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Be Careful When Doing
Business with an Advertising Network called clickXchange
December 6
- 2001 - from the Editor MarketingViews. As a publisher I've experimented with
hundreds of promotion programs over the last 10 years to increase the readership
of our various computer publications. In the 1990's one of these methods was "pay
per click" programs run by ClickTrade and clickXchange. I stopped dealing
with most of these a couple of years ago because of the high incidence of fraud
in participating sites. The 10% of dishonest sites made the administration and
refund claims not worthwhile. In fact ClickTrade (acquired by Microsoft)
eventually stopped running pay per click programs and replaced them with "pay
for sale" programs, I suspect prompted by the sheer scale of the fraud
problem.
The scams varied in sophistication, but a typical one would
work like this. I'd be approached by affiliates via my contact page, and filter
out 95% or more of irrelevant low quality sites. I'd accept sites which looked
like they had some original content which were related to computing. The fraud
sites would not be detectable at this stage. Many of the best fraud sites would
also pass through the filters set up by the network program managers about the
incidence of surfer domains, click rates etc. But I always analysed whether the
volume of traffic from a site seemed credible. Often my referral log would show
web pages which looked completely different to the web pages I'd seen. Just long
lists of banners and links, with a message saying something like "get paid
to surf - click on as many links and banners as possible". clickXchange had
a good no-quibble refund policy about reported fraud. But the effort was just
not worth it compared to other promotion methods like straight CPM banner ads.
Anyway
I finished with clickXchange a few years ago, and I thought that was it... I
would still get the occasional email reminder, but that's just you'd expect.
Then a few weeks ago I got the first email titled "Recurrent
Payment - Please Reply" with a message saying - "Your account
balance with clickXchange.com has fallen below the notification level set for
your account. Your account also shows that you had selected a recurrent payment
method to keep your account active. We'd like to confirm your intention, that
you would like us to run another charge on your credit card for the same $xxx
you previously deposited, before we take any action. Simply reply to this email
and we will proceed."
I was a little bit annoyed with that
message, because I react very fast to incoming email, and had almost replied to
say "take me off your email list". But if I had done, that would have
cost me money. I realised it was a harder selling email, but still within the
bounds of acceptability. But I had a gut feeling I'd be seeing more of these
soon. I was right, I now get these reminders daily. As far as I'm concerned
that's no longer an acceptable solicitation to buy a service. That's SPAM. And
if I reply to that SPAM originator it's going to cost me money.
If
this develops any further, I'll report it in these pages. I don't recommend
these types of affiliate "pay for click" traffic programs anyway,
because of the fraud issues mentioned above, so it doesn't change my thinking
about the concept. But it seems to me that getting this kind of SPAM from a
site you have done business with in the past, is something you would not want.
And there's a simple way to avoid it.
...Later:- the same
irritating email keeps coming every day. |
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Internet Advertising
Revenue Holds Steady As All Ad Sectors Decline
New York, NY - December
4, 2001 - The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) says that Internet
advertising in the United States held steady in the third quarter of 2001,
totaling $1.792 billion, down 4.1 % from Q2's $1.868 billion. The first nine
months of 2001 revenue stands at $5.55 billion, compared to $6.06 billion for
the first three quarters of 2000, off 8.4%. This, according to the IAB's
Internet Ad Revenue Report, which is conducted independently by
PricewaterhouseCoopers, New Media Group.
"While the online revenue reported has shown little change from
the previous two quarters, the fact that our industry is holding steady should
be looked at as a positive sign," said IAB President & CEO Greg Stuart.
"The $1.792 billion in revenue for the quarter indicates that the Internet
is holding it's own against what we have been hearing about other advertising
sectors, indicating that, contrary to popular belief, advertisers are not
deserting the medium and in fact are committed to the Internet long term."
...Interactive Advertising Bureau |
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Exabyte Corporation Selects
Strategic Alliance International as Public Relations Consultancy for UK, France
and Germany
December 04, 2001 -
High-tech public relations consultancy, Strategic Alliance International
has announced its appointment by Exabyte Corporation, a performance
and value leader in network backup systems, to handle its European PR programme
including the UK, France and Germany.
"We are very pleased
that Strategic Alliance International is our Public Relations consultancy for
the UK, France and Germany," said Taylor Allis, manager for Corporate
Communications and Investor Relations at Exabyte. "Their knowledge of the
storage sector is excellent and will play a significant role in marketing
Exabyte products in Europe. Strategic had a successful track-record with Ecrix,
prior to the Ecrix /Exabyte merger."
