SidebarAds is shutting its doors.
After almost a year, this little pet project from Sidebar Creative is calling it quits. Originally conceived as The Deck "Light" but focusing more heavily on the designer/developer crowd, it would grow to more than a million ad views a month. Too bad the advertisers didn't come join the fun.
It was great fun to put together and a learning experience all 'round. In the end, though, we couldn't sustain the model we had created nor had the time to heavily go after advertisers. (If you build it, they don't always come.) In lieu of all this, and much to the chagrin of all those involved, I decided to shut it down.
As you might already know, the backend was all completely custom built (using CakePHP) and sitting on a dedicated box over at Hostway, which ran very reliably — something I was pretty proud of. But back to the point: what about this custom software?
The possibility was always there to license it out to other parties. Unfortunately, I didn't spend the time the software needed to be able to begin licensing it out. For now, it'll sit idle unless inspiration hits to get those remaining changes in place. If you're looking for a somewhat decent ad platform, let me know.
