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