After I and Inquisitr’s Duncan Riley yesterday both expressed a bit of apprehension that the sometimes unscrupulous world of affiliate and MLM marketing might be making its way to the Twittersphere, John Reese (founder of traffic funnelling pyramid scheme BlogRush) decided to “set the record straight” on his personal blog. Unfortunately for John, much like in his marketing verbiage, he was unable to stay very far away from hyperbole and the ridiculous allegation that I didn’t research my position before I promoted it.
Of the many things that John took issue with, the first thing he mentioned was that both Duncan and I didn’t do our research. As evidence of this, he bragged that he’d “never sold an ebook since I’ve been marketing online for over 15 years.” I stand corrected on this point. He gave away ebooks to sell “digital home study materials.“ Essentially, books on CD. Not ebooks, per se, but pretty close.
Most of the rest of his post, in retort, reads like the marketing verbiage you probably remember from BlogRush and from the excerpts of his Twitter letter Duncan and I quoted. “I’m the best,” and “I’ve made high traffic sites,” and “I made all this money, and it was only my side project.” I’m sure that impresses a lot of folks, otherwise how else would have have sold all his “not-ebooks.” His defenses of his actions seem to amount to “I’m rich, so I’m right.” Bank robbers can be rich, too. That doesn’t make them right either.
His thrust of his retorts seem to be that I’m some sort of anti-marketing hippie, and that my “lack of research” is a thorough indication that something is rotten in the state of Mashable (or perhaps even blogging entirely?). Anyone that has followed my opinion pieces in general, or who actually knows me, knows this is laughable, as I’ve many times defended marketing from undue government regulation and attack. What I (and most human beings, for that matter) hate with a passion are hucksters trying to pawn off on me something I don’t need or have any use or interest in. This is something in which, unfortunately, the affiliate marketing world excels in. That isn’t an indictment of everyone who might be an affiliate marketer, but it is an indictment of a lot of the more visible members of this demographic.
I know of what I speak, on this. Many years ago, I was a CTO at a credit assistance agency that employed affiliate marketing techniques for a time to grow the business. As such, I learned more than I ever wanted to know about the MLM world, but was afraid to ask. I could describe my experiences there in detail, but the best analogy I can provide to you as to how the MLM and affiliate marketing world works is to liken it to a spyware infection.
When you’re infected by one piece of spyware, it often opens the floodgates for a host of other virus, malware and spyware infections. Similarly, you talk to one affiliate marketer, who may be a decent guy and wants to sell you something you need or sell something for you. Unfortunately, just by talking to that one fellow, it seems you soon have (no exaggeration) have hundreds of marketers beating down your door and flooding your inbox with ridiculous offers, pie-in-the-sky schemes, get-rich-quick scams and often outlandish conspiracy theories.
(Imagine that for a moment, and amplify it through the megaphone of Twitter-mania. Twitter could get really unbearable while affiliate marketers infiltrate, amass hordes of followers, and start trying to sell their ebooks on ways to infiltrate twitter, amass hordes of followers and sell ebooks on …. )
John notes my extreme dissatisfaction with BlogRush in his response to me, and promises me a full refund for my investment (a clever distraction of a promise, since the widget and “service” was free). He then goes on to boast that the BlogRush service garners more traffic than Mashable. His defense is to intimate that there was no harm done by hoodwinking thousands of bloggers into installing a useless widget. It’s true that no actual money was lost, but it doesn’t make it right, valuable to anyone (other than John and his team), or even honest.
At the end of the day, I’m still a fan of marketing (contrary to the laughable claims of John Reese’s groupies of me being a socialist), but that doesn’t have to make me a fan of John Reese. While his moves may have made him rich, nothing I’ve seen in his past shows me that he’s done much to separate himself from the shadier marketers in the very same space as him. Despite his claims to the contrary, nothing on the public record (read: researchable) shows that he’s a trustworthy member of the social media community at large (particularly since his defense of himself was full of truth-twisting and hyperbole). In the end, it is that which make me doubt his intentions aren’t to make Twitter part of some affiliate marketing scheme - something I nor anyone else is going to enjoy.
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The advent of Twitter going mainstream is upon us, according to Inquisitr’s Duncan Riley. That’s not actually how he put it, though. I believe he said something like “doom, gloom, and the end of days!”
What’s bringing this glorious/tragic event? Riley quotes an email he recieved from known Web 2.0 flopster and prolific e-book salesman John Reese:
If you haven’t yet created a Twitter account you’re really missing out.
This service has exploded in growth in the past few months and I don’t see it slowing down anytime soon. There are now MILLIONS of users and it’s becoming mainstream.
I’ve been running some interesting tests and I’m already seeing some great traffic results — far greater than the traffic from Facebook or any other “Web 2.0″ service.Facebook and the others certainly have their place, but Twitter is more powerful. At first I didn’t really “get it” but now I do and my traffic stats don’t lie. IT WORKS.
[..]
So trust me, this is no flash in the pan. In fact, this may be one of the most powerful marketing
tools ever — it just depends how it evolves.But so far you’d be crazy not to use it. It’s producing great results.
On the one hand, its hard to take much that John Reese says seriously after his outlandish claims landed a net negative with his service BlogRush. Given his propensity for hyperbole, I’m unsure exactly what he’s promising his victims e-book customers in the texts, but in a certain sense, he’s not wrong. When used in the manner it was intended, Twitter is a mighty powerful marketing tool. Even if John Reese makes claims that he can actually live up to this time, given that there are a million affiliate marketers with even less scruples, there will be a number of e-books to follow from several other folks trying to game the system.
Fortunately for those of us on Twitter currently, as studies plainly show, we’re nigh-immune to the shady tactics of those who would like to use the system for profit whilst at the same time adding no value. If these e-book marketers turn legit and realize this, we may have a group of highly effective evangelists carrying the gospel of Twitter to the masses. Or, conversely, we may have a group of unscrupulous jerks bringing in a load of undesirables for a little while (who will leave once they realize it isn’t profitable to try to game the system).
I’m can’t predict which. It could go either way.
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(UPDATED: See below.)
Getting stuff for free is always an attractive proposition from the consumer’s point of view, if not necessarily the greatest business model for the company doing the giving (go ahead and recall your favorite dot-com example here). Now TrialPay, a self-described arranger of “alternative payments” that just raised another $13 million, thinks it’s found a way to square that circle by updating an old department-store offer: Buy one, get one free.
TrialPay gets online vendors — many of them software makers who are painfully aware that few people really want to pay for their offerings anymore — to offer visitors a free product if they’ll sign into the TrialPay service and buy something from a list of selected, and presumably targeted, advertisers. Once the purchase is verified, TrialPay emails the consumer a coupon for their free swag. TrialPay has started to attract some well-known advertising merchants to its platform, ranging from brick-and-mortar stalwarts like Citibank, Geico, Comcast and Time Warner Cable to Web-centric businesses such as eBay, eBags and eMusic.
This is still one of those ideas that sounds kind of nutty until you dive into the business logic behind it. Essentially, the merchant who actually sells its product — the “buy one” side of the deal — is subsidizing its “get one free” counterpart in exchange for acquiring a new customer relatively cheaply. (The rationale is similar to that of merchants who pay bounties to blogs and other Web sites that deliver customers through affiliate programs.) That commission is often higher than the actual selling price of the free item, TrialPay says. And as long as the average customer buys more than an item or two, the selling company also makes money on the transaction. The New York Times explains it all in detail here.
TrialPay, which is based in Mountain View, Calif., makes money by taking a cut of the commission and supposedly also does some targeting to put the most relevant advertisers in front of would-be customers. The company told the NYT that roughly 2,500 merchants now show TrialPay offers to prospective customers and that its annual sales may top $20 million. (Presumably, TrialPay is referring to its own revenues and not the total sales volume moving through its network. I’ll run that down and update. UPDATE: A TrialPay spokesperson confirms that the company is expecting total revenue of more than $20 million in 2008.))
That said, TrialPay isn’t exactly intuitive the first time you come across it. Coincidentially enough, I ended up stumbling across a TrialPay site just yesterday while downloading a free version of the antispyware program Ad-Aware. First, TrialPay snags you as you’re about to launch the free download with an offer for a free copy of the paid version:
Next, you’re asked to sign into TrialPay with your name and email address. There’s a minimum of explanation here, and at the time, as someone who’d never heard of TrialPay before, some of the language here — especially, “Try it, it’s free” — struck me as a little on the hucksterish side. In fact, it was at this point that I bailed on TrialPay, particularly since I had no idea what I’d be signing up for and how much marketing spam I might inadvertently be opting into. (Yes, the signup box says your email address won’t be sold; I just didn’t believe it.) That screen is here:
Next, you’re presented with a variety of advertiser offers, which you can sort by category and even filter specifically for merchants who’ll give you instant credit for your purchases (some credits, particularly with big financial institutions, can take a few days). Here, for instance, is what the service offered me:
Whether such offers float your boat or not is a matter of personal preference. (I didn’t end up biting on any of them.) Overall, however, TrialPay offers a pretty intriguing model, and one that several of its participating merchants seem happy with. “You can reach out into the virtual space and find new customers you wouldn’t have otherwise reached,” Gap.com general manager Will Hunsinger told the NYT. “It’s a little different model, which is something we haven’t seen come out of the Valley in a little while.”
TrialPay just raised $12.7 million in a second funding round (the release is here), for a total of $15.8 million since its founding in 2006. Investors in the latest round included Index Ventures, Atomico Ventures and former PayPal executives.