I was ripped off by industrybrains some time ago. My budget was used up with click fraud and industrybrains denied and refused to refund me although it was clear that some Chinese guy got a bot to click on our ads. the experience using industrybrains was so annoying that I use it as an example I give to new internet entrepreneurs:
1. you will get screwed
2. even if the traffic provider has nice ad real estate it doesn’t mean he wont screw you
Today I got 10 emails from marchex.com telling me i have a low ad budget. marchex.com? who the hell are marchex.com and when did i use their service? after some googleing i found out that industrybrains changes their name to marchex. I guess a lot of people think industrybrains suck so they had to change their name to the parent company that bought them in 2005. It looks like they think so as well since nowhere in the email did they mention their old brand.
5 Comments
Marchex is so so bad.
The commit click fraud in 2 ways. one buy owning the actual websites and two, but simply lying about clicks.
I warn ANYONE using Marchex to please set up a landing page just for them and use ANY type of counter and you will shortly see.
Also, you can save time and simply do a search for Marchex Click Fraud on the internet. They are terrible.
Please, everyone, avoid Marchex and all of its products. The company is a complete scam making hundreds of millions of dollars