If you work at Facebook or Google you're benefiting directly from the similarly shady practices they used to grow on their way to being "pillars of tech" today.
Do you remember when at LEAST 20% of Facebook's revenue came from Zynga? Like less than 5 years ago? Many speculated it was considerably higher, but Facebook never provided a full accounting (1).
Or do you remember when Facebook literally had an "affiliate marketing panel" that they worked with at the C-suite level packed with guys selling weight loss affiliate slop? Almost impossible to find reference of it now, was well known in many circles and you can still see references of it here and there. (2)
Or maybe when Google was caught colluding with a notorious gangster when he turned state's evidence to demonstrate to the DOJ how quickly Google was willing to skirt around laws to sell illegally imported drugs? They were fined $500,000,000.00. Google was. (3)
50onRed is clearly engaged in scumb-bag advertising practices, but at least they keep good company.
Despite the examples you give, I don't think it's fair to lump Facebook and Google in with 50onRed. The former two are mostly above board, with some occasional exceptions, while the latter is completely, morally, underwater.
Not sure how you compare 1) and 2) to ad-injections. Those are companies which purchase ad-space on websites which sell ad-space, solved by visiting those sites less. Not ad-ware installed to deliver ads to your browser, solved by switching browsers..? reformatting hard-drive..? replacing your computer..?
One major difference is that Facebook and Google also provide value to their users. They do good and bad things. The company in the article did only bad things.
Considering 50onRed started as an ad network on facebook helping companies like Zynga, as explained in the article, point 1 can most likely in part be blamed on them.
I think what you're describing as dirty transgressions is a natural cycle in evolution of auction-based ad systems. When early marketplaces price the leads at several pennies an action, weight loss and herbal supplement affiliates crowd in, as it makes financial sense for them.
As the cost per lead is bid up, they are eventually forced to drop out.
Yeah, I think one of the dirty secrets that doesn't really come across until you've been in the entrepreneurial trenches for a while is that most people who make a lot of money end up doing so not by being paragons of morality, but by skirting rules and doing things other people may find questionable or unfair. YC itself acknowledges this to an extent by saying that good founders are moral, but that they are not "goody-two-shoes" and they break rules "that don't matter".
Of course, the material value of each rule is in the eye of the beholder; surely the cab drivers of the world felt that there was material value to adhering to their regulations and that it would not be moral or necessarily safe to circumvent those regulations. Then Uber came along and its founders entered the pantheon of those that break "rules that don't matter". Ditto for Airbnb.
Most types of marketing and PR are morally dubious. But you have to play that game if you're going to get anywhere.
That's the secret that entrepreneurs have to learn, the secret that doesn't get shown in the profile pieces or the television specials. "Might makes right" in this world and if you want to be a successful entrepreneur, you need to loosen from a theoretical moral ideal to a practical one that is informed by the competitive landscape of capitalism. You can nitpick and find fault with most money-making techniques, so you just have to try to do something you can be reasonably comfortable with, acknowledging that in a competitive landscape, sometimes uncomfortable choices have to be made.
If you do find something that makes money and has no competitors, thus allowing you to not worry about underhanded techniques to steal your marketshare, take advantage of your early position to decisively corner the market. That means employing the same techniques that would be employed against you, because those techniques will be employed against you pretty soon. I know this because one of my companies was roundly beaten after a spammer started a competitor and engaged SEO link rings to inorganically alter his ranking, among other tactics that I was morally "above" until my company was pwned that way. Now I understand you must play that game, that everyone plays that game, and they just don't talk about it because it doesn't help them to do so. It helps them to keep potential competitors naive.
Playing by the rules may be the cool way to do it, but in the real world, it doesn't work, because there is someone who is willing to break those rules. How many entrepreneurs started on something like Uber but quit because they saw the regulatory landscape and a) didn't have the millions to fight cities and the cab industry; b) didn't want to run afoul of city regulations in the first place? Do what YC does: break whatever rules are in your way and then afterwards say they were rules that "didn't matter". If you say this from a position of success, people will believe you.
