RIP AdDuplex

AdDuplex, the cross-promotion network targeted at Windows apps and games, has announced plans to shut down. The service allowed developers and publishers to promote apps for free by helping each other. That's not all it did though. Over the years, when BetaNews reported on usage share for Microsoft's various operating systems -- Windows 11 versus Windows 10, for example -- those share figures came from AdDuplex.

That is about to end however, as after more than 12 years, AdDuplex finds it is no longer able to continue.

The announcement posted on its site explains:

After more than 12 years of serving the Windows developer community it’s finally time to make the call and shutdown AdDuplex. I didn’t make this decision lightly and it comes after more than 5 years of periodic optimizations (both technical and organizational) to keep the service alive while the industry and the community we are serving were shrinking. We ran out of options and ideas, so it’s time to call it a day and say goodbye.

The site has posted a timeline for its proposed closure, which is as follows:

We will stop serving both cross-promotion and commercial advertising on July 17, 2023. In order to minimize the impact on your apps and games we will continue serving “no ad” responses. So, if you have implemented a way to handle the NoAd event in your app, it should just switch to the scenario you have in your event handler. Otherwise, our SDK will just behave as it always did when there’s no ad to show.

If you have some homegrown ad network rotation system, you can just remove AdDuplex from your list.

We will continue serving these "no ad" responses for the foreseeable future (at least until the end of 2023).

We will shutdown our self-service client area on August 1, 2023. So, if you want to check out your stats, download invoices, etc. please do so before the end of July.

So long, AdDuplex, we will miss you.