All's fair in love and ad clicks

Want to know about the ethics of this business.


There is a site that I visit(that led me to here btw) whose administrator basically trolled another popular site until the administrator got fed up and closed the forum. He then "just happened" to have another forum all set up. I noticed that while the other site's administrator was working on setting up a more secure site (he was banned off that site several times btw) to keep him off the site he basically started using on his site, the "search engine" type words that would draw people looking for that site to his site instead.

In other words he had the title of his forum and then in tiny letters or in white on white font he had the title of the other forum on his. I imagine he did this in order to steal the members of the other site by tricking the people into thinking that this was the "new site" because it appeared that the old site had been going under renovations. We couldn't figure out why he would do this but it makes a lot of sense to me now, because he needed the high volume of members from the other person's site in order to get a lot of ad clicks.

There are several other sites in the same genre that are all starting to experience hacking problems and interestingly enough, as busy as he says he is on his site, he shows up to "offer advice" to the administrators on the other sites. My vibe has been that he is up to no good and is just trying to get more and more people onto his site for obvious reasons. I think he is trying to crash the sites the way he did the original site.

When he first started the site he encouraged people to "just click on the ads" and acted like he needed a lot of clicks in order to help offset the cost of running his site which he stated was $2 a day. He also got into heated debates with people questions who wanted to know why they had to click on the ads and his argument was that this is what he wanted instead of charging people to join his site. And basically to STFU.

I imagine this is a business and he is systematically taking down the competative sites in order to draw them to his site. For example there is another site that is renovating the site at the moment and he is using catchwords on his site again so that if people were to be looking for that site it would once again draw them to his site instead.


My question is this, Is this just business as usual? Is this how you make a living at this, by gathering as many members from all the sites you can, to your own site, by any means necessary.

Is this how it is done? Or would you consider this an unethical way to make money with ad clicks.

I am not sure what to do. Thanks.

 

What you describe is pretty much common with all markets, even with my retail stores people will actually steal my pages content for my top products and add such as XXX site states XXX. This way not only do they in a sick way give me credit for possible legal reasons they also get traffic looking for xxx from site xxx which is a common way reorder customers who failed to bookmark find some sites. To me it is not business as usual, it's very unethical but it is going to happen.

 

Thanks for the reply.

I am interested in what others have to say about this as well.

 

This seems highly unethical to me. I don't know if it's common but it wouldn't surprise me. Sometimes the very people who complain about the lack of ethics in others are worse than those they point fingers at. But, how can you tell without details? There are unethical people everywhere, I don't like it but what can you do?

Edited for clarity.

 

Well one of the members here has done this.

 

What you have described is highly unethical. The encouraging of clicks alone is really, really bad.

Many people here are Adwords advertisers and take this kind of defrauding very seriously. The right thing to do (for you) is to rat this bozo out to Google.

The other stuff is vile also.

 

how do you go about reporting someone?

 

I'm ignoring her, I suggest you do the same.

 

Never said anything about who or where but yet somehow you think that the discription fit you?

That's kind of interesting don't you think? Why would you think I was referring to you? I mean that's sort of a bit of nastiness and unethical and I wonder why you immediately applied that to yourself?

I wasn't talking to you. But thanks for the reply.


But since you have taken the time to answer, I am curious, is it in your opinon ethical to write the name of another person's forum in tiny letters under your own forum name while it is going under repairs or to do the kinds of things described above? I guess if you link your site to another popular site its almost the same thing right? Because their site would show up on yours and then you will come up in a Google search correct? So what is the difference? Why is it unethical to do that?

The consensus seems to be that it is not but seems like you are more business minded about it? In your opinion would that be an okay thing to do?

Thanks for the reply.

 

I'm ignoring her, I suggest you do the same.

 

Again you have a little paranoia drama going on here my friend! I have never mentioned your name or the name of any site, nor in anyway made a specific reference to identity. Not here and not in any PMs. I have only described behaviors. If you feel those behaviors clearly identify you, then that's your guilty conscience speaking to you. Not me.

I wasn't aware that this was your board?

 

riddler, I think at least a couple of us are starting to find this thread a bit creepy. You started out with what seemed like a theoretical question of ethics. You got the answers you requested. Now you're making vague accusations. Still just hinting around, nothing direct.

This creepy game isn't much fun.

 

Why not list specifics and not beat around the bush? If he knew you came from his board and are listing the same exact crap of course it's very logical to come up to the conclusion you're trying to wreck his name, or troll this board as well.

