Affiliate Mudslinging – The Ringtone Flare-up

“CPA Empire and Mobile Sidewalk Team Up On Ringtone Fraud.” That headline illustrates the difference between being a company and being an affiliate. A company cannot say such things, but a one-man show whose personal branding skills might just top his abilities in search can get away with such a title. The salacious sounding post came to being when Jeremy Shoemaker, a.k.a Shoemoney, uncovered a ring tone affiliate marketer whose site engaged in some unethical if not illegal activity. Shoemaker even captured (grainy) footage of the site that upon entry of a phone number forced a click on the submit button.

The web site forcing a click on the submit means that every person who entered a number received a text message asking them to confirm. Not every user that lands on the phone entry page will enter their phone number. Even if 100% percentage of users who entered a number also hit submit, having the website hit submit before the users do, still shows bad taste. One could even try to argue that since the users do not become signed up upon phone number submit, auto-submitting the number is a minor thing to do. This again ignores any semblance of good taste, not to mention costing the user one standard text message.

Jeremy’s post helped put a stop to a gross impropriety, but in doing so it puts a slight stain on the affiliate as blogger industry and illustrates the personal brand dilemma. The post exhibited about the same accuracy checking as a typical issue of The National Enquirer. Unfortunately, had the post been vetted further, it would not have drawn the attention it did; it would not have made it to the front page of Digg, and it would have not contributed to the Shoemoney brand, the quasi-AdBumb / aspiring Howard Stern for search marketing. Were Jeremy’s main concern everyone who participates in the ring tone / mobile marketing vertical playing by the rules along with treating the consumer in the best way possible, he could have contacted Scott Richter directly instead of posting first.

If Scott and CPAEmpire did not respond in a timely fashion, then Jeremy could have written about it and used the public forum to force the proper action. Instead, the way the post reads, it suggests that CPAEmpire and Mobile Sidewalk had a direct and knowledgeable role in the offending site. The offending site did generate leads for CPAEmpire and ultimately Mobile Sidewalk, but neither of the two companies had a role in the creation or maintenance of the site. Larger affiliates often earn the ability to create custom landing pages, and in the age of Google deciding that more and more pages qualify as jump pages, the more technologically savvy ones will often host the phone number entry page, if not the entire process. An affiliate network can police the pages well, but even the best would not have caught an affiliate that decided to game the system.

To CPAEmpire’s credit, it appears they reacted quickly, shutting down the affiliate’s links only hours after a post made at 10:30pm at night. The affiliate claims a testing script went live and that caused the auto-submit. (Who is to say – not like an affiliate would claim they did it on purpose.) After speaking to both CPAEmpire and Mobile Sidewalk I have also learned that the subscribers who joined during the time period this site claims to have had the script live have been cancelled. Hopefully this means they will not be charged, and/or if they have, then the money will be refunded. Perhaps the only questionable action on the part of CPAEmpire is having an ongoing relationship with this affiliate.

Iomad2serve.com, the root domain in question, belongs to Vinod of Imperial Online. In addition to that domain he also runs totally-free-ringtones.net, a questionable domain to continue to promote given the current environment and blacklisting of the word free. Both domains do not give accurate WhoIs info, which only makes his activities more questionable. Vinod also likes to play the role of vigilante, gathering screenshots of companies using the word free when they shouldn’t, and often emailing the carriers themselves. In the end, we, even Vinod I assume, all want the same thing