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.
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.
This "fact" is why only 2 out of at least 200 people I've asked have given and answer of less than 90% to the question, "How much of the web do you think is garbage?" It will remain that way until we stop relying on ads.
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.
Keep in mind that a lot of ad blockers are blocking third-party analytics too these days, so measuring an AdBlock ratio by pushing events into GA isn't going to be very accurate.
I display a gentle plea to whitelist my site (http://encosia.com/blog/wp-content/themes/encosia/carbon-ale...) if the Carbon div isn't in the DOM after a little bit. I'm displaying that by loading an HTML fragment via AJAX, so I can grep my server-side logs and see how often that's loaded. I haven't checked lately, but the ratio was huge the last time I did look.
Whitelisting you would also allow AddThis, Clicky, GA, G+, and Adobe. The "gentle plea" just makes your blog (or whatever it is) look annoying and desperate.
That's not very nice. Surely you wouldn't look a real person you barely know in the eyes and call them annoying and desperate for something that trivial.
Regardless, I was hesitant to add the nag, but I've only received positive feedback, e.g.:
Surely you'd expect a negative response if you walked up to random people on the street and said "let me follow you and show you ads!" IRL, I'd smile and nod politely, while trying to find a way to leave.
Considering we're talking about people choosing to visit my site, your analogy seems almost exactly backwards. They're walking up to me, not the other way around.
And, come on. The ad on my site takes up a miniscule fraction of the space above the fold and probably less than 1% of the total area of content on an average page on my site. Following people around showing them ads? That's a heck of an exaggeration.
