AdDuplex is Shutting Down

AdDuplex announced today that it is shutting down after over 12 years of serving the Windows developer community.

“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,” AdDuplex founder and CEO Alan Mendelevich writes in the announcement post. “We ran out of options and ideas, so it’s time to call it a day and say goodbye.”

AdDuplex will stop serving both cross-promotion and commercial advertising on July 17, 2023, but it will continue serving “no ad” responses to minimize the impact on developers that used this service in their apps and games. These “no ad” responses will be served through at least the end of 2023.

The company will also shut down its self-service client area on August 1, 2023, so developers that want to view their stats, download invoices, and so on will need to do so before the end of July.

As I’m sure many readers know, I used AdDuplex’s survey data to report on the relative usage share of various Windows versions, Surface PCs, and, back in the day, Windows Phones. Alan is good people and I always trusted him and the data he provided, and I mean that literally: my first use of AdDuplex data, for Windows Phone devices, came in January 2015, the month we started Thurrott.com. And our final report based on AdDuplex data, covering Windows 10 and 11 usage, came one year ago, after which he stopped sending his useful monthly survey results.

Good luck to Alan with whatever comes next.