simply by existing any node imposes some cost on others. This becomes a simple random probability function: there's some random probability in any given cycle that one node will interact in a negative way with any other.
A key realisation is that that negative interaction can literally be anything -- it's a lot easier to get things wrong than right. So odds are that any interaction with any other node is going to impose a cost.
Tossing this into a more concrete realm, I've been doing a lot of thinking on communications and media networks, and the rivalousness of attention. (On which there's a fairly interesting history I'm just starting to scratch, going back to Herbert Simon and Alvin Toffler's Future Shock, as well as before.) In the realm of "fake news" or cognates (propaganda, misdirection, misinformation, distraction, etc.), there's a question of how much news can the typical person process in a period? Say, a day, week, month, year, etc.
Most media publications have a top-10 story listing. I've found lists of the top-20 real and fake news stories posted around Facebook, and the drop-off in re-shares is 1-2 orders of magnitude from the top to bottom of the list. Discussions of "the big lie" (see Hitler and Goebbels, Nazi Germany) make clear that a small number of key points is key. Major news providers (WashPo, NYTimes, WSJ) produce ~150 - 300 original items daily. Newswire services (Reuters, AP, the French one (Presse ???) kick out about 2500 - 5000 pieces daily. Online media consumption (FB, mostly) is about 40-45 minutes daily, which you can divide amongst however many messages are processed (10? 100? -- that's 4 minutes, or 25 seconds, per message). Super-email consumers (Stephen Wolfram, Walt Mossberg) manage about 150-300 messages/day. The NY Times comment moderation team handles somewhat short of 800 comments/day, presumably over some fraction of an 8-hour workday. Attention per message is time divided by messages.
Which means that every message we see, regardless of quality, imposes some acquisition cost. And if we're on a network that streams and dumps messages at us without any filtering capability, then ... we're going to be overwhelmed.
And that's a minimum cost.
The network which retransmits the fewest bullshit, bogus, false, irrelevant, etc., messages, has the highest intrinsic attention value.
Now, on top of this, there are other costs, for which some variant of nlog(n) metrics probably apply: there is a small subset of sources whose content is actively malicious. The ability and capacity to filter against* that ... is useful. And this shows up in all sorts of contexts -- small portions of any population are the overwhelming sources of crime, disruption, corruption, etc., etc. The key problems are 1) identifying them and 2) doing something effective to limit their capacity to do harm.
(There are almost certainly second order and higher effects as well, that's ... another discussion.)
A few more examples of cost functions:
1. In workgroups, inter-member communications, coordination, resource conflict, management time, meeting time, etc., all impose costs. See Brooks, The Mythical Man-Month.
2. In cities, any number of problems arise from putting people in close proximity: noise, smells, disease, congestion, etc. By the 19th century, London, as an example, was killing off its inhabitants faster than they could breed. The only way to sustain (or grow) its population was by net in-migration from the countryside. I believe life expectency once moving to the city was on the order of 16 years. Installing a sewerage system (1850s) and freshwater supplies (roughly the same time) vastly improved on that. New York City saw similar problems for which there's a Department of Public Health graphic showing net mortality from about 1800 through ~2005. The biggest declines were 1850 - 1910. Everything since has been at best modest.
3. Email. Classic instance of message-acquisition conflicts, but also of a failure to standardise on conventions and message formats. I find the medium all-but-unusable presently. And that's before considering the absolute lack of security or authentication involved.
4. Computers. If nothing else, heat accumulation limits the density and scale of systems.
5. Mammals. From the smallest (a ~0.5g shrew) to largest (200+ tonne blue whale) there's a tremendous range of scale, and superlinear net scaling. But dumping heat becomes a problem. Ounce-for-ounce, the shrew has a far higher metabolism than the whale, but a whale's total metabolism is far higher -- on the order of a tractor-trailer rig. There've been some recent discoveries of odd organ-like features withing the whale mouth, including a tremendous vascularisation of the tongue. I suspect that may be a means of ridding excess body heat particularly during feeding activities, which are tremendously energy-intensive: ram-filling the mouth with water, then straining it out, for krill-feeders. The entire underside of the mouth baloons out massively during this process.
