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.
Quantcast Internet Ratings – A publisher & advertiser’s dream
MarketingVOX ran a blurb today on a new company called Quantcast. Quantcast is described as follows:
Quantcast is the world's first open internet ratings service. Advertisers can find reports on the audiences of a half million web sites here. Publishers can ensure their sites are represented accurately by tagging them for direct measurement. The service is free to everyone.
This service is what Google Analytics (light-weight, free web analytics) is to Omniture SiteCatalyst (heavy-duty web analytics). It functions on a similar methodology of partnering with ISPs for aggregate data and crossing it with panel data to provide a higher-level overview of your target audience such as:
- Gender
- Age
- Household income
- Ethnicity
- Head of household education
- Children
This is similar to the data that Hitwise provides, but the very tip of the iceberg and best of all, free. Where it's extremely valuable is you can analyze the stats of other sites (partners, competitors, potential sponsors, etc.). Hitwise, through their contractual structure, will typically limit your reach within the data to just the pre-defined categories that sites are lumped into. Hitwise also provides a much deeper dive into the data. Quantcast is a superb service for small-to-medium sized businesses.
Sitegraphics & Common Audience (I love these!)
What is also provides is a snapshot of the sites that index well against your audience (the "Sitegraphics" feature). Additionally, it also provides a list of sites that your audience also visits. Check out the snapshot of SuperMotors.net here. Unfortunately, we changed domain names in July of '06, so there's only 5 months of data (their stats go through November 2006 thus far), so the data isn't 100% accurate. I have however added their tracking code to SuperMotors.net in an effort to paint a more accurate picture of our visitors.
What value does this provide?
As a site owner, this is a very powerful tool, particularly if you sell your own advertising inventory. On SuperMotors, while we run Tribal Fusion and Google AdSense ads, we also have our own ad serving system and subsequently sell inventory in it. We do not have a dedicated sales force, so we rely heavily on ad networks for revenue. That said, selling our own inventory offers the greatest ROI.
In looking at the "Common Audience" chart:
We have data that supports which sites our visitors also frequent -- thus we have data to bring to potential sponsors to help sell ad inventory
Here we see where our visitors are also going. I know of a lot of these sites and personally visit them quite often. You can see a trend of Ford and Bronco-related sites, primarily because our userbase indexes heavily towards those makes and models of automobiles. Those sites aside, we also see retailer sites such as Summit Racing, 4 Wheel Parts, Edelbrock, Bronco Graveyard, James Duff, and BC Broncos. Fortunately for us, Bronco Graveyard is already a sponsor on SuperMotors.net (where we sold directly out of our inventory). We now have data that can help us craft a story to approach these other retailers and manufacturers. This shows that our visitors also visit their sites. This has nothing to do with referring links, it simply tells us over time that these sites are also visited by our members.
But, if they're already visiting these retail/manufacturer sites, why would they want to advertise on SuperMotors.net? They already are getting the traffic.
Sure, this argument could be made. However, one of the driver's behind choosing where to advertise is qualifying the sites you advertise on. What better way than to advertise on sites that you know is already a match for some of your consumers. Leverage this demographical data and expand your reach to this network that is already proving it has qualified consumers.
As a sponsor or someone who spends ad dollars, this tool is great to identify sites on which you would consider advertising on.
On the flip-side of this coin, this also means we could pursue partnership opportunities with the non-retail sites who have visitors that use our services. Perhaps even we would advertise on these sites to further promote our services. We are much better off advertising where we already have advocates than trying from ground zero. The same holds true for retailers who are looking to advertise online. Examine the sites where your users are currently visiting and tap into the visitor bases of those sites.
Moral of the story: Use data to support your advertising pitches
Ad networks frequently approach advertisers and pitch them on demographics, ages, incomes, education, and all of the metrics that align with an advertiser's target market. If you sell your own advertising on your site like we do, use this tool to identify potential sponsors and leverage the data in your sales pitch. It's a much more compelling if visitor data shows that users who visit Yoursite.com also visit TheSponsorYouWant.com. It's hard for a potential sponsor to tell you, "no" because it's hard to argue against data. This levels the playing field for you if you're a smaller company -- get them hooked with the data and talk about the sponsorship package you can put together for them.
Blog by Eric Long
I'm an experienced digital product & marketing strategist and am passionate about providing outstanding cross-channel, mass customization (product configurators), and considered-purchase experiences.
About Eric Long
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