Reminds me a bit of an experience I had at an event around 2000 or so. Most of the folks there were heavily academic, but at lunch I found myself sitting with one of the organizers who was clearly cut from different cloth, so I asked what he did the rest of the year. After a couple of rounds of vague responses about how he helped companies use email to get in touch with potential customers, it finally dawned on me that I was sitting at the table with a SPAMMER. Pretty much lost my appetite at that point.
My takeaway is that spammers, malware authors, even identity thieves, are among us. They can seem like perfectly nice people. They might even be perfectly nice people except for this one bad habit, this one ethical blind spot, that enables them to do things from which the rest of us would recoil in disgust. The company in this story might be an extreme case, but I'll bet a lot of people asking "how could they not know" have themselves worked at companies that made at least some of their money in less savory ways. Sometimes it might be why that company survived while contemporaries faded away. Silicon Valley from its earliest days has been full of people who benefited from carefully redacted history, whether they knew it or not.
You talk as if the 'rest of us' in tech are so innocent and pure. Spam is small potatoes compared to the ethical violations many big tech companies get up to on a daily basis.
You lost your appetite because you thought someone was a spammer? There are a lot of companies that perform much worse ethical behavior that spamming (e.g. LinkedIn's existence is thanks to unwanted invite request sent to all your contacts, SocialCam abused Facebook OpenGraph so heavily they had to shut it down.) Just because they get away with it in secrecy doesn't mean it's not happening. So you can pretend you live in a world where majority of people are saints or their crimes are not as bad as something that is demonized heavily in public like email spamming but then again we why would you.
I worked at a web development studio. One of our clients was MannaTech, basically a marketing company that sold snake-oil to parents of sick children, claiming it could "cure" everything from cancer to down syndrome. They were under investigation by the Texas DA at one point.
We tracked our work hourly, so I donated all the money I made from that particular work to St. Jude's hospital, which actually does cure cancer in children, but it still irks me to this day.
Looked this up, and it's not only selling snake-oil to parents of sick children, it's MLM selling snake oil to parents of sick children. I honestly didn't think such a level of depravity was possible.
Oh, and they had Ben Carson for a spokesman for a while. Amazing.
I used to work for a company that was purchased by a Multi Level Marketing coughpyramidschemecough company similar to Herbalife. They purchased us for our technology to power their platform. There was supposed to be very little overlap with their business, so I did not feel too worried about it.
As time went on, our focus was more on how to sell more of the parent company's products. I also learned more on how the MLM business really worked, and I was disgusted at how the system preyed on the vulnerable. With very few jobs in the area, I continued working there. I eventually moved and turned down requests to work remotely.
None of my co-workers seemed to have cared. Either that, or they understood it was still one of the better tech opportunities in an area with very few.
Working at this type of company will eat at your soul. Really, you only have about 40 years of work in you.
It sounds like a lot, but when you consider is takes a few years (sometimes more) to figure out what you like. A few more to get good at it. And then you have maybe 20 peak years of productivity, you sure as hell don't want to spend any of it at something you can't respect.
When you are done with your career at 60 or 65, you want to be able to look back and say "I did this" or "I created that" or "I helped this many people", not "I worked at that shitty adware company for 2 years because they have me free food and beer"
Interviewed at a company called Rakuten Loyalty in Boston a few years ago. At that time it was the exact same thing, a malware / adware browser toolbar company, and they also sold white label toolbars. Took me the entire interview to figure out what they actually did. Their website [0] now has very little information about what they actually do, with a generic contact form. But an archive.org [1] of their old website shows the truth. Funny how they hide what they actually do now.
I interviewed at 50onRed a few years ago soon after I left college. I went through the interview process, received an offer, and was on the verge of accepting.
