Epoch :: Regarding Zango

Rand, there are too many affiliated websites ;) Also what if someone uses you second in their cascading rotation?

"Also, keep this in mind. What about your clients that use your service. Just because they "claim" to not allow people to target your signup page, they still continue to allow people to target your client's sites. All they do is hijack the traffic further upsetream. It diutes the value of the traffic and they sell it for less and make less but they still take it from you and your clients. You still lose transactions so you make less money and your client still gets screwed."

This is the heart of the matter right here, and it's really not fair of us to hope that Epoch or CCbill will go to war against these guys. They have a company to run and have to watch the bottom line just like everyone else. Here's something Epoch, CCBill or some company with a lot of pull and the means to contact damn near every webmaster in the biz with one email COULD do: Start a litigation fund.

I would be happy to throw in 5 or 10k towards a kitty to hire lawyers to drive Zango completely out of business, with hopefully enough left over to take on the next company that acts in an exploitative manner ie Acacia or one of our adult webmaster buddies who tries to patent "using an image on an html page" or some such bullshit. I think it's doable and practical. A REAL trade industry group with REAL teeth.

Right on

Come on Rand.... Yes i read that part... I also read this part too" "Furthermore, Zango has informed us that they have already disabled an advertiser that was the subject of board posts."
For all we know thier "Steps" could have been to disable the advertiser who was doing it.

the better question is do you believe them?


Where do i get a list of all sites that use epoch. I want to start testing to see how many of them zango is targeting.

It's nice you got this reply from them, but i wouldn't take it for fact as it appears you guys have.

Has nothing to do with skimming, it has to do with understanding how Zango's system works. Zango refers to "advertisers" as those who bid on urls within their system to specifically target cause a pop up over a targeted url that zango infected users go to. An advertiser could be an affiliate or sponsor.

The "Zango is investigating the situation" part is a classic

I bet they were shocked to learn of this situation that in fact represents their entire business model.

Like the crack dealer saying

"You mean the same people will keep coming back to buy more from me? I didn't know! Let me look into how to stop this."

I realize that, I was curious if they were alerted to whom or which company. Typically the word "an" referes to one person or company.

Where did skimming come into play? Damn now your confusing me. I understand people bid on words, domains, whatever. I am just curious about the "AN" and if anyone knows who than would of been. I also mentioned it would of cost a pretty large chunk of cash.

That is great news Rand!


Do we know if the other spyware programs are also owed by Zango?

programs such as:

Seekmo
hbtools
hotbar
peoplepal

thx,
Ray

seekmo appears to be them and hotbar is what no comes up on the bottom of the zango pop up. It use to say zango, now it says hotbar.

Sorry but the statement above sounds toooooo funny

Good to hear Rand, thanks for the info!

Rand, good news. Two things:

1) considering the circumstances, might it not be a good thing to reveal who was buying this spots, and

2) If they are going to extend this to "Epoch and its affiliated websites", would that include websites that process with Epoch? Sending them a complete list of the domains that process with Epoch would be a big step towards slowing the use of this product against adult websites.

Finally, if this is the case, I would hope you would communicate with RonC and let him know how to do the same for CCBill clients. It would be to everyone's benefit, I am sure.

although i trust epoch, i will never trust the word of a company that bases its business model off of swiping visitors from the person who earned them, to someone who paid to have the visitor stolen from someone else.

keep your eye on them rand.

If someone answers your 1) without asking numerous other questions that confuse you I shall punch my damn screen in protest.

It's good to hear, but this part made me laugh..


As if they don't have a clue as to what they were doing.