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Posts Tagged ‘offer’

This constitutes as some serious planning but if you preorder Madden NFL 11 from Walmart.com, you’ll get a $20 gift card when the game ships on August 20th. The $20 gift card is good for the Xbox 360, PS3, and Wii versions. You can get a $10 gift card with the purchase of the PS2 or PSP versions

Read more from the original source:
Walmart.com offering $20 gift card with Madden NFL 11 preorders

Stop! Turn that car around! Roku is selling the HD-XR for half-off. There’s no reason to go to the store! The Roku is one of my favorite living room devices and it just got better.

Continued here: 
CrunchDeals: Half-off Roku’s HD-XR

PS3 owners no longer have to be jealous of Xbox 360 owners. Now, they too can stream Netflix goodness through their gaming console of choice

Original post: 
Today is Netflix on the PS3 day

What do a crane game, two Iron Men, and Wall-E have in common?

Original post: 
And our costume contest winner is…

Last week Zynga CEO Mark Pincus said that they would take steps to remove scammy advertising offers from their social games. There have been a couple of missteps since then, and Facebook responded by taking Zynga’s newest game, FishVille, offline.

Zynga insists they are serious about cleaning up the industry. And today Pincus has announced that the company will remove all offer advertising from their games.

This isn’t a meaningless action. Offers account for 1/3 or so of Zynga’s rumored $250 million in revenue.

All offers will be removed by the end of today, says Pincus, “until we can control their inclusion and presentation ourselves.”

The blog post also discloses that Zynga is an investor in DoubleDing, an offer provider that competes with OfferPal and SuperRewards. DoubleDing was serving the mobile offers that popped back onto Zynga on Friday.

Pincus’ blog post:

Ensuring zynga’s user experience – removing all cpa offers

michael arrington posted yesterday on mobile offerings still being shown in our new game fishville. I want to explain why this occurred and how we are taking more aggressive steps to ensure this never happens again.

zynga has not been able to control the ad content as it is managed by the offer companies that we work with.

with regards to yesterday’s incident, the offer provider, doubleding, told us this was the result of their failure to remove an optimization queue which was still showing these ads to 10% of pageviews. i want to be clear that zynga had no control over the pages being shown and never filtered them from michael or anyone’s view.

we recognize it is our responsibility to ensure that offers which generate a bad user experience are not shown with any of our games.

therefore, we are removing all CPA offers across zynga games until we can control their inclusion and presentation ourselves. This will be effective by end of day today. this move is worth it for the long-term user experience and value to our partners like facebook and myspace.

yesterday’s mobile offer issue was particularly painful as we had helped fund doubleding earlier this year in the hopes of cleaning up the space and raising the bar on user experience. we intend to influence them and others to improve their ad content and be long-term focused for the success of the social gaming and social networking industries.

as I said in my post last monday, my mission is to build zynga into a sustainable consumer service with enduring value to our users. we will continue to do whatever it takes to earn our users trust and respect for the long-term.

We’ve also heard from DoubleDing President Matt Handal, who responds to our article yesterday:

Michael,

I am the President of DoubleDing and this is not the way I wanted to meet you. I wanted to provide you with some additional information and offer more details for your Zynga article dated Nov. 6. It is my desire that you relay this information to your readers as soon as possible.

It is our intention to fully comply with all Facebook, as well as partner (e.g. Zynga), advertising standards. Zynga’s standards require us to remove all mobile offers which do not offer a clear user value. We take 100% responsibility for any issues that arise from our actions and commit to correcting any errors.

As evident from our logo on the bottom of the offer wall, DoubleDing powers the offerwall displayed in this article. Mobile offers were displayed because of a technical glitch in our system. We have an optimization engine that serves advertisements to 10% of the traffic. Sometime late Thursday or early Friday, a bug in this engine began pulling previously removed mobile offers and displayed them in the mobile tab of our wall. If a user would have refreshed the page 10 times, they would have seen offers in the mobile tab only once. We identified the bug and corrected this within 30 minutes of being notified today. There was NO IP BLOCKING of any sort, beyond the normal country and fraud blocking.

Finally, to reiterate our commitment and seriousness of our intent to adhere to high standards and bring value to the growing virtual currency space, we will be donating ALL revenues derived from this and any future mistakes of this sort to charity. DoubleDing will NOT derive any financial benefit from any such issues.

