AdBrite will cease operations on Feb 1, 2013 | Hacker News Reader

AdBrite will cease operations on Feb 1, 2013

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102 pointsJimWestergren58 comments

With all due respect I'm not surprised. My media buying agency had tried buying traffic from them about a year ago and the quality of the traffic we got was shockingly bad. Support was not at all helpful. We were left thinking that they either had no measures to combat click fraud in place, or that they had no problem with selling that kind of traffic.

Common problem unfortunately in the media buying business, but not a foundation to build a long-lasting company on for sure. Word gets around.

I'm absolutely amazed that they have stayed in business this long. My media buying agency has also tested their network several times over the years. They have absolutely junk traffic, and I had come to the same conclusion that is has to be largely fraud clicks.

40M in funding makes it easier to stay in business.

Where are you buying through now? My contact information is in my profile. Reach out if you'd like to discuss other options.

There's no contact information in your profile. Only the about box is shared, the e-mail box is for password retrievals.

This thread suggests that it's probably fun to say: good riddance to the fuckers! (And you might say "good riddance, you fucker" if you were on FuckedCompany...)

I've met pud and talked with him in an entrepreneurial setup, and I was truly impressed by his early-stage insight. Seriously, he's smart and savvy, so there, but for the grace of God, go I, etc. Rather than piling-on in a FuckedCompany-like sense, I think it's more interesting to think about the trajectory of a company founded by a bright and very in-tune entrepreneur.

Looking for lessons:

  * What do you think went wrong?
  * What are artifacts of the failure you can enumerate?
  * What would you have done differently?
  * How did their competitors excel?

I had a site with a few thousand page views per day, and they would never display any ads on the site so I stopped using them. I also signed up for an advertiser account to see how the advertiser experience worked, and they immediately flagged my account as fraudulent and wouldn't let me buy ads.

I think the obvious reason is marketshare. Most websites were running Google AdSense, so AdBrite didn't have as large a catalog of websites to advertise on. I remember browsing the websites on there in my niche, and the majority of AdBrite publishers I saw were splogs with scraped content.

Sometimes AdBrite wasn't serving ideal ads to publishers. I remember one site that had acai berry & weight loss ads, on a page specifically about not letting mass media dictate your self-esteem about your appearance. I guess AdBrite didn't have the critical mass of advertisers for better ad selection/targeting.

On the other hand, as an advertiser I liked how AdBrite was setup. I could target a specific website & specify exactly where on the page of that site I wanted my ads to appear. My most successful display ad campaign was on AdBrite (though I'm something of an advertising newbie). For that reason I'll be sad to see AdBrite go.

> "I could target a specific website & specify exactly where on the page of that site I wanted my ads to appear."

You can also do that with Adwords.

After being banned from Google Adsense (I still don't know the reason why) I have used Adbrite as an alternative. It's no surprise they are shutting down. The ads they deliver are borderline suspicious and they don't make publishers any money at all. I have earned $0.07 with Adbrite whereas I could have earned $60 in the same time frame with Google Adsense.

Does anyone know good alternatives?

I'm in the same boat (AdSense ban and all). I would be interested to hear if anyone has experience with some alternatives.

I haven't been banned, but AdSense is incompatible with my preferred mobile framework (jQuery Mobile) without some ugly (and possibly TOS-violating) hacks. Other mobile frameworks are in the same boat.

I'd also be interested in alternatives (ideally, Google would fix the AdSense code so it works, but people have been asking for that for a while).

Having temporarily been denied Adsense earlier this year (subsequently reversed), about the only option I would recommend is well-targeted affiliate marketing. Clickbank (in my case) ended up making rather more money than equivalently-placed Adsense ads :)

Hopping on that "used Adbrite after getting banned from Adsense" wagon. I think I got banned because after some user requests, I packaged my JavaScript game that the Chrome Store was linking to as a .crx package and left in the ads (the .crx contents are exactly the same as the original website). I was on track to make $60/day with Adsense, ended up making about $50/month with Adbrite :\ Sucks that even that was apparently on the high end for that network.

I can help you with alternatives. My contact info is in my profile. Give me and e-mail and we can chat.

There is no contact info in your profile. (Put it in the 'about' area if you want others to see it.)

You are seriously spamming. If you aren't hell banned at the moment, you are sure to be soon.

I've unsubscribed you from their mailing list. You are welcome ;)

You can update his profile without signing in.

I resubscribed him. Clearly he was getting useful emails.

There's a joke in here about adbrite ending up on fuckedcompany.com

Good spot. For anybody who doesn't get it... http://blogs.wsj.com/venturecapital/2009/06/22/from-a-compan...

Thanks for the context.

