Every network has thousands of publishers and hundreds, if not thousands, of advertisers, but very few businesses, especially those in the cpa world have a very long tail. Even Linkshare and Commission Junction, who probably have the longest tail in terms of publisher distribution, have a significant amount of business deriving from a limited number of relationships. Unlike royalty, the who’s who list can change. A person who was on it one year can fall off, just as one who no one has heard of before can become an almost legend in a short amount of time. The best of the best tend to find out about one another eventually. Sometimes, it’s a function of time in the space – the more people you meet, the more relationships you have the more likely you are to know who truly matters. Other times, it’s more viral, more instantaneous. However it happens, the haves often end up associating with one another while everyone else tries to get to know them. And, like celebrity, those who have yet to achieve status, are forever interested in the lives of those who have. And, while we all know that for each bit of second hand knowledge or public comments, there is generally a story behind the story. Sometimes, it’s not as interesting as we might think. Other times, it’s even more outlandish than we could have imagined. Rarely though do we get an insight into them, and even more rare are they aired in public. Such was the case of the verbal battle that will be known as either Yugate or Shoegate.
The story began earlier this month when Dennis Yu guest authored a post on TechCrunch. That in and of itself is a pretty good accomplishment. TechCrunch, were it an offline publication, would have more readers than most major cities newspapers do. It is almost a mass marketing medium, which means a post on there will get some attention, especially one titled like Dennis’, "How To Spam Facebook Like A Pro: An Insider’s Confession." Not long after the post came out, instant messenger windows and email in boxes of those in the affiliate/performance marketing space were ablaze with links to the story. Emotions were mixed – intrigue, outrage, skepticism, you name it. What made this piece different from many was that instead of someone just saying there were shady things happening, here was someone claiming to have inside know how and a willingness to share it. And, if anyone is to do it, Dennis seems like the right guy having worked first at the pioneering social media ad network and then as an arbitrager. That would imply he knows what works, and in his list, it proves out, i.e. toolbar offer, email submit offers, and mobile being the top three. And he encapsulates the dilemma well, that between people wanting to do the right thing and getting a taste of money. Once you taste money, it becomes all about the money for just about everyone.
Dennis goes one step further and mentions a few black hat tricks that current arbitragers use on Facebook. They aren’t major, e.g., cloaking; instead they are temporary holes that arise from the newness of the platform and that it hasn’t achieved the automated efficiency of AdWords. But in the cloaking description Dennis throws out this nugget, "One of the largest Facebook advertisers (I’m not going to out you, but you know who you are) employs this technique to this day, using a white-listed account." Then, in shifting from Facebook flyer and display inventory on apps, he shifts to covering the subject of the "Scamville" blow-up, the incentivized landscape. Here he lists the big players, but it made more than a few curious why out of the five big players only two were mentioned, and the third on his list had just barely launched yet was called biggest. Overall, though, were you to not know the author, you would find it articulate, insightful, and in more ways than not on point. You would have thought highly of its author. Seems straightforward enough, right? That is until we get to the comments, which fall in two camps, the insiders and the outsiders. The outsiders take the post at face value. The insiders layer in existing information, and read the post through a filter. Or worse, they air potentially dirty laundry in the comments. Or, even worse, they make you the subject of their own post, the most notable being that from ShoeMoney.
In a rather unexpected move, Shoemoney, crafts a frank, no holds barred piece of his own, titled, "Dennis Yu – Rise and Fall of A Con Man in The Affiliate Industry." Equally unexpected, he makes public what only a few knew, that the line regarding cloaking was directed at him, saying, "Ya so if you have not guessed it… its me he is talking about. I like how he doesn’t want to ‘out’ me in public." It was raw, full of personality, and drew tremendous support from his readers. It is also the number two listing in Google when doing a search for Dennis Yu, allowing his follow-up. Somewhere in these two posts and in the hundreds of comments on each, is a fable about not just our industry but humankind and how it is to live life online. After being fortunate enough to hear about the saga from someone truly on the inside, what we find is just that. It’s a tale of good intentions gone awry, of the dangers of publicity, of casting stones inside glass houses, and of knowing who you are picking a fight with before doing so. We all have done things of varying degrees that we wouldn’t do again, and guaranteed more people than you think, hope, or want know about it. So, the lesson is really to be cognizant of flaws and aware of how we portray ourselves. Unlike any other time before, if we try to convey an external image without considering how others who really know our past transgressions will react, we will come out worse for wear every time.
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