Inside Word
Inside Word: How To Crack Down On ‘Scammy’ Offers In The Virtual World
The Inside Word is a weekly feature that looks at compelling industry debates and discussions unfolding on the blogs of employees at digital-media companies.
Blogger: Sean Ryan
Position: Chairman, teen-centric virtual world Meez
Blog name: SharkJumping
Backstory: Two weeks after TechCrunch first reported on what it said was the prevalence of ‘scammy’ offers on social games, the fallout continues. On Thursday, Valleywag reported that a law firm was considering a class-action lawsuit. This follows the resignation of Offerpal CEO Anu Shukla and the decision by Zynga to pull all offers from its games until further notice.
Blog post: Ryan writes: “I believe that CPA/direct response-style ads have a place in everyone’s payment options since there are some people who wish to trade time or other types of subscriptions for the currency offered in your game or world.
“The key issue is that the misleading offers are often the higher eCPM (effective cost per thousand impressions) ones vs legitimate ones, so some online publishers need to get used to a lower eCPM than they formerly enjoyed, but in the longer run, it will be healthier for everyone. The advertisers will be happier as well since they will be getting more legitimate buyers, making those CPA (cost per action) deals worth more to them than a bunch of lousy ones. And users will be protected from some of the more scam-like issues that we’ve been seeing for the past 18 months.”
Post-script: I asked Ryan whether—and how—‘scammy’ offers would ever go away.
His response: “There is no way to fully get rid of the ‘scammy’ offers. ... No one wants to say this, but a bunch of these offers are triggered by users, and then they call for refunds, but keep the currency—as soon as you see an offer that seemingly offers a good deal, then users just jump on it until the ‘hole’ is plugged in the offer. Same with really bad or ‘scammy’ offers - (it’s) amazing how quickly users e-mail or call Meez with the extremely negative offers, and we pull them down.
“There has to be a uniform code on how to fully reveal what the user is signing up for when they go through an offer (e.g., there are some people who actually want to sign up for mobile-subscription services and see this as a way to get something extra for it, but there are definitely a set of offers that obfuscate what they’re looking for, like taking a simple quiz, but then asking for your personal information in order to deliver the results.
“Do I believe the offer providers should crack down on it from their side? Absolutely, but not by looking at every single offer to make a judgment call on the ‘value’ of the offer since each publisher and user views it differently, but by making their offers follow a set of disclosure rules, including a follow up e-mail clearly stating what they signed up for, and giving them a period to pull it back, similar to certain state’s lemon laws.”
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