The Deck is awesome, The Deck is classy. I've always loved their ads and the look of it. But as a publisher, it doesn't add up. I've run the numbers a few times here on HN but I'll give it another crack.

They seem to have about 30 advertisers at any one time and rate card is $8300 per month. Let's sum it up to $250,000 per month in total. They served 110m impressions in October. So that's 110,000 "M". Or $2.27 CPM.

Unless you're in some high traffic, low quality niche, $2.27 CPM is not great (even The Deck's homepage says it's "well below industry norms"), especially as it's a single unit per pageview. As a publisher, the only reason I'd run The Deck would be for the kudos and ability to work with some great people and advertisers.. but definitely not for the money!

I've spoken with folks who've used The Deck and from what I can make out, it's a great deal for advertisers. But for publishers? I'm not so sure. And I'd go as far to guess that competing networks aren't paying significantly higher rates.

Speaking of Deck, are there any non-invitation services that serve ads at a similar quality level to Deck?

If there is, I haven't found it.

I believe the invitation system is precisely why the Deck ads are of the quality they are. Removing that puts you back in the realm of DoubleClick and AdWords.