It was at this point I realized that I barely understood what the company actually did. I set up another in-person interview, except this time with the roles reversed. I asked them to walk me through their products and platforms so I could better understand what I would be working on. Ten minutes in, I realized what I was looking at. I treaded water until the end of the interview and called them a few days later to decline the offer.
The [engineering] team was solid, the tech was intriguing (a lot of expressjs microservices and interesting design patterns), and the offices were great. But given the wealth of compelling opportunities for javascript engineers, I couldn't come up with a good reason to work on something so insipid and manipulative. This article is strangely validating, perhaps in a schadenfreude kind of way.
Worth noting that the reporter on this story is a beat reporter who has been covering the Philadelphia tech scene closely for years now. She knows it like no one else.
I had no idea there is a such a large industry doing this type of stuff until building a Windows 10 machine recently for VR. So many "free", seemingly kosher apps seem to install sneaky adware in the main app installation process these days
Today my mother got AD on her phone with "Android update", it was a pop-up from one of normal sites she visit. So she touched "update now" as she normally do with system messages about update... Then she confirmed, then she got 2 SMS, in one that deal was finalized. WTF? I've checked with Orange and indeed she was charged and subscription was started, 20 euro a month for some 3 shitty sms per week. They have turned this subscription off. THIS practices should be stopped. This is really a plague, I see those on my desktop and phone on regular basis, i know they are fake updates but most people don't..
My mother had this as well but with a game. We simply reversed the charge and continued pay the subscription like normal. They made one vague attempt to get that extra money then gave up. While I'm not a lawyer I doubt such charges would stand up on court.
I've seen an ad for GTA5 for iOS and Android (obvious scam) on Facebook, and thousands of people liking, and hundreds of comments, most seemed organic, of people tagging their friends.
Copyright infringement + scam, right there on Facebook.
I worked at a company very briefly in the early aughts. I thought I was hired to be on the team that built the platform. But before we would do that we needed to have a list of beta users. So my job was writing bots that scoured forums and other social networks for contact information (emails, phone numbers, names, etc.)
It took me a week to realize what I was actually doing then another week to plan and execute my escape. The rest of the team were east european and did not give a fuck about what they were doing, it was good money to them.
They eventually did release a product with a few thousand users. Not long after, Facebook changed their signup strategy from schools to the general public and the rest is history.
Maybe I just forget what it's like to be a beginner, but how on earth do you work on Ad Injection software and not realize that you're working on Ad Injection?!
Pro Tip: The "what questions can we answer about $COMPANY" section at the end of an engineering interview should be used to ask about the business model and revenue/monetization, not just the tech stack
More generally, not knowing how a company makes money should be a huge problem for someone candidating.
Given the choice, a company with a sane business model has less chances to go under (== not going through interviews again in 6 months), and it should also give an idea of how much and in which way the comapny has any chance to grow.
>Gill tells me he doesn’t consider himself in the adware business. He prefers, instead, to describe 50onRed as a company that keeps content free for users.
I love that bit. How does injecting ads into random sites help keep content free for users?
Who's buying those ads by the way? Sure it sound like a terrible company, but I can help thinking that their customers are worse.
If anything, hijacking page real estate makes it less likely the user will click on non-injected ads (which actually pay something out to the content creator).
I believe content creators have a right to seek compensation for their work - whether it's through ads, affiliate links, or a subscription model.
But what 50onRed does is thievery from the creators, plain and simple.
I worked in the user experience team at that one big American domain company (that's well known for mostly the wrong reasons.) Similar situation as the story: great coworkers, great pay, & great perks.
One of the products I was assigned was the interface for customers to configure those sites that are intended to monetize a domain with filler content meant to fool a visitor just enough to milk them for a few cents with seemingly legitimate articles/posts and an e-commerce feature that was essentially a storefront built entirely from affiliate links.
Unlike the individual in the story, it was immediately clear what my task was: make spamming the Internet as user-friendly as possible. Unfortunately there was no mental gymnastics I could do to reconcile that.