Yes: http://cdn.cinemagr.am/cine_1/106931733.gif

what is pud up to these days?

he is the founder of fandalism, which is doing pretty well i think. http://www.fandalism.com/pud

He posts on here: http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=pud

He's reading this thread & posting here once it's bonked off the HN front page. Is that bad HN etiquette?

not at all, one of the reasons I love HN is because you replied. same reason I love Quora.

They had over $40 million in investment capital according to Crunchbase (http://www.crunchbase.com/company/adbrite), with $5 million of it within the last 8 months.

No regret. I tried out AdBrite once and when I wanted to cash out the $130 I had earned back when I was a student, they told me they couldn't pay me out because they hadn't received the money yet, and that was that. Nothing I could do. This was 6 months after the pageviews in question ran, so it's not like they didn't have time.

Why do you guys think they failed? What are the decisions that got them here?

Nice as it is to see the advertising industry in trouble, this will put even more control into the hands of google.

Why is it nice to see the advertising industry in trouble? Those are people with jobs and families to take care of.

You missed the obvious sarcasm as in "even more control into the hands of google" is not a good thing.

I think you missed the "Nice as it is to ...," which suggests it's not sarcasm.

You're correct. Should've paid more attention.

The same can be said of a whole bunch of people, from black hat SEO guys to arms dealers and from social gaming psychologists to the guy in his ice cream truck.

That has nothing to do with how one rates the impact of their business on society and our lives.

I'm not sure AdBrite having trouble means the advertising industry is in trouble. It could be poor management, poor sales staff, low quality traffic, the lack of a good mobile offering, bad tech or a lot of other things.

Best of luck to the adbrite team. Unfortunately, this happens. Also, if any adbrite developers are interested in coming to Minneapolis, we'll expedite interviews :-)

Contact info in my profile.

All 26 of them.

Sure. Why not?

AdBrite was a great network. Their payout rates were by far the best of any network I've tried.

Full-page ads were a killer revenue source, I would get 4x the amount I would have gotten on Adsense.

I cant believe im the first commentor to call FuckedCompany on this, I am clearly getting old.

I tried out Adbrite last year for an ad placement at footer of one of my websites because I couldn't put any more Adsense on the page, it wasn't too bad but it was nothing compared to how much Adsense generated. It was still better than Clicksor and Bidvertiser. The thing I didn't like with Adbrite was that they had too many "spammy" advertisements.

http://i.imgur.com/ZvN347V.png

I received this email a few minutes back. It is sad to see this happening and that too on such short notice. Used to use it along with Adsense, and it was the only good alternative.

I am certainly going to miss the feature where they automatically swapped their ad-code to any competitors if theirs din't cross the minimum CPC threshold.

If I recall correctly, the CEO/Founder of Adbrite is a member of HN. Maybe he can shed some light.

infos: http://allthingsd.com/20130128/sales-talks-fell-through-so-a...

    but sales talks “unfortunately fell through a couple weeks ago.”

I wonder how often this happens. Just this week another company (own3d.tv) suffered the same fate.

Sometimes things don't pan out as well as all parties hope, and it flows downhill.

I'd much rather see a company close up because they know they are no longer sustainable than to try and extend beyond where they can pay the people that are supporting them. (http://www.destiny.gg/n/own3d-tv-a-beginners-guide-to-being-...)

own3d has not been paying streamers for a few months[0], and there was recently a public backlash against them.

[0] http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=393...

I had a top 3 site on adbrite and was making almost six figures per year around 2004. I got banned without any warning. It was fun while it lasted. Their whole system sucked. They banned me because they wanted me to charge more. Their system allowed a huge backlog of ads that I had to display when my site got popular and prevented me charging more.

I tried AdBrite once, that was the only time I used them. The traffic they sent was junk and I am almost sure they had no click-fraud detection in place so most of the clicks were fraudulent. Good on them for staying in business this long though, surprised they lasted all this time.

Why aren't they selling off the campaigns, users, or other assets? Just a complete shutdown?

I always wonder this whenever companies shut down. Somebody would surely be willing to pay for all of their code, users etc. Why not let it live on and see if somebody else could be a better steward?

I know I'd be willing to give it a shot...

I assume their liabilities greatly outstrip the value of the code/etc that they could get. Possibly in bankruptcy some of the creditors will sell of parts of the company but its unlikely to be very public.

A friend of mine would be receiving $5500 from them in ads by Feb 1. He suspects that he is never going to get it.

What do you think?

So I'm assuming their adult ad company, Black Label Ads, is going to go under too?

Well, that's something awful to see a fued company go under.

C'mon people! Let's give these guys a break. They had a vision for something great and they tried their best to make it happen. Not every business succeeds, in fact almost many fail. They had the guts, the vision and the nerve to be great.

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