If you would like any more information or to discuss further, please feel free to contact me directly.

Thanks,

Matt Handal
President
www.DoubleDing.com

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Here are some stories from this week on CrunchGear:

Japanese company announces Dragon Ball headphones
Toyjector: Cute mini projector to be released in Japan
Choken Bako: Cute Japanese piggy bank

Feedback is rolling in on our Scamville post last night. Even more people are coming forward to talk about their experiences getting ripped off by Offerpal and SuperRewards, or how they were pitched by these companies to add offers to their apps.

We’ve got a lot more to say about this before we’re done. And we’re hoping that Facebook and MySpace make the right decisions for users and begin to enforce their own rules on subscription and other scams. Even if it means a huge drop in advertising revenue from the apps that rely on scams to make money.

But in this post we’re going to let two other people make their points. In a comment to the post yesterday HotOrNot founder James Hong talks about how his company tried, and quickly removed, scammy offers from their site. He says “In a nutshell, the offers that monetize the best are the ones that scam/trick users.”

And PlentyOfFish founder Markus Frind talks about being pitched by companies like Offerpal and SuperRewards. He also follows up with a post on his own blog.

James Hong:

We ran offers like this back in 2005 for a very short period of time at HOTorNOT, that is until we realized what was going on. In a nutshell, the offers that monetize the best are the ones that scam/trick users. Sure we had netflix ads show up, and clearly those do convert to some degree, but i’m pretty sure most of the money ended up getting our users hooked into auto-recurring SMS subscriptions for horoscopes and stuff. When I hear people defending their directory of deals by saying Netflix is in there, i am reminded of how hotel pay-per-view has non-pornographic movies. Sure it gives them good cover, but we all know where the money is made.

In the end, we decided to turn the offers off. Quite frankly, the offers made us feel dirty, and pretty much on the same level as spammers. For us, the money just wasn’t worth it. On top of that, we relied on our goodwill with users and focused on growing by having a product and company that our users liked. Our sense was that using scammy offers would make good money in the short run, but would destroy our userbase in the end. Perhaps apps on facebook don’t feel this pressure because facebook is so huge, and there are always new people to burn.

I’d like to point out that there are some game companies out there who are holding out on using offers to monetize their users. Personally, that makes me 10 times more likely to pull my credit card out for them.

PS. I don’t think the concept of letting people fulfill offers to get credits is structurally a bad one. I for one would like to see the offer networks work together to create some set of public agreement on what types of practices are banned from their network, and perhaps they can evan have some sort of certification logo. These practices will only stop when companies are not competitively crippled by NOT doing them. In effect, we need a nuclear non-proliferation treaty among the offer networks.

Markus Frind:

I’m surprised it took this many years to be reported by the “media”. These kind of scams have been going on for years and I get several emails a month from these vendors promising to make me millions of dollars a month. I’ve no doubt I could make millions a month off these scams, but they are scams and will eventually bring government regulations. Michael mentions tattoo media look up tatto media sued on google and you will see all the government agencies sueing them.

Michael, is just barely scratching the surface, these scams are extremely far reaching and deep. Some of these scams are charging users over $1 million dollars a day, and many of these middle men/networks are nothing more than smoke screens.

There are a number of comments from anonymous posters saying that there’s no fire here behind the smoke. The thing is, they’re lying.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Lots of negative feedback from our post the other day on Cash4Gold’s amazing growth and profitability. This year, their third year of operations, they are on track to make $160 million in revenue and $50 million or so in profits. All from encouraging people to send in gold jewelry in exchange for cash.

A handful of comments pointed out the very funny Onion spoof on the company where the U.S. government uses Cash4Gold to pay down the national debt. But many of the rest say the company is a scam.

Example: “They offer people significantly less money than their gold is worth and prey on people’s ignorance and desperation. If those profit margins are right, they’re basically stealing from the uninformed. Search online and you’ll find a ton of scam stories about them. It is a very, very shady business…”

Another: “There must be a difference between doing business and stealing from people. I can not believe that this company is still in business. goverment should bring some regulations and monitoring to this industry. due to the recession people are desperate and this company is taking advantage from people. how the owners can sleep at nights. they are taking advantage of people in need of money.”

