As many who follow the blogosphere know, Jason Kottke recently celebrated a joyous event. That’s right, he was added to The Deck, our targeted ad network for creative, web, and design professionals. Kottke.org will begin running Deck ads in May.
I knew Jason Kottke before he was Jason Kottke. I knew him way back when he was doing nifty web stuff like creating a fake “pick your color” page to let buyers of the then-new, first generation iMac choose a color other than Bondi blue for their hot new fashion computer. At the time, the iMac was only available in one color. Maybe Steve Jobs was an early Kottke fan.
Then Kottke turned all his web attention to blogging. It’s safe to say that most of us who blog have learned from him, and none of us is as good as he is. If there had been no blogging, it would have been necessary for Kottke to invent it.
When we started our new ad network, we all thought Kottke would be a great addition. And now he is.
There are several ways to fund high quality publishing on the web. One way is to charge a subscription fee for for some content. If you’re The New York Times or Advertising Age, you can make paid content work, although it will take trial and error to achieve the right mix of paid and free features at the right price.
Another way is to cover your site in paid advertising. Boing-boing does that, and I am fairly confident that they make money. There is an aesthetic cost and a user experience cost to doing it that way, but if you publish content many people want to read, as Boing-Boing does, you can make the multi-ad approach work, like they do.
With The Deck, we are trying something different. We are not charging for content and we are not plastering our pages with ad after ad after ad. Instead, we place just one ad on every page of a Deck site. The ad is drawn from a shallow pool of advertisers whose products we know to be of the highest quality and relevance to our readers. User experience is not diminished, and the reader knows that the product being advertised is deemed trustworthy by publishers the reader trusts.
A List Apart, 37signals, Daring Fireball, Waxy.org, The Morning News, Kottke.org and Coudal Partners make up The Deck. Limited advertising opportunites are currently available May through July.