Especially since the second product I had was domain auctions, which alone is nothing more than virtual real estate, but together with the first product is the makings of a thinly-veiled means to skim money off the top of online purchases made by ignorant users AND to fool people into believing they could profit from otherwise idle domains (by first paying the company for the monetizing product first, of course.)
And a tiny fraction of our customers did make a good income with those 2 offerings but the significant majority would never net a dime.
Aside from the pay and perks, the only professional payoff was also having the company's support site in my charge. I was proud of the work I did on that and it was a feature of my portfolio. But it wasn't enough and I was too disillusioned and discouraged overall by the day to day work. It wasn't long before I let it get to me, my performance began to suffer, and I needed to get out of there. (Admittedly, the nature of the job wasn't well-suited to my strengths either so it was probably fortunate I lasted as long as I did...)
I was able to cash in quite nicely on the experience gained there with a good offer on an out-of-state position with a generous relocation package. So, no, it wasn't all bad and, like the person in the story, the coworkers were largely really great (some going to work for large, well-known tech companies) and though I value the experience overall, it revealed just how much money can be made if you're willing to profit from people's ignorance and greed, just by framing your product or service in a particular way.
Mildly off-topic, but why do sites like this highlight the "top highlight"? I always find it really off-putting (in a "Oh, you tracking EVERYTHING I do" sort of way")
I interviewed three times at a company once which didn't seem to have a clear business model. Only in the last interview with the CEO did I realize he was running a ponzi scheme.
[+] [-] aresant|9 years ago|reply
If you work at Facebook or Google you're benefiting directly from the similarly shady practices they used to grow on their way to being "pillars of tech" today.
Do you remember when at LEAST 20% of Facebook's revenue came from Zynga? Like less than 5 years ago? Many speculated it was considerably higher, but Facebook never provided a full accounting (1).
Or do you remember when Facebook literally had an "affiliate marketing panel" that they worked with at the C-suite level packed with guys selling weight loss affiliate slop? Almost impossible to find reference of it now, was well known in many circles and you can still see references of it here and there. (2)
Or maybe when Google was caught colluding with a notorious gangster when he turned state's evidence to demonstrate to the DOJ how quickly Google was willing to skirt around laws to sell illegally imported drugs? They were fined $500,000,000.00. Google was. (3)
50onRed is clearly engaged in scumb-bag advertising practices, but at least they keep good company.
(1) http://allthingsd.com/20120423/zynga-accounted-for-15-percen...
(2) http://www.shoemoney.com/2009/11/16/dennis-yu-rise-and-fall-... & http://www.jimcockrum.com/blog/2011/10/19/the-biggest-dog-in... & http://techcrunch.com/2009/11/01/how-to-spam-facebook-like-a...
(3) https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/google-forfeits-500-million-g... & https://www.wired.com/2013/05/google-pharma-whitaker-sting/
[+] [-] notatoad|9 years ago|reply
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130115/17343321692/why-a...
[+] [-] eloff|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eanzenberg|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Apocryphon|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smt88|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fiatmoney|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alaskanloops|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] prostoalex|9 years ago|reply
As the cost per lead is bid up, they are eventually forced to drop out.
[+] [-] cookiecaper|9 years ago|reply
Of course, the material value of each rule is in the eye of the beholder; surely the cab drivers of the world felt that there was material value to adhering to their regulations and that it would not be moral or necessarily safe to circumvent those regulations. Then Uber came along and its founders entered the pantheon of those that break "rules that don't matter". Ditto for Airbnb.
Most types of marketing and PR are morally dubious. But you have to play that game if you're going to get anywhere.
That's the secret that entrepreneurs have to learn, the secret that doesn't get shown in the profile pieces or the television specials. "Might makes right" in this world and if you want to be a successful entrepreneur, you need to loosen from a theoretical moral ideal to a practical one that is informed by the competitive landscape of capitalism. You can nitpick and find fault with most money-making techniques, so you just have to try to do something you can be reasonably comfortable with, acknowledging that in a competitive landscape, sometimes uncomfortable choices have to be made.
