The Deck ad network is shutting down

The Deck, an ad network whose founding members included Daring Fireball, Kottke and Waxy, announced today that it’s shutting down.

As a simple, clean ad network focused on independent websites, The Deck  may have seemed like a bit of a throwback — and indeed, in his blog post announcing the shutdown, founder Jim Coudal tied the network’s fate to broader changes in the online ad landscape:

Things change. In 2014, display advertisers started concentrating on large, walled, social networks. The indie “blogosphere” was disappearing. Mobile impressions, which produce significantly fewer clicks and engagements, began to really dominate the market. Invasive user tracking (which we refused to do) and all that came with that became pervasive, and once again The Deck was back to being a pretty good business. By 2015, it was an OK business and, by the second half of 2016, the network was beginning to struggle again.

Coudal’s post closes by encouraging advertisers to contact The Deck’s publishers directly, and by noting that Coudal Partners continues to work on other projects, including Field Notes.

Since its founding in 2006, the network served “somewhere north of 7.5 billion ad impressions,” according to its website.