If what you say is true then why not list proof and specifics instead of beating around the damn bush! Might I ask what is your feeling on the ethics part? Your first post almost sounds like you wish to do what you are talking about, and wanted permission from others first.

 

Hmmm I guess I don't know too much about this stuff and wanted to know if it was considered ethical or fair game. Hence the title of the thread. I am a big softie at heart and don't have a good head for business. Just wanted to know from the inside out if this is "just business as usual" and that I am just a wuss or if this was considered a fair game. I mean as the first reply demonstrated, what is fair is not always what is right. Some people get caught up in the semantics.

Btw I have no idea who this yo-yo who keeps replying to me is. I am not beating around the bush I just want information. And to know what this business is all about. If someone else on here has personal dramas and paranoias that isn't my business to deal with. Its theirs right?

Never heard of this stuff before and I am interested in hooking up some of my college forums this way in order to make a little money for them in the process but now that I know you can't tell people to click that's set it back a little.

Not conniving, just uninformed and looking for a little information. I started this thread because I believed that this was not a good way to make money but if all's fair in love and ad clicks then I might suggest that people do what the guy I am talking about did. Its nice to know it is considered unethical but it does set my plan back a bit.

Thanks for the information. And no I am not here to troll. I don't have too much to contribute but I am really interested. I have friends who have no idea about this stuff and I will probably referr them to this site. So any help I can get is much appreciated.

 

Give me a break Lolijume. My board, the board you're on, and this one have all tracked your IPs. They're identical.

A person you PMed here, contacted me and told me about this. Plus you run your own site http://www.scarycelebrities.com/

I've phoned your ISP's abuse line and am filing a complaint. Enough is enough.

http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=29724&page=2 there's the rest of your posts. Looks like someone's trying to get someone else banned, no?

It's the same stuff you've been spouting since you got www.apsforums.com shut down. Little did you know I wasn't as hated by the admin as you might have thought. I was never banned from APS, but you were multiple times. You even tried to trick me into logging into one of your banned accounts so my IP would be banned as well. I wasn't a celebrity, or a celebrity promoter either. I posted a photo proving that I was in fact, an 18 year boy. And you said you'd stop. So honour that. This has been going on since August.

You also pretended to be me on said forum...my email address was steve_edenfield, you created an email with steve-edenfield and registered as edenfield. You even said you did it to scare me.

Plus "someone" spammed my blog yesterday with links leading to this forum and some other posts of mine. Same IP as yours. Do you think I own WordPress as well? Can someone explain to me how putting a link in my signature on another board, could cause that board to slow down to molasses? And posting pictures of asian girls who had gotten plastic surgery make me money?

For the rest of you, I invite you to visit my sites http://www.gossiprocks.com/ and http://www.gossiprocks.com/forum/ to tell me how unethical I have been.

Heck, you know what? I'll even give a 3rd party access to my admin cp so they can check the IPs themselves.

 

OK whatever dude, believe what you want. The person I PMed? I didn't PM anyone they PMed me and their name is Rob. I replied and I never said one word about you or your website so please just give it a rest.

I have never once mentioned you or your site so why not use the little ignore option. OK. Seriously, you even have me listed as a stalker. I have not done anything to you but reply to your accusation which I can see is a lost cause.

But since you invite speculation you might want to answer how you managed to have such a huge member list and a high post count on such a new website. That is what I am looking for with the sites at school. That's the only thing I'd really ask you about. Pretty cool site btw.

Beyond that please ignore me and I will grant you the same respect. I am not here about you nor do I care about you. So please leave me alone. I haven't said anything about you that would warrant this kind of attack.

Chill.

 

Riddler, what's love got to do with it? and I don't mean the Tina Turner song, I mean seriously, love and ad clicks? No connection.

 

Oh its an expression, "All's fair in in love and war." Sorry I thought it was a common proverb.

It was used, I believe in that movie "You've got Mail" with Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan.

In other words some people tend to play by ethics and the rules and others seem to have a gloves off approach to things. When the incident happened that I wrote about I felt it was unethical. But then I thought it might just be how things are done. Tom Hank's character wound up closing down her bookstore because in business "alls fair in love and war."

I wanted to know if it applied in this case as well. Sorry about the confusion.

 

Oh ok, for some reason I thought it meant you're in love with the person in question and feel guilty reporting them and didn't know what to do, so you came here to clear it up and make a decision.

 

No its not that. I am considering reporting them but I think its more about understanding the motivation that would cause someone to trash a board that meant a lot to a lot of different people. Money is a good motivator. But karma is worse.