I believe most businesses have to naturally change and adapt as time goes on. 10 years is a long time, and I expect our model will have to continue to evolve and change to make it another 10 years.
Carbon Ads has pretty solid CTR, ads perform, advertisers renew, etc. It's not all doom and gloom for online advertising when you respect users and work hard to combine quality advertisers and publishers.
We're very much alive! Thriving, even. And yes, we merged AdPacks, Yoggrt, Fusion, and Carbon into just Carbon. Been growing the network ~20-30% or so year over year. The simplicity of the model still works well.
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.
It's fair to be skeptical about anything anyone in ad tech says. However, there's no intent hidden in the idea of "integration" in the article that is suggesting that it's because we want ads to be non-blockable. Integration != non-blockable. Integration == better overall user experience to us.
Contextual != even more tracking. We currently do not do any kind of contextual targeting that is using algorithms or involves dropping a tracking pixel at BuySellAds. We do it the good old fashioned way... "website is about C++, let's show them an ad from a company trying to target developers!". That's what we mean by contextual.
(disclosure: I'm the Founder of BuySellAds who owns Carbon Ads)
FWIW, when it comes to privacy, BuySellAds (and by extension Carbon Ads) is probably one of the few companies who don't actually do anything we don't tell you about with users' browsing data. We use it for forecasting what's available to be sold - that's it.
Is there some place to get it cheaper? Just for rule of thumb checking AWS (with their new pricing) it would cost ~$72/year for the 200GB storage alone, without factoring in any cost for transferring data, requests, etc.
I'm curious if there is a way to get storage cheaper than their existing $50 for 200GB/year. And yes, I know Flickr is free, but I mean from some place where the pricing isn't in exchange for some "to be determined later" monetization angle.
- I had the project specifically spelled out in my employment agreement with them since I had already been working on it for a while. I started working for them because I genuinely believed in their mission, and there was a certain allure of a steady paycheck after freelancing for a while. I made the decision to leave after about a year of trying to juggle both.
- By the time I left HubSpot was 50 people and they had plenty of funding, so while perhaps they would have liked for me to stick around, there's nothing I did that has ultimately contributed to them becoming the billion dollar company they are today (a nice humbling lesson for the youngster I was back then...).
- I actually think doing this (as long as you can keep it clean legally and actually own what you're building in your spare time) far outweighs quitting your job before starting a company. I wrote a post on Quora about this in a little more detail (http://www.quora.com/I-plan-to-quit-my-job-at-a-software-com...)
Indeed, there are many folks doing this very successfully. It's certainly not for everyone though, and does require a bit of work. We actually work with a bunch of folks who are doing this successfully over at a side-project of ours: http://syndicateads.net
I'm not sure I understand your question. We put the sites in "circles" and advertisers buy a specific circle.