Tribal Fusion not accomodating towards (some) social media sites
At the risk of poo-pooing any chance at rekindling our relationship with Tribal Fusion, we (SuperMotors) were taken back by an e-mail we received from our (new) account executive on Friday morning, February 16th and 3:23 AM. In what appears to have been a standard form letter used to contact sites that have “fallen below the standards of the Tribal Fusion ad network,” we were notified that adult content was found on SuperMotors.net and that this was in fact a violation of the Tribal Fusion Terms of Service. This as the first such notification in our almost 5-month relationship with Tribal Fusionnnn.
Fair enough. They have every right to be monitoring the quality of their websites and I applaud them for enforcing this. This is what we received:
Hello Eric,
I am contacting you because it is our belief that the quality of the content on SuperMotors has fallen below the standards of the Tribal Fusion ad network. In particular, the content found on these pages:
(page link removed)
Content like this is a violation of our publisher contract; and as a result SuperMotors has been removed from the Tribal Fusion Marketplace and we are currently serving only defaults or PSAs. We value the relationship we have had with you up to this point, and if you would like to speak with us regarding ways to potentially continue working together, please don’t hesitate to contact me. Otherwise, I have to ask you to please remove Tribal Fusion’s ad code from the SuperMotors website and/or from your adserving system by the end of the week. Failure to do so will result in broken images appearing through our ad tags.The clause in our publisher contract for termination (for your reference):
6.2 Termination. Publisher may discontinue participating in the marketplace after the initial term by providing 30 days written notice to Tribal Fusion™. However, Publisher has an obligation to fulfill any advertising campaign configured to run on their site in its entirety prior to termination. Tribal Fusion™ may terminate a Publisher’s participation at any time if Publisher’s website quality falls below the standard set by other websites in the marketplace, fails to deliver the minimum number of impressions, or if Publisher fails to comply with any other provision of these Terms and Conditions.
2.2 Right to Refuse. Tribal Fusion™ reserves the right to refuse to accept any publisher at its sole discretion, as a member of the Tribal Fusion™ Marketplace. Publisher websites shall not contain (or have direct links to) any content deemed inappropriate by Tribal Fusion™ at its sole discretion, which includes but is not limited to the following: content promoting the use of alcohol, tobacco or illegal substances; sex, pornography or adult-oriented content; violence, expletives or inappropriate language; content promoting illegal activity such as copyright infringement, racism, hate, mail fraud, spam, pyramid schemes, investment opportunities or other advice not permitted under applicable law; content that is libelous, defamatory, contrary to public policy or otherwise unlawful.
Should you have any questions regarding this issue, feel free to contact me
Since adult content is also a violation of our own Terms of Service, we immediately removed the material referenced in the link they provided us (which had been available online for less than 24 hours), issued the offending user a “strike 1″ (we utilize a “3 strikes and you’re out” policy for our users) via e-mail, and responded to Tribal Fusion informing them the matter had been resolved. My follow-up e-mail:
Thank you for bringing this issue to my attention. We have removed this photo as well as another photo from this user’s account that were in violation of our terms of service as well as Tribal Fusion’s. We take issues like this very seriously and have sent the user a warning about posting future content like this.
SuperMotors.net is a site with user-generated content. Due to the volume of newly posted photos every day, it is impossible for us to monitor each and every photo, sound, and video for quality. For this reason, we rely on our members to help us police other user-generated content (pictures, sounds, videos, comments, forum posts, blog entries, etc.). We have a clause in our terms of service which specifically states that adult content is not allowed to be posted and if it is, it will be deleted and a warning will be issued to the user. If the user is found to violate this rule a second time, their account is temporarily suspended. A third time results in permanent account deletion, along with all of their posted content.
The image at the URL below was posted on 2/15/07, less than 24 hours ago. I hope that we can be reinstated and continue to be a part of the Tribal Fusion ad network as we have now resolved this issue as soon as we were made aware of it.
To our surprise, there is no leniency. My intent on this follow-up e-mail was more to issue a formal apology and to state that, “Yes, hosting adult photos is not how we do business, nor is it something we permit.” The response from Tribal Fusion:
Unfortunately we cannot have our ads running on unmonitored user-generated content. We have looked at your site more closely and have found numerous pages with this type of content. Because of this, we will be forced to deactivate your account. I have decategorized your site so you should now be showing either PSAs or the defaults you have set up in our system. Later today, I will have to deactivate your account completely. At that time you will serve error messages.
I apologize for the inconvenience.
So, in a span of just 12 hours, this revenue source has completely gone away. While Tribal Fusion isn’t our primary source of income, we are diversified enough among our own sponsorship dollars, subscribers, and Google AdSense, it still is an unplanned loss of revenue especially entering a weekend on a record-setting month for us. Revenue is still revenue, and we really take this seriously. Finding another ad network is not only time-consuming, but really painful when a company like Tribal Fusion is regarded as one of the best in the industry. How and why would we want to switch in the first place?
I did some further digging and looked other sites in the Tribal Fusion Automotive Channel. One of them is YouTube.com. I proceeded to reply to the message above explaining that even YouTube.com, backed by Google, is unable to deal with the overwhelming demand of user-generated content. They do their best by implementing a “report as inappropriate” link on every posted video to allow the community to help report offensive content. We’ve all seen the headlines that YouTube has droves and droves of copyrighted material. There currently isn’t a magic formula to policing user-generated content other than providing the necessary tools for the community to report inappropriate content and to deal with it in a timely manner (if you or your staff don’t discover it on your own).
Another site, which shall remain nameless, has one of the racy Tribal Fusion Ad Network Ads for True.com dating service running on a page where there is a link to view illegal street racing videos as seen in this screen shot:
It just seems that we are being held to unreasonable standards when other sites on the Tribal Fusion Automotive Network are obviously violating the Terms of Service. We fixed the problem on our end in a timely manner and are more than willing to work towards a better solution that will keep Tribal Fusion happy and more importantly, their clients (advertisers) happy.
I’ve asked Tribal Fusion how we can strive to meet their standards for providing sufficient moderation for on a user-generated content site. Unfortunately, our account exec is unreachable for the next two weeks, so I will be attempting to get a hold of another account exec this week to see if we can’t come to an agreement. It really seems like this is a misunderstanding. Maybe my e-mail was interpreted as “we don’t moderate our user-generated content?” Regardless, we can modify our moderating policies and procedures to meet Tribal Fusions needs. I just hope they are open to making this consideration.
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