Matched.co.uk , still in beta, has closed today. A few hours ago, it sent an email to its members announcing the decision.

“MATCHED HAS CLOSED
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It is with much regret that we announce that Matched.co.uk has closed.

Matched has been running as a beta experiment for some time and, after much careful consideration, it has been decided not to progress the project to the next stage.

As a result, Matched will not be accepting new sign-ups and will no longer be assigning adverts to its current publisher base.

If you completed your last payment run before November 19th 2008, you will still be paid, but please note that no future payments will be made after this. Therefore, we recommend that you remove any Matched ads from your websites.

Thank you very much for being part of the Matched.co.uk experience and we wish you the best of luck for the future success of your websites.”

As you can read in the mail, for them it was an experiment in beta whose results have prevent it to pass to the next stage. I can’t understand this. For me, the stages alpha, beta, release candidate and final are stages of software (application), not a business. What has done wrong is the business, not the software that managed campaigns. Or is it the software?

Matched was launched at the end of 2007. It was an british agency that sells advertising spaces in blogs. Blog editors would sign up in the system and registered up to 5 blogs with 5 spaces each. Once they were checked, they waited for receiving offers from the advertisers, who asked for the spaces.

The main difference with other advertising systems was that Matched payed monthly a fixed sum for each ad, £3. Since the maximum was 5 blogs and 5 spaces each, the maximum earnings were £75.

The number of impressions, clicks or conversions didn’t matter, so it became a good system for those modest blogs with little traffic. Given the figures that were handled, they use it to pay the hosting and little more. By grouping dozens of blogs in the campaigns, Matched sold thousands of impressions to advertisers.

That differentiation was criticized has disadvantage, the fact that it didn’t take into account factors such as page rank, clicks, impressions or conversions to adjust the price. For Matched, all their blogs were equal, so they left out of their catalogue the most successful blogs.

Let’s say Matched tried to get hold of the advertising market that was dismissed by other agencies.