From the beginning, Philip Kaplan has touted AdBrite's ad stats on the ad network's homepage. Today, it proclaims "470 million impressions a day on 54,328 sites." Which sounds impressive enough. Until one consults the Internet Archive and sees that more than two years ago, AdBrite was "serving 321,628,843 daily pageviews on 8,660 sites. AdBrite's pageviews have grown by less than 50 percent, while its customer base has expanded sevenfold. More customers, more costs; even on the Internet, catering to small fry gets expensive. If ad networks are a scale business, AdBrite has been growing the wrong number.

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