If you do find something that makes money and has no competitors, thus allowing you to not worry about underhanded techniques to steal your marketshare, take advantage of your early position to decisively corner the market. That means employing the same techniques that would be employed against you, because those techniques will be employed against you pretty soon. I know this because one of my companies was roundly beaten after a spammer started a competitor and engaged SEO link rings to inorganically alter his ranking, among other tactics that I was morally "above" until my company was pwned that way. Now I understand you must play that game, that everyone plays that game, and they just don't talk about it because it doesn't help them to do so. It helps them to keep potential competitors naive.
Playing by the rules may be the cool way to do it, but in the real world, it doesn't work, because there is someone who is willing to break those rules. How many entrepreneurs started on something like Uber but quit because they saw the regulatory landscape and a) didn't have the millions to fight cities and the cab industry; b) didn't want to run afoul of city regulations in the first place? Do what YC does: break whatever rules are in your way and then afterwards say they were rules that "didn't matter". If you say this from a position of success, people will believe you.
[+] [-] eyeareque|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hkmurakami|9 years ago|reply
This was cited in the FB S1 filing, which was around March 2012, so you are correct.
[+] [-] wdr1|9 years ago|reply
It talked about how MS, Google, and others worked to prevent this type of behavior.
[+] [-] fredgrott|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] notacoward|9 years ago|reply
My takeaway is that spammers, malware authors, even identity thieves, are among us. They can seem like perfectly nice people. They might even be perfectly nice people except for this one bad habit, this one ethical blind spot, that enables them to do things from which the rest of us would recoil in disgust. The company in this story might be an extreme case, but I'll bet a lot of people asking "how could they not know" have themselves worked at companies that made at least some of their money in less savory ways. Sometimes it might be why that company survived while contemporaries faded away. Silicon Valley from its earliest days has been full of people who benefited from carefully redacted history, whether they knew it or not.
[+] [-] danenania|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] soheil|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pavel_lishin|9 years ago|reply
We tracked our work hourly, so I donated all the money I made from that particular work to St. Jude's hospital, which actually does cure cancer in children, but it still irks me to this day.
[+] [-] NoGravitas|9 years ago|reply
Oh, and they had Ben Carson for a spokesman for a while. Amazing.
[+] [-] usefulcat|9 years ago|reply
Source: am a long time resident of TX; it's business-friendly reputation is well earned, IMO.
[+] [-] donretag|9 years ago|reply
As time went on, our focus was more on how to sell more of the parent company's products. I also learned more on how the MLM business really worked, and I was disgusted at how the system preyed on the vulnerable. With very few jobs in the area, I continued working there. I eventually moved and turned down requests to work remotely.
None of my co-workers seemed to have cared. Either that, or they understood it was still one of the better tech opportunities in an area with very few.
[+] [-] socrates1998|9 years ago|reply
It sounds like a lot, but when you consider is takes a few years (sometimes more) to figure out what you like. A few more to get good at it. And then you have maybe 20 peak years of productivity, you sure as hell don't want to spend any of it at something you can't respect.
When you are done with your career at 60 or 65, you want to be able to look back and say "I did this" or "I created that" or "I helped this many people", not "I worked at that shitty adware company for 2 years because they have me free food and beer"
[+] [-] seibelj|9 years ago|reply
[0] http://www.rakutenrewards.com/ [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20121216021038/http://rakutenloy...
[+] [-] switz|9 years ago|reply
It was at this point I realized that I barely understood what the company actually did. I set up another in-person interview, except this time with the roles reversed. I asked them to walk me through their products and platforms so I could better understand what I would be working on. Ten minutes in, I realized what I was looking at. I treaded water until the end of the interview and called them a few days later to decline the offer.
