I loath this site. Putting aside the dubious moral issues, it’s routinely pushed in social networking spam (such as Myspace), and it’s been advertised heavily in malware. Maybe it’s pushed by affiliates and not the company, but we’ve all heard that argument before. It’s still the company’s responsibility.
Now it looks like the site may have been acquired — and one of the rumored buyers is Penthouse Magazine. The size of the deal might be as high as $500 million.
Taking a look at a Wikipedia entry for the site is disturbing:
A key feature of their online advertising system is pictures of attractive women supposedly living local to the website user. This is achieved by IP-localisation software. On the AFF website (as with many ther similar sites), some advertisers (usually female) use faked details to entice others, including fake photographs. Some of the photographs known to have been used include those of well-known porn stars and similar…A velocitypress.com study showed that the male-female ratio is 10 to 1, that 2/3rds of the claimed subscribers have not visited the site for over 3 months and that nearly half of the women were angling for lesbian relationships.
What a circus.
I hope the acquiring company knows what it’s getting into.
Alex Eckelberry
“Maybe it’s pushed by affiliates and not the company, but we’ve all heard that argument before”
They were openly one of the largest clients of Zango for a very long time. When they finally cut ties, it was only for financial reasons…
“With all the promotion of Zango over the last few months so many new affiliates and ad buyers have signed on to promote and buy ads from Zango, they have driven the price of traffic up so much that it is no longer profitable for us to continue buying ads from Zango.”