My theory is that in any dendritic or network structure, you can identify similar value and cost functions, though you might have to think for a while before turning them up. One of the more interesting questions for me is knowledge-as-network itself: the ability to come up with more individual models, and more complex models, creates value (better modeling, understanding, prediction, and control of reality), but, if my theory is correct, also imposes some costs. Transfer, maintenance, utilisation, and variances on the abilities of individuals (or AI systems?) on acquiring, utilising, and adapting those models may be part of that.
He explicitly told us this during a lecture. It was something to the effect of "I just made it up, it's an oversimplification, but it's good marketing."
(And rings true.)
Network effects necessarily exist, but walled gardens don't.
Centrality-of-control ... somewhat depends.
Danah Boyd in a Medium piece pointed out that Google's central-point-of-control of Gmail:
"Many who think about technology recognize the battle that emerged between spammers and companies over email, and the various interventions that emerged to try to combat spam. (Disturbingly for most decentralization advocates, centralization of email by Google was probably more effective than almost any other intervention.)"
https://backchannel.com/google-and-facebook-cant-just-make-f...
Though thinking a bit on this gives some indication of how and why, and by extension, what could be done to break this control point:
1. Gmail receives a tremendous amount of mail. It can recognise both repetitive content and patterns of behaviour, particularly by points-of-origin.
2. Gmail can standardise internally on forms of reporting and mitigation against spam. That is, it is its own standards-development organisation. Increasingly, I'm noting that one of the efforts of a would-be monopolist is to attack standards formation. Because standards lower the barriers of entry for other participants.
3. Google specialise in contextual analysis -- the mining of content, particularly (but not just) textual content -- for indicators. The same analysis which makes for improved ads targeting or SERP relevance features heavily in detecting and thwarting spam, phishing, and related antisocial behaviour.
4. Tightly integrated communications. Between formats, pipe-bandwidth (intra- and inter-datacenter), and processing, Gmail can respond rapidly to new threats.
In particular, Gmail has a "report spam" feature (as do many other mail service providers) which allows for rapid detection of what users consider spam. Where you won't find similar features is on any third-party email tools.
Take an extreme case: Yahoo. I've long had problems with spam originating or transiting Yahoo's server space. What I've found is that whist Yahoo have a standardised reporting tool, they have not provided any support, nor are there any third-party tools of which I am aware for reporting spam in that format to Yahoo.
Running mutt, it would be trivial for me to pipe any given email, headers and all, into a report-generating application. Hell, I could dump spam to a dedicated mailbox, and run shell tools on that to handle 100s to millions of messages. I've built and used tools to do just that, back in the day.
But ... Yahoo never did this. Nor have any of the other major email service providers.
(I was approached at a spam conference by several people at email service providers who'd told me they'd written programs to read and parse the mail my programs were generating, which was ... amusing and heartening.)
There are dynamics which tend toward and reinforce walled gardens. Busting those is ... hard.
I agree that networks will continue to benefit as more users hop on the platform. What I mean is that the element of network effects that we consider prohibitive/oppressive -- the "walls" around the "garden" -- are artificial in cyberspace, whereas they are real in meatspace.
There is nothing in cyberspace to prevent that data from flowing freely; there is only the threat that meatspace thugs will come and take your liberty and property for failing to respect the imaginary lines. In effect, it's a political border.
Without the legal armaments at its disposal, Facebook could still be a central hub of activity, but the data could be freed from it and exported.
Instead of creating Google+ and hoping it caught on, Google, seeing Facebook's success, could get credentials from the user and automatically multiplex/multicast the user's streams from G+ and FB into the G+ interface. The user would be using G+ as an FB browsing device, and that should be legal -- just as legal as using any other software as a browsing device.
Yes, the browser could materially modify the content of the page, including stripping the ads off the child stream. But all browsers can do that. Should we make it illegal for Chrome or Firefox as well? The only difference is that Firefox is executed on a box a few feet away from the user, whereas a G+ browser is executed on a box that is (probably) much further away.
In this scenario, Facebook continues to directly benefit from the growth and expansion of its network, and more people hop on Facebook. The difference is that there is no barrier to get up against if you're viewing the network's growth from across the room, and you can tell people on your side of the room "It looks Alice from that other network is brushing her teeth". Facebook would no longer have a monopoly on the content generated by users who are "in their space".