The [engineering] team was solid, the tech was intriguing (a lot of expressjs microservices and interesting design patterns), and the offices were great. But given the wealth of compelling opportunities for javascript engineers, I couldn't come up with a good reason to work on something so insipid and manipulative. This article is strangely validating, perhaps in a schadenfreude kind of way.
[+] [-] BradyDale|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dharma1|9 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Download_Valley
http://www.forbes.com/sites/alexkonrad/2015/02/25/israeli-un...
[+] [-] lossolo|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] quikoa|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] NEDM64|9 years ago|reply
Copyright infringement + scam, right there on Facebook.
[+] [-] rasz_pl|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yardie|9 years ago|reply
It took me a week to realize what I was actually doing then another week to plan and execute my escape. The rest of the team were east european and did not give a fuck about what they were doing, it was good money to them.
They eventually did release a product with a few thousand users. Not long after, Facebook changed their signup strategy from schools to the general public and the rest is history.
[+] [-] tonyarkles|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eastbayjake|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hrktb|9 years ago|reply
Given the choice, a company with a sane business model has less chances to go under (== not going through interviews again in 6 months), and it should also give an idea of how much and in which way the comapny has any chance to grow.
[+] [-] jmcgough|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] al_chemist|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mrweasel|9 years ago|reply
I love that bit. How does injecting ads into random sites help keep content free for users?
Who's buying those ads by the way? Sure it sound like a terrible company, but I can help thinking that their customers are worse.
[+] [-] etjossem|9 years ago|reply
I believe content creators have a right to seek compensation for their work - whether it's through ads, affiliate links, or a subscription model.
But what 50onRed does is thievery from the creators, plain and simple.
[+] [-] settsu|9 years ago|reply
One of the products I was assigned was the interface for customers to configure those sites that are intended to monetize a domain with filler content meant to fool a visitor just enough to milk them for a few cents with seemingly legitimate articles/posts and an e-commerce feature that was essentially a storefront built entirely from affiliate links.
Unlike the individual in the story, it was immediately clear what my task was: make spamming the Internet as user-friendly as possible. Unfortunately there was no mental gymnastics I could do to reconcile that.
Especially since the second product I had was domain auctions, which alone is nothing more than virtual real estate, but together with the first product is the makings of a thinly-veiled means to skim money off the top of online purchases made by ignorant users AND to fool people into believing they could profit from otherwise idle domains (by first paying the company for the monetizing product first, of course.)
And a tiny fraction of our customers did make a good income with those 2 offerings but the significant majority would never net a dime.
Aside from the pay and perks, the only professional payoff was also having the company's support site in my charge. I was proud of the work I did on that and it was a feature of my portfolio. But it wasn't enough and I was too disillusioned and discouraged overall by the day to day work. It wasn't long before I let it get to me, my performance began to suffer, and I needed to get out of there. (Admittedly, the nature of the job wasn't well-suited to my strengths either so it was probably fortunate I lasted as long as I did...)
I was able to cash in quite nicely on the experience gained there with a good offer on an out-of-state position with a generous relocation package. So, no, it wasn't all bad and, like the person in the story, the coworkers were largely really great (some going to work for large, well-known tech companies) and though I value the experience overall, it revealed just how much money can be made if you're willing to profit from people's ignorance and greed, just by framing your product or service in a particular way.
[+] [-] TheRealDunkirk|9 years ago|reply
So "Tyler" wasn't a programmer, then. Got it.
[+] [-] recursive|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tomp|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mfringel|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] puranjay|9 years ago|reply
I'm a writer and man, I hate writing with people around me
[+] [-] dec0dedab0de|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pavel_lishin|9 years ago|reply
It seems to me that the more ambiguous your business strategy is, the more you have to show off to convince others that it isn't.
[+] [-] stordoff|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alanh|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dredmorbius|9 years ago|reply
</godfather>
[+] [-] coldcode|9 years ago|reply