And: “It appears they are litigious scammers. Running scams is a great way to rake in money.”

Etc.

The chief complaint is that the company offers customers too little money for their gold compared to the spot price at any given time. My understanding is the company aims to pay no more than 50% of the spot price to sellers. The rest, after operational and substantial marketing expense, is profit.

And there is certainly nothing wrong with a company making a profit. They are offering a convenient service to consumers (they send you the prepaid envelope to ship your gold, pay insurance, and ship the gold back to you if you don’t take their offer). If you don’t like what they offer to pay you, use another service. The site even tells you that pawn shops, local jewelers and online services like eBay and Craigslist may fetch you a higher price.

Overall I don’t see any serious ethical issues at all with Cash4Gold, with one exception. If the company is in fact not sending back jewelry promptly to customers who have declined the offer, that needs to be fixed. But hard bargaining and lowballing offers to consumers isn’t evil. It’s just a business decision.

There are no ethical issues here that you don’t see with Google’s business model that generates obscene profits. Or the Windows/Office franchise. Or the exorbitantly priced hot dog vendor at the baseball stadium. Or $30 wifi in a hotel.

I’d personally like to see them make a flat out promise to pay some percentage of the spot price of gold – say 50% or 66%. That way people can have a better idea of what they’ll be offered. Given how many competitors there are in this market, I wouldn’t be surprised for something like that to happen eventually anyway.

But let’s save the “this is evil” comments for the really insidious stuff. Like Jigsaw, who continues to make a killing of the sale of our personal information. Or the Intelius scam we reported on last year where consumers were being automatically signed up to useless credit card subscriptions.

Making obscene profits may make you jealous, but it isn’t evil. There’s a reason so many people are using the Cash4Gold service – it’s easy and convenient. They don’t make promises on their website that they don’t keep, and they aren’t tricking or scamming people. They are simply buying low and selling high, and that’s capitalism at its finest.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Russian investment group Digital Sky Technologies has placed a tender offer to purchase up to $100 million of common stock from current and former Facebook employees, we’ve confirmed from a source close to the deal. Employees who would like to accept the offer must accept the terms within 20 business days from today. The offer is for $14.77 per share, valuing the company at $6.5 billion.

Facebook has confirmed the transaction, and sent the following statement from CEO Mark Zuckerberg: “While individuals must make their own decisions about participating in this program, I’m pleased that the price DST is offering is much greater than the price originally considered last fall. This is recognition of Facebook’s growth and progress towards making the world more open and connected.”

This comes just a little over a month after DST invested $200 million in Facebook, purchasing preferred stock that valued the company at $10 billion.

If the offer is fully accepted DST will purchase approximately an additional 1.54% of the fully diluted stock of Facebook. With the two investments combined, DST will own approximately 3.5% of Facebook in total.

The difference in valuation ($10 billion in May v. $6.5 billion today) is not a sign of a lower valuation. The stock DST is acquiring in this tender offer is pure common stock without any special rights or privileges. The May investment was for preferred stock, which includes various voting and liquidity provisions that makes it more valuable. Generally in any liquidity event (an acquisition or IPO), preferred stock will convert into common stock on a 1:1 basis.

This isn’t a complete surprise. In an interview I did with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and DST Founder and CEO Yuri Milner, both said DST planned to offer to purchase employee stock.

Here’s that interview again in case you missed it:

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TweetFeel is a new web service by marketing research startup Conversition Strategies that combines real-time search for Twitter with sentiment detection algorithms.

The idea is for people to use TweetFeel to run search queries for products, celebrities, companies, brands etc. and thus get a notion of what the average Twitter user thinks of them in a matter of seconds.

TweetFeel evaluates real-time tweets about whatever search term the user has entered for positive and negative feelings, presumably taking into account words like ‘good’, ’sucks’, ‘great’, ’screw’, ‘love’ and whatnot. Search results flow down the screen as they are calculated as positive or negative, and the service offers an overall percentage number to indicate whether the majority of results are one or the other.

Individually, the results are evidently hit or miss, but in general there could be some interest from marketers to regularly cross-check references on Twitter for the company they work for, the products or services they market and the brands they represent.

Or you can just enter your name and see what people really think about you. In real-time.

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