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Ad Network Not Paying Up
Rev. DOG. writes: "According to Lowtax at Something Awful, the now defunct GameFan Network, bought out by Express.com a while back has sent a letter to their sites saying that they won't pay them a dime, because the bulk of the banner ads served up were for GameFan/Express or hosted sites. Apparently, during Lowtax's stay there, they wouldn't let him take any non-GameFan advertising. Anyway, it's all at the 10-9-00 article on the front page at SA, especially warning others on other banner-ad networks that they may be next." I'm not knocking on Gamefan/Express as much as this is a good example of /always/ read the fine print. Read it again. Have a lawyer read it. When I was selling the ads on here, there were a couple times that people tried to screw us over - so be prepared.
Incidentally, does this letter give such sites the status of a creditor, so they can demand payment, sue for the debt ("Ha, got your car!"), and stand in line at bankruptcy court for a share of the assets?
I was using my bonus as a bully pulpit to let people see my side on the issues. Unfortunately, with the swarm of AMD articles, I fell out of the favorable portion of the Slashdot crowd. That's the price of speaking your mind, but hey, what's right is not always popular, and what's popular is not always right.
I'll probably ditch the bonus when I see that I'm outnumbered. That way, I'll risk losing 2 instead of 3 points. I'll keep the bonus for things which might soar to 5, so I won't be whoring points (as much).
I hope other KWs adopt this as a standard doctrine for posting (yeah, Signal_11, I'm talking to you!).
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
this is the person who puts 12 year old's geocities sites on his front page for mockery, and then sends his users there to flame them.
Granted, the whole ad-thing is a bit unfair - but then again someone who so blatently is immoral and screws people over for the sake of a laugh deserves this.
I mean, lowtax would laugh at someone in a wheelchair for christ's sake!
Sorry guys, I never see them. Junkbuster prunes them out.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
It's not a good idea to say "Gamefan/Express.com" since Gamefan is in no way responsibile for what's happening. Gamefan is getting screwed as much as anyone else- Express.com bought Gamefan erroniously and doesn't even want it, so they're finding as many ways as possible to not pay GF and GF's hosted sites.
At least, that's how I've heard it. Express.com are the ones to blame.
Fortunately, the print magazine won't be effected.
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ADVENTURERS! - ANTIHERO FOR HIRE - CARDMASTER CONFLICT
Speaking from my infantry beta testing. Nick Fisher is an asshole. He would harass other fan sites of the game
Vermifax
Vermifax
Logout
Okay, so SA wanted to make a few bucks to defray expenses. No fault there. But, now that lowtax got burned because he didn't read the fine print, he wants *you* to share the financial burden of recovering his losses by "contributing" to his server fund. I wonder if lowtax intended to share the profits over and above his expenses with the same people from whom he now solicits contributions. Lowtax should be placed on his own SA list for this one.
Jeepmeister
I don't need no estinkin'
Jeepmeister
I never fail to be amazed at some of the folks that post on these banner ad issues. Busy websites are expensive to run. Telcos never forget to send the bill for that T1/T3/Colo shelf the webserver is attached to. In many cases, the only revenue these sites take in, comes from banner ads. No one really enjoys looking at ads, but lets face it - they make it possible for a website to support more than just a few hundred page impressions a month. You think Slashdot would even be here if they didn't get ad revenue? How many thousand bucks a month would *you* pony up out of your own pocket to pay for bandwidth for your suddenly-popular website? No ads? Guess what - only corporations with the bucks to throw away on websites will be capable of supporting the traffic load a popular site generates. As for the guys bragging here about the various ways they have devised to prevent ads from being seen on webpages - screw you. You're doing nothing more than cheating the websites out of the ability to pay their bills, and hastening the demise of the non-big-business information scene. How clever of you. I'm sure the big business corporate types really appreciate the help you're giving them. Go ahead and map names to loopback. Download that copy of junkbuster. But when you can't log on a site anymore that isn't owned by AT&T, IBM, MCI, or whatever, just remember - you helped bring that about.
Just because they created the ad banner doesn't mean the current state of the Internet is their fault. All they did was prove that putting up a notice that said "HEY! NEKKID LADIES OVER HERE!" was effective. It was the clueless mainstream marketers who made the illogical leap that banner ads could pay for everything else.
True, but fortunately, most sites have a simple method of retribution - leave the ad network. OK, it's not always *quite* that simple, but it would seem to be in a network's best interests to treat their member sites fairly. After all, it won't take much burning for sites to flee en masse, and spread the word to potential new recruits.
:)
I run a site that used to be part of the GameFan network as well. We signed up a few months ago, noticed we were never getting paid OR serving ads for anything other than express.com, and promptly left. Yeah, I feel a bit burned, but having control over my site's DNS, and local backups of our files made it easy to nip the abuse in the bud
Perhaps, but the bad negotiating wouldn't have mattered if someone wasn't trying to take advantage of suckers. I don't care if it's "standard practice" or not, it is dishonest and deliberately deceiving. The people I do business with aren't out to unfairly fuck me over a technicality, nor am I out to unfairly fuck them over a technicality. Only the weak and pathetic hide behind fine print, and such scum do not deserve to transact with honorable men.
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As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
You got your sig off a fortune cookie. :P
You also forgot that it's a quote from Winston Churchill.
I'm tellin' ya!
This is offtopic, but I don't know where to ask:
Should I moderate trolls that are at 0 down to -1 or just leave them?
-Erik
His name is Nick Fisher. He lives in Minnesota and plays with his dad's money, which he desperately wants everyone to believe is his, and that he earned it all from scratch. I swear this guy was the valedictorian of the Elmer Fudd School of Self-Esteem. "My name is Nick Fisher. I am a millionaire. I own a mansion and a yacht."
I had the misfortune of making his acquaintance about 5 years ago in the online game SubSpace. I was pretty active in the SubSpace community and was witness to countless incidents where he proved what a prick he is. He did things ranging from getting people banned from the game even when they had done nothing wrong, to ping flooding individuals during League matches so that his squad would win. He pulled the same stunt on one of the more popular Quake servers and was cold busted by the guy that ran it. He had about a 60-page ping log, all coming from Nick Fisher's IP address.
Anyway, to anyone who has ever met this jackass, this type of behavior comes as no surprise. Download SubSpace and see for yourself. Go into any zone, ask about 'trixter' (his rather fitting online name) and the Gamefan debacle. You'll get an earful. He still plays rather frequently, so you may even get the chance to tell him how you feel in person. (SubSpace only runs on Windows. Sorry.)
Talisman
"Study your math, kids. Key to the universe." -The Archangel Gabriel
Oh wait. Yes it did. This has been ongoing for at least a week, why is it now suddenly /. worthy?
Gamefan is getting screwed as much as anyone else- Express.com bought Gamefan erroniously and doesn't even want it
Ok, how does a company buy something erroneously? I mean, I can see how an individual can do this, as I have multiple copies of the same book, but I don't quite get this one...
Anyone got details?
I like you, Stuart. You're not like everyone else, here, at Slashdot.
Look at the registration info for GAMEFAN.NET, EXPRESS.COM or VOODOOEXTREME.COM
They all have Fisher's name or his company's name (Maximum Holdings) as at least one of the contacts.
Why do users with IDs under 100,000 or over 700,000 usually have the most worthwhile comments?
Yeah, but I can't seem to get the old gif capable gd library to compile.
It's very similar to what happened to cr0wbar with Safe Audit a little while ago over at detonate.net. Can these banner-ad revenue services just spontaneously decide that they're no longer going to pay web sites for hosting their banners? What's going to happen to a lot of the web sites that depend on them to pay for server space and domain names?
Of course, since Microsoft bought it, I see a lot more Microsoft, MSN, and even Link Exchange ads. They've gotten rid of the link exchange web site and hidden the directory so well that I can't find it anymore. Microsoft is their own worst enemy.
Oh yeah. Well, he was at the IRC meeting, probably for a last blast from Hemos and Taco, heh.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
What I don't understand is what Lowtax did with all the money he had before Gamefan stopped paying him? I've seen him claim 5 million impressions a month, which would be $12,500 for a single month. I sympathize with his being stuck with $3000 in bandwidth costs, but surely he can cover this based on the money he got from Gamefan before they stopped paying. If people want to donate money to him, so be it. It's hard for me to sympathize with someone who may have been pulling in over ten grand a month before the bottom dropped out though.
Here's what's really going on:
GameFan states to its network that it will pay $2.5 CPM, which means that for every 1000 impressions it will pay them $2.5.
I can guarantee you that if GameFan were to pay that much it would go out of business. The problem is simply that the market does not pay that much! A savvy company wishing to advertise with GameFan will NOT, EVER pay that much today! Average clickthrough on banners in substantially below 0.5%, so if someone were to pay $2.5 CPM, it would cost them $5 a click at least. That's not acceptable.
So... What happens? Well, people don't advertise, and GameFan Network doesn't make any money. But wait! People do advertise? So what's going on? Well, they're paying much less than $2.5 CPM (which is very much negotiable). So does GameFan lose money? No! Because GameFan/Express.com HAS A CONFLICT OF INTEREST!
GameFan/Express.com is itself a website, with means of revenue dependent on people visiting the site. With this clause in their contract, this is what happens:
GameFan states that it will pay $2.5 CPM for any ad NOT for GameFan.
GameFan sells on its own site let's say an average of $1 CPM and fills its real estate.
GameFan also takes any idiot advertiser who wants to pay $2.5 CPM and shoves him in the network itself.
Anything else that's left unpaid, GameFan uses to drive traffic to its site, where it gets $0.5 CPM.
End result? GameFan makes $0.5 CPM out of every click on an ad IT SERVES, FOR ITSELF, on the network!
I'd call that a scam, but hey...
I wouldn't bother. Rinoa 0wNz Selphie anyday...
Two types of ad revenue:
Click through and impressions.
An impression can be registered without me needing to see it.
A click-through system is not going to benefit anyone if I never click anyway.
Finally, HOW MANY TIMES DO YOU CLICK?
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
The kid you were talking about was 14.
And he chose to play adult games as an adult and has been laughed at by a lot of people. (mostly deservedly)
Sometimes lowtax crosses a line and I look at what he's done and think "that isn't so funny".
But mostly I laugh my head of and send the page to a friend.
Just because your sense of humour responds to different things to mine/his/anyone elses doesn't mean that a hosted webmaster serving up 15gb of mostly text a day with a banner add on the top of every page shouldn't be paid by the advertisiers pon his pretty darn hot content.
Otherwise there will be no model for little people to make a living on the web.
Be a big corporate site or die.
Thats not the web i want.
'There is a Light that never goes out.'
What Safe Audit said was that the quality of service was not on par with their expectations. If we slashdotted a site one day, that sites impressions would shoot through the roof... but only for that day. And certainly, lots of those people will just ignore the banner. I'm not defending Safe Audit... it's pretty lame to "adjust" based on a perceptual thing (ie. its quantitative vs qualitative here folks).
What GameFAN has done is run out of money by not being able to sell banner ads. Whatever the reason really is, the fact is: they ran out of cash. I think that Express.com, being the new parent company of GameFAN, is obligated to pay their member sites something for carrying the ads - otherwise, as someone else pointed out, it beggs the questions of an advert scam to draw people to GameFAN/Express.com.
I think we can all learn:
1) RTFL
2) IANAL, YANAL, so GAFL!
3) The advertiser shouldn't "adjust" pay based on "quality" delivered.
4) The advertiser should be pro-active and let people know that they are dying - perhaps lower the rates or something to entice new clients.
Verbatim
Price, Quality, Time. Pick none. What, you thought you had a choice?
When challenged, they admitted fraud and withdrew invoices citing thousands more click-throughs than we actually got.
Mind you, the guy I was working for then was a crook in his own right - it couldn't have happened to a nicer guy...
I did that. Once.
Too bad I didn't read his fine print.
Uh... I would have thought most banner-ad companies were scams?? Isn't it only a small percentage of them that actually pay? If I had a cent for everytime I've heard something like this... I'd have at least 10 cents by now!
The way I heard it is that the owner of the gamefan network (i forget his name, but he had a past of being an asshole and a shyster) sold it to Express.com but express.com didn't know what they were buying. However it happened, it turned out Express found themselves with a site network they didn't want and the rest, as they say, is recent history.
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ADVENTURERS! - ANTIHERO FOR HIRE - CARDMASTER CONFLICT
Actually it was a bumper sticker. I didn't know who the quote was originally from.
If you think education is expensive, you should try ignorance -- Derek Bok, president of Harvard
His name is Nick Fisher and from pretty much all accounts, he's a dickhead. Check this /. post on the same story:
2 34&cid=42
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=00/10/10/1221
Knunov
Why do users with IDs under 100,000 or over 700,000 usually have the most worthwhile comments?
once I was BROKE and OUT OF LUCK. but then I discovered the INTERNET and how to MAKE MONEY FAST!!! all you do is send ME $20 and I will run a BANNER for your site, and soon you will have lost of traffic and HUNDREDS of people JUST LIKE YOU will be sending **YOU** $20 to host **THEIR** banners so that THEY can *****MAKE MONEY FAST*****!
I have to wonder how sustainable this banner-impression based economy that so many companies seem to run on really is.
Trees can't go dancing
So do them a big favor
Pretend dancing stinks!
I perodically hear about sites that get screwed over by these banner-ad companies. The reaction always seems to post a complaint letter on the web site and stop using the service.
I always thought that a better solution would be to have whatever perl/php/etc. script that serves the banners continue to show the banner, but modify the gif so it has a huge red line through it with overlaid text that says "advertiser www.banneradcompany.com does not pay out for ads". Then send e-mail to all the people whose ads you are showing and tell them to take a look at how their ad looks on your page.
Bad PR goes a long way in advertising.
If you don't like the banners, why don't you block them and quit whining?
This saga has been going on a while, and from what I've heard Express.com has been doing every damn thing they can to keep lowtax from geeting his well deserved (imo) cash. At first they didn't deny he was owed money, but just blatantly failed to pay. Then, they refused to pay him because he had been posting derogatory remarks about Gamefan's business practices. Now, and only now, are they stating that they don't owe him anything based on this utterly lame legal loophole. I can imagine how pissed Lowtax must be. And Voodoo extreme. And UU. You can read the small print all you want, but this reeks of a sleazy lawyer peering through them himself in a desperate attempt to find a loophole that will allow GameFan to wiggle their way out of paying what must be hundreds of thousands of dollars by now. By the way, proud as he may be, lowtax is accepting donations. If you appreciate the site, you may want to help him out.
I want the fire back.
Lowtax needs to do his homework. i've been very involved in a certain very successful gaming site for about 4 years. i've seen ad brokers come and go (out of business even). the practices and terms he describe are completely standard.
this sounds like a matter of bad negotiating. lowtax obviously didn't know what a good deal looks like, as he did not negotiate one (granted, very few people have the experience to know what a good banner contract looks like)
ad brokers "fill" inventory with non-paying in-store ads (like the commercials for tv shows), this is _indeed_ the mark of a broker not being able to sell their product (i.e. space on your site). you can draw two conclusions when you see this on your site:
the moral of the story is, ALWAYS make your contract breakable if they don't fill their inventory, or negotiate a guaranteed minimum income. anything less, and you are bending over. and remember to GETH THE F*CK OUT when you see alot of "stock" ads.
it _is_ possible to negotiate with these guys. most of them are desperately in need of clicks. in fact, alot of them are so desperate, they'll cut you a deal they can't fill. this happened to us, our "big dot com ipo" broker is now trading around the penny stock territory.
another piece of advice, is to stick with the bigboys (cnet comes to mind). if the big boys won't take you, you aren't good enough to make them money, and you likely aren't good enough to make _you_ money either.
remember, this is bidneth, nobody owes you anything. you get what you agree to.
Express.com bought a dud and now they're trying to palm the cost off on to the "employees" by witholding payment.
.oO0Oo.
It really stinks. They've strung poor Rich along for ages and I'm sure he's doing well to hold on to his sanity.
To people who say "too bad, you should've read the small print" or whatever well the guy has been receiving payment for the same ads for ages. Then one day the cheque doesn't arrive and they tell him "we'll be paying you late - sorry" the time drags by and yesterday it turned in to "nope, we're not paying you ever because of some lame shit we just made up" and he's $3000 out of pocket for the bandwidth for the site.
We all run the risk in a salaried environment of a similar experience - I know I've had it happen to me - comapny starts going bust but they don't tell the employees and then Bam! "sorry no pay this month -we're broke" and you sit there looking at your credit card bill & mortgage cos you lived a month in the future.
Saying "you should've known it could happen" isn't much comfort.
and btw. people in wheelchairs are funny just like everybody else is.
as usual Post your comments in the forum
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
I handle all the money and most of the code for lowpass.net.. We did Threatster and a few other semi-popular things.
We've been really lucky and collected every dime we've been owed so far, but not without staying on top of it.. Read the contracts, for real.. No-payment for network ads is clearly in ours, their stats page even shows how many we've served as a percentage of the total.
Lowtax mentions a clause about not seeking other sponsors, but honestly, that couldn't have been stopping him, he did change to backbeat after all..
This is a particularly good idea. It would serve two very useful purposes. 1 - Allow webmasters to avoid the slugs and sleazemeisters and 2 - Show webmasters the width of competition. How long do you think sleaze tactics would be around if there was a third party site vetting out the losers?
This is not the way to build a lasting empire.
Look, this guy needs a serious reality check. There are three posibilities here. 1) he never signed any contract; 2) his contract allows them to do this; 3) his contract does not allow them to do this. If it's 1 or 2, he deserves what he's getting. If it's 3, there are specific legal remedies that he can get. In any case, let's stop this pointless finger-pointing without hard facts, shall we? We don't even know if his contract permitted them to do what they are doing. If it did, then express.com has not done anything wrong.
When I put my site Bill's Games online, I ended up going through about 10 different ad networks before I finally dropped all but ValueClick.
They pay well, they have good statistics tools (no JavaScript needed), and friendly customer support!
If you're lucky enough to make $2000 or more a month, they can even send your payment via wire.
I sure hope that Hemos was referring to the pre-Andover setup.
Selling ads must be one of the most horrible occupations associated with running a website, and not something that most techies are any good at either. If there's a good reason for bringing in external involvement, it's got to be to give that job to somebody else.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
I feel sorry for the guy, but aparrently he has nobody to blame but himself.
Shhheeeeesh! Before you get into a business transaction, any business transaction, you don't rely on what you're told by a corporate droid.
I hope he learned a lesson without taking too much of a hit. Welcome to the world, pal
ich bin der musikant
mit taschenrechner in der hand
kraftwerk
I run a gaming site - granted, not a popular one, but that doesn't hurt my feelings any. And advertisements is something that any site has to deal with.
The problem I see with the whole Express.com/Gamefan Network thing isn't a legal thing, but a right thing. Sure, the legal thing for them to do is to cut their losses, don't pay the sites, and keep the corporation going.
Then there's the right thing to do. In the case of Something Awful, the guy's out $3000 in server costs because he's not going to get paid. I think more about the case of VoodooExtreme.com, which was probably getting a few million hits a day - and evidently they are owed $100,000 that they're never going to see.
These are folks who had an agreement, that they would run their site, bring in traffic, and have ads up for the "parent company" - and in return they would recieve money to keep it going. In the case of some of these sites, people have probably quit their day jobs because they had enough money coming in (or promised to come in) to take care of them.
Yeah, Express.com doesn't have to pay them. But if they don't, you can bet that they're not getting another $0.02 out of me. I'll buy my anime and import stuff somewhere else. (Damn, and I had my eye on those Final Fantasy Selphie figurines).
Do the right thing, Express.
John "Dark Paladin" Hummel
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
I blame the pornographers for the state of the Internet, but not for putting morally questionable material out there. I blame them for creating the banner advertisement, the 468x60 splash of garish color, choppy animation, and oversized text featuring the words CLICK HERE... and then showing that people can make money that way.
After all, it's the love of *money* that is the root of all evil, not the love of enormous hooters.
A whole economy has sprung up around banner links, and not a pleasant economy either. Sure, banners can advertise legitimate services, and some of them are quite attractive doing so too. But I've seen bad banners too. Things that don't lead where they expect, or promise things they don't deliver. I've even seen samples of banners made to look like part of the website that they're being hosted on!
The Internet itself loses value under these circumstances. Information wants to be free, but it doesn't necessarily want to make itself known to everybody, and it can be awfully hard to pick out when the noise is intentionally disguising itself as signal.
(Side note: the advantage to using either a Mac or Linux box is the user interface -- I get to laugh myself silly at every banner advertisement that's dolled up to look like a dialog box which, if you're on the aforementioned, is appearing on the wrong OS.)
Then this happens. This beautifully apocryphal event that tells the world, "Banner adverts aren't all they're cracked up to be! Servers might not get rich off of them!" Business models shift. Sites either negotiate better contracts with the people they're shilling for, or work up alternative business models that don't require banner advertising for revenue. Or people start using their own servers.
Contracts get looked at a little more carefully, too. It'd be nice if the unscrupulous ones were left out in the cold by their own legal trickery, but that'd be too much to hope. All they have to do is latch onto the suckers. Then again, I'd like to think that suckers are an exhaustable resource, that if they're suckered enough, they start thinking.
It might not happen the way I'm hoping it will... what I'm hoping is that the banner advertising companies thin out and become more reputable. Who knows? They may even point to more interesting content...
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You cannot truly appreciate Dilbert until you read it in the original Klingon.
I've just received an email from Dan Knight at Low End Mac -- http://lowendmac.com/. He's suggesting webmasters (1) write the bozo at Express.com to express their disappointment with how Express.com fulfills contractual obligations and then (2) tell Express.com we're all ready to get out of their affiliate program (since we can't trust them to pay) and instead push Amazon.com, buy.com, and anyone else who doesn't screw sites. I expect this could be far more effective than whining. :-)
Someone should establish a site where webmasters can rate/view the merits/demerits of certain ad services.
If you are dealing with a guy named LOWTAX you know that he won't be going to the government/feds/court anytime soon after you rip him off :)
j/k I love JEFF K! and somethingawful.com rox0rs your box0rs!
Back on 8/23 Moto over at TechZone, wrote up a great piece on how to start a tech site. In it, he clearly talks about ad's, and how most networks pay for them only when they're not for other network sites. It seems to me, if you're going to work within and industry, and make deals with other companies within that industry, you ought to do your footwork. It's simply irresponsible, to sign a contract with a company, without reading what you're agreeing to. And if you do that, you have nobody to blame but yourself.
And I don't see fault with not being allowed to solicit outside advertising either. I would think, that part of being a network, is that the network can control it's identity. If you start working on side deals, it will dilute the brand identity that the network is trying to build. It's just part of the price you pay, for the convenience of not having to shop for your own ad's, and for the strength of co-marketing that you should get from the affiliated sites.
I'd basically chalk this whole episode up, as a sterling example of a variation of "caveat emptor". Be sure of what you are getting, before you lay out the cash to get it. I feel for the guy, but at least he'll provide an object lesson to some others by publicizing his mistakes.
"Politicians are interested in people. Not that this is always a virtue. Fleas are interested in dogs." P.J. O'Rourke
Funny, Detonate.net had the exact same problem a bunch of months back. Next spammers are going to stop being paid to email everyone on earth! *pray*
If you think education is expensive, you should try ignorance -- Derek Bok, president of Harvard