But they're not.
Standards, access, frictions, legal obstacles, implementation costs, and much more.
How, precisely, do you distinguish "artificial" and "non-artificial" barriers?
There were open networks, with Usenet being a particular example. Usenet still exists, sort-of. It's entirely a non-starter in social networks. You might want to enquire as to why. Similarly, Diaspora, Friendica, FOAF, blog+RSS, etc., etc.
An artificial barrier is something that constrains by fiat, especially when that barrier comes from a third-party like the government. It's "because I said so".
You're correct that things like standards, access, and costs are barriers that must be overcome, but with a relatively small amount of effort, these barriers are surmountable.
The ongoing cat and mouse game between something like Facebook and something that multiplexed its data on the user's behalf would be the most expensive/irritating "natural" barrier; natural because, while Facebook would be intentionally creating it, it's a real capability restriction that must be circumvented technologically and not the government saying "Don't do that, or else".
A natural barrier that may constrain some otherwise illegal activities would be the disdain of the public. In this case, there is no such disdain; copyright and IP law long ago exited the space that most people consider reasonable.
>There were open networks, with Usenet being a particular example.
Fixing the law would make the data open without requiring any material change in FB. They don't have to open up. The point is that in cyberspace, the data is natively open.
As Bruce Schneier says, "trying to make digital bits uncopyable is like trying to make water not wet". Easy copying is an intrinsic, inextricable mechanism of the medium. Indeed, it's the fundamental mechanism that allows computers to function at all.
Blog+RSS did extremely well. Facebook and Twitter succeeded because they were simple forms of aggregation. Throughout the 00s, before FB took off with the adult crowd, many people had personal/family blogs to share information about their lives with families and friends, and you'd add them to your feed reader to keep up. FB has supplanted that by having greater usability, but at the core, the concept is the same. The difference now is that FB can lock it up due to the favorable legal situation.
As for things like Diaspora, though I admittedly haven't studied them thoroughly and they probably suffered significant real flaws, they're hamstrung by the artificial effects discussed here.
Diaspora likely would've been an acceptable "social interface" if it could multiplex streams from Facebook and multicast out both to its own network and Facebook (and for all I know, there probably is software that allows this to happen on open protocols like Diaspora; it just can't be deployed in a usable way by anyone looking not to get sued out of existence).
True there are barriers like technology and cost to overcome, but the one intractable barrier is the one that is totally arbitrary: the laws that prevent it.
Anyway, I know that we don't agree, but I do appreciate your contributions to this thread. The discussions have been interesting and given me some good feedback on how to phrase this moving forward.
The good news, if there is that, is that aspirational social networks tend to follow cycles, both online and off, and Facebook will all but certainly fall, eventually. The bad news is that the same dynamics which created it will create the next instance, and I'm really not sure those dyanamics can be disrupted, no matter how much I'd like to see that they are.
While it's hard to make digital information uncopyable, it's relatively easy to make it nonsensical. Obsolete or opaque formats, hoop-jumping, rate-limiting, and more, all impose costs. And the larger your population is, by definition, the less sophisticated it is (sophistication is a definitionally minority characteristic). So the harder it is to manifest a shift.
Something to keep in mind: any time someone pitches an idea to you with the line "all we've got to do is convince people to ...", run. Just run. Unless people would sell their children and mothers to get what it is you're selling, it won't fly.
(Cellphones are crack.)
I still fundamentally think advertising is slime, a form of mind control, and a symptom of excess consumption in society, but that's not changing anytime soon. In the meantime, I'd be very happy if everyone were like The Deck.
Where we deviated from The Deck's model is that we made some changes a few years ago that are working quite well. On the advertiser side we started selling on a cost per thousand impression basis vs a fixed monthly price per "slot". And on the publisher side we started paying them a dynamic rate based on traffic and performance of the ads vs. a fixed monthly amount. Hope that doesn't come across the wrong way - just a fundamental difference that I believe is one of the reasons why an otherwise incredibly similar business can work well for one, but not for the other.
Thanks for your insider's take but who was the originator of the old business model? The Deck or Carbon?
The Deck was first.
Here is an example video showing that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V_oTtDUV0yI
Although the ads aren't blocked by ad blockers, if they were, would you unblock them? Also would love any feedback!
This works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V_oTtDUV0yI
Like looking at a car out the bus window, and then suddenly someone leaning over your shoulder, whispering "psst, buddy, wanna buy that car?"
That was probably the first time in recent memory that I've clicked on an ad
So hey, the model at least works.
The fact there was no tracking so the same ad didn't follow me around, and wasn't tailored due to my web browsing history made them far more interesting, because they exposed me to new services.
That (for me) is the major annoyance of retargeting in particular. Just because I've looked at something once I'm shown ads; they can't determine whether I looked at it or I'm interested in it.
Tangentially (maybe), the only ads I clicked were the Deck ads and affiliate links in writing that I read. If the rest of the ads that I see are returning profits to the ad-host and ad-network, those profits are fake, as I not only no click them at all (well if not accidentally, and I've clicked, voluntarily, five-six such ads in my 20-odd years of life) the effect is negative, it's a -5 for the ad publisher and the ad host for me. But with Deck, if a website has (had?) Deck ads on it, it was +5 for both. So sad that this sort of value-adding service is going offline.
I really liked the deck - it was one of the few ad networks I actually wanted to get on my site. They had both really high quality ads, and really high quality publishers.
This is also a pretty big blow to the publishers - they'll feel the revenue loss, and there isn't an equivalent network to take their place. I'm sure they'll find something though.
We don't have nearly as much mobile traffic (only ~6%), so hopefully we will be able to make it work, but this doesn't fill me with confidence.
I'm not sure I understand your question. We put the sites in "circles" and advertisers buy a specific circle.
So did Waxy: https://twitter.com/waxpancake/status/847188783724322816
Should I care?
Hint: Click his username, and read his profile. We'll wait.
I still don't know how jgruber's comment is supposed to catch the sarcasm, but that's probably something going over my head as well.
Edit: From another comment, apparently Daring Fireball is also largest platform to host Deck ads.
Damn, that is a hilarious parody.
There was a recent discussion on HN about how difficult it is to promote a blog now (compared to a few years ago). I think this statement by Deck further emphasises the fact that independent blogs are seeing a decline in readership.
http://www.fsf.org/news/ad-bard
A big problem for free software sites is finding ads that respect the users freedom while promoting products which are not harmful to computer users.
The sheer number of tools display networks have at their fingertips to try to unlock value from your visitor's eyeballs are astounding - RTB exchanges / re-targeting / user profiling / etc / etc.
And even with all of that most content producers can't make a living off of their cut.
I always loved the simplicity of The Deck, but their end was inevitable.
The whole ad business reeks of desperation. However, it does pay the bills, so I guess it actually works.
For instance someone googling reviews of Samsung Dryers probably is considering buying a dryer of some kind.
The further you get from that initial intent the less valuable your ads are until they are basically worthless.
what I'd really like to know is whether banners are a worthwhile investment, not if they get clicked on.
More seriously, sad to see them go but this does reflect the reality of a market shift in this space.
We really shouldn't be looking down on this business. They managed to outlive a TON of companies (10 years is great on the internet), and I'm sure provided livelihoods for a fair number of people both at Coudal and their partner blogs who they were monetizing. Kudos to them!
It seemed like a straight-forward business with little overhead considering there wasn't anything invasive or highly technical about the advertising units.
Is there a market for that type of advertising online?
Seems short-sighted! And, also, an indication of where things are today.
@@||decknetwork.net^$first-party
I wonder if having a somewhat more clear and easy vetting process would have helped expand their reach somewhat.
I wonder what Daring Fireball (AFAIK by far the site with largest readership on the Deck) will do. I'm sure that's still quite a profitable enterprise, to be clear.
Advertising arbitrary services, even if they're good, on arbitrary blogs seems trickier to price and sell. But with the quality of the sites in the network, I'm sure they could all individually find the right, complementary type of advertising to continue to fund them.
I think the only thing I've ever bought based on a podcast ad is BackBlaze, but I do find podcast ads for the podcasts I listen to much better, more relevant, etc., I've just never been in the market for most of what they are selling.
There's also a certain remaining level of novelity in podcast advertising that helps it command a premium, although I suspect this is beginning to diminish.