A List Apart, 37signals, Daring Fireball,
and Coudal Partners are implementing a very interesting ad campaign.  They are selling ad space on all of the sites and calling the service the Deck.  There is limited space for ads (6 ads per month) and each ad gets rotated across all of the sites.  Now the way I see this, is that it is a benefit to all involved.  The Deck provides specific advertising of products/services that the owners of the 4 sites pre-screen and deem useful.  This will maintain a high quality for the ads.  The ads will be very targeted to the people who are visiting the sites.  This opposes Google’s ad method that targets each specific page differently across a website, rather than targeting the type of people who visit that site.

Now, along with giving the four sites an immediate monetary bonus, an ad campaign like this should also draw more visitors to each site.  I know it that it worked for me.  I hadn’t heard of Daring Fireball or Coudal Partners, but because I respect both A List Apart and 37signals, I will probably start visiting the other two sites.  Actually, I’ll subscribe to their feeds and determine if they’re worth reading after a trial period.

Another interesting note about this method is that it does not guarantee the number of clicks per ad.  In fact, their method is to not charge by how many clicks you’ll get.  Rather, they’re basing the success of the ad program off of the number of page views that the four sites bring in.  From the statistics that they claim alone, you can be sure that your ad will be seen by the people that crowd that you want.

Anyway, this seems like a great example of taking advertising into your own hands.  I’m sure this will be much more successful for each company, than revenue from a mass advertisement system like Google ads.  Plus people are more likely to respect ads put on a site like this.  I’m curious how long it will take them to integrate some sort of ads to the feeds…