Just when I thought I was heading for a quiet and peaceful end of the week, I started to receive endless reports of malware ads being served on many web properties, particularly to US-based users. Having witnessed (and reported) such problems not too long ago – remember the Vizi – Oridian war of accusations last week? – I had an uneasy feeling of déjà vu.
Cascading pop-ups, malware ads infested with trojans and other nasties, adult ads, you name it – they’ve all been served yet again through RMX (Right Media Exchange) but clearly originating elsewhere. Just when I’ve escalated about 3 such reports to our ad optimizer, the following message arrived, from, you guessed, Vizi.
“Dear Publishers,
As you know there have been some problems on the RightMedia exchange that has affected Vizi and many other networks. We have been dealing with these issues and have been on the forefront of the fight against the misuse of the exchange. We have been working with both RightMedia/Yahoo and Federal Law Enforcement to catch these criminals!
We have taken some new policies that will make it harder for anyone to bring bad ads into our network. These changes will help ensure that less problems happen, and has also meant that we are banning approximately 25% of the possible revenue we can make. It was a hard decision – but the right thing to do.
However, yesterday while banning certain types of ads, I accidently made a mistake and put to to accept those type of ads. This has been fixed – and if any publisher was affected, please contact me personally.
Again, while these issues have not been caused by us, I want to extend a personal apology for not doing more initially to catch them and work harder to prevent them. My team is extremely amazing here at Vizi and they have been working extremely hard, day and night to make sure that all our clients and partner publishers are treated right. This is my personal responsibility and my fault – not them.
I hope you can continue to work with Vizi, and I thank you for the business and the relationship we have built.
Best,
Pesach Lattin
CEO, Vizi Inc”
Well, dear Vizi, this is simply not going to cut it, and the explanation would be hilarious if it wasn’t, in fact, quite tragic. You’ve had huge problems for quite some time – and had done pretty much nothing about it,while ignoring emails and reports of bad ads sent your way. Why would publishers still stick with an ad network that has a “proven record” of failures, one may wonder?
March 24th, 2009 at 11:47 pm
Vizi is not the originator of the ads, they were run through the exchange and the company doing it was found. If you would like to contact me, I can show you log files and so on of where they came from and how they worked.
March 25th, 2009 at 5:47 am
Please read this email from the one and only Pace: I had a bad publisher and he wants to buy this traffic! Wow
I want to be honest here, and also see if there is something we can work out.
I know exactly how you generate your traffic – I have videos, log files from both my own computer, I know about the ads being in 1×1 pixels.. and so on…from three other networks, Ben Edelman, and independently from Yahoo. If you want to google me, you can find that I created one of the first electronic crimes task forces for the US Secret Service.
I’m not here to judge or accuse you, but no need to deny it. That being said, I like your traffic because of targetting needs and getting information for visitors and some other things.
Let’s be honest here moving forward – I know the ads aren’t going on those sites, and some of our clients we have had to refund. I do however, need lots of cheap traffic in general… and willing to work knowing that is shitty cheap traffic that is going on a bunch of shit and so on. If you are willing to be honest with me moving forward, we will create an account moving forward, I dont care where it goes, etc…but we will not be putting our brand clients etc on there and so on.
You will not be paid for the old traffic in full, we will do some payments based on what was usable, but you will be paid in full moving forward if you agree to this deal. If you don’t agree and want to deny this, I’m just going to ignore you and we will go our seperate ways. Either way, I have no plan in doing anything else with this information, because its not my business what you do with your business.
best,
Pesach Lattin
Vizi Inc / Vizi Direct
June 2nd, 2009 at 8:19 pm
Hilarious! If the ads are not coming from him, then why does he know that they account for 25% of his revenue and that it was a hard decision to let go of them. How could it be a difficult decision if you have no knowledge of them? Or, Peasach did know, and maybe they weren’t his ads, but apparently no problem in re-monetizing them and taking his cut. Joke. Right Media should suspend Vizi from the Exchange for a month and watch the complaints drop like a ton of bricks.