Strategic Alliance International has a long history in the storage
sector, having run successful campaigns for many key industry players. "Our
appointment is a compliment to our experienced European account teams, who
succeeded in building the successful media programme for Ecrix and VXA
technology," said Nicholas Flowerdew, Strategic Alliance International's
chairman. "Exabyte is an extremely good fit for our business and we expect
it to be a long and mutually beneficial business relationship."
...Exabyte profile,
...Strategic Alliance International |
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Writing an Electronic
Communications Policy
December 3, 2001 - a
new article on MarketingViews by Yvonne Buchanan, an instructor at The
PR Academy includes checklists and guidance for writing your own electronic
communications policy. With corporate America's heavy reliance on
technology, an electronic communications policy should be a mandatory component
of every company's employee handbook. Marketers, are often at the front line of
the communications interface with their company's external environment. They are
most at risk, and also have the most to gain. ...The PR Academy |
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Gartner Dataquest Forecasts
Worldwide IT Services Spending to Be $865 Billion by 2005
MOUNTAIN
VIEW, Calif. - December 3, 2001 - Worldwide IT services revenue is projected to
reach $554 billion in 2001, a 7.1 percent increase over 2000 revenue of $517
billion, according to Dataquest Inc., a unit of Gartner, Inc.
The industry is forecast to continue growing through 2005, when IT services
revenue will reach $865 billion. While poor economic conditions and the impact
of heightened terrorism are expected to dampen growth to single digits through
2002 in many segments and regions, Gartner Dataquest believes overall demand
will bounce back to double-digit growth from 2003 through 2005.
North America remains the leading region for the IT services
industry. North America IT services revenue in 2001 is projected to reach $271
billion, and the region will continue to drive worldwide sales through 2005, as
North America revenue totals $423 billion.
Western Europe is on pace for IT services revenue to total
$149 billion in 2001, and the region will still rank No. 2 worldwide in 2005
when revenue is expected to surpass $229 billion.
Development and
integration has been the largest segment within the IT services industry, and
this will continue through 2005. In 2000, the development and integration
segment reached $156 billion, and in 2005 the market is expected to be $263.5
billion. Business process and transaction management (BPTM) services was the No.
2 segment in 2000 and is forecast to have the strongest growth rate in the IT
services market as enterprises attempt to reduce the cost of transaction
processing in noncore areas by turning to external suppliers. BPTM services in
2000 totaled $74.8 billion, and in 2005 it will total $145.2 billion.
Economic and political uncertainty is expected to hit consulting the
hardest of all sectors. Gartner Dataquest believes the general recovery of
consulting will lag the larger economic recovery by three-quarters. However, the
introduction of Windows XP, demand for CRM, supply chain management and
e-commerce solutions, and adoption of Web services software should drive growth
beginning in 2003.
Additional information is available in the Gartner
Dataquest Alert "Worldwide IT Services Forecast: Growing in Tough Times."
...GartnerGroup |
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Looking Back on Sun's Cache
Memory Problem
December 3,
2001 - A new article in the SPARC Product Directory looks back at one of
the problems which dented the confidence of Sun users in 2001:- random data bit
changes due to flaky memory. This is every product marketers worst
nightmare, technical problems in your hottest new products, which only become
apparent after you've already been shipping them in volume. Sun's specific cache
problem is now very much in the past... Could the problem have been spotted
earlier? - Yes. Could something similar happen again? ..to Sun and other
high-tech manufacturers. The article says yes. |
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| today's news etc from
MarketingViews | |
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Other news on this page
Be
Careful When Doing Business with an Advertising Network called clickXchange
Internet
Advertising Revenue Holds Steady As All Ad Sectors Decline
Exabyte
Corporation Selects Strategic Alliance International as Public Relations
Consultancy for UK, France and Germany
Writing an Electronic Communications Policy
Gartner Dataquest
Forecasts Worldwide IT Services Spending to Be $865 Billion by 2005
Looking
Back on Sun's Cache Memory Problem
earlier news (archive) |
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Serial Attached SCSI on
STORAGEsearch.com |
| Gunnar the
Goblin didn't understand high-tech standards, and he had the feeling that
he might actually be on the wrong web site. He hoped that the
illustrators at ACSL
would hurry up and get the proper new Megabyte the Mouse graphic for Serial
Attached SCSI drawn real soon. | | |
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