Blight Warriors
by Blight Crusader
The fight against Virtual Blight has two heroes this week, TechCrunch founder and editor Michael Arrington and Facebook advertising guru Dennis Yu, who set the spammy/scammy world of incentivized lead generation scams on fire.
Arrington started the ball rolling with Scamville: The Social Gaming Ecosystem of Hell, and Yu pushed the gas pedal to the floor with How To Spam Facebook Like A Pro: An Insider’s Confession.
These two heroes in the fight against blight have pushed MySpace to publicly flagellate these scams and toughen up their TOC for applications and advertisers along with getting serious about enforcement. Hopefully Facebook and Google Adwords/Adsense will follow suit with some enforcement.
They also forced RockYou and Zynga to remove scams from games along with a belated mea culpa from Zynga CEO Mark Pincus, who came out and essentially admitted that they have been used to defraud users.
We have worked hard to police and remove bad offers. In fact, the worst offender, Tatto Media, referenced in the TechCrunch article, had already been taken down and permanently banned prior to the post. Nevertheless, we need to be more aggressive and have revised our service level agreements with these providers requiring them to filter and police offers prior to posting on their networks. We have also removed all mobile ads until we see any that offer clear user value.
In a final note from the DUH category, RockYou parent company PeanutLabs did a survey to gauge user satisfaction with these offers:
By now you’ve probably heard about the showdown at Friday’s Virtual Goods Summit between Mike Arrington, editor of TechCrunch, and Anu Shukla, founder of Offerpal. The showdown came at the conclusion of the “Payments Infrastructure for Virtual Goods” panel. For those who spent their Halloween weekend in the depths of costumed carousing, you can still check out the details of that on TechCrunch.
At Friday’s conference, both Shukla and Arrington spoke on behalf of the users regarding the quality of user experience. We agree with both parties that user experience is of paramount importance — over the weekend, we took things one step further and asked Facebook users what they thought. To the best of our knowledge this is the largest survey of its kind conducted on the FB platform.
We conducted a research survey of 11,678 users over the weekend across our publisher network (~500+ applications) with sample representative of the US online population. The users surveyed ranged from 13-60 years. The average respondent plays 8 or more online games and spends nearly 7 hours a week playing online games.
Peanut labs discovered widespread dissatisfaction among users with incentivized offers for virtual goods. Only about 11% of users had a positive experience with mobile offers.
