Removing the Hexagram endorsement (formerly known as Scribol)

When Scribol first came out, I was an early adopter, and reported very favorable results here. In short, Scribol was an updated take on the old Webring concept. You displayed a bank of several small promos on your site, and in exchange, you were given the ability to place your promos on other Scribol sites. The number of views your promos received were based on the number of views for other sites you displayed.

As you can see from this chart that appeared in Aug 2011, it yeilded very good results. Since that post, I had removed the Scribol widget from its rotation in my ad server and placed it directly below the comic (in a non-rotation basis).

And I want to point out that the guys from Scribol were extremely helpful and hardworking people. Their software worked great, and they worked hard.

Unfortunately, it seems, we are becoming victims of their success.

Earlier this year, they were bought out by Hexagram, a native advertising exchange entity. It's basically the same concept, but with dollar values attached. You're still displaying small ads through the Hexagram widget, but now you're earning a dollar value for those ads. And you still have the ability to advertise through Hexagram, but now those ads cost you money.

From what I can see, there's an internal mechanism that seems to keep you from going in the red, but I can't state that as fact. And that's the first reason I'm removing mt endorsement of Scribol/Hexagram: everything about Hexagram has been entirely opaque. And that's what I have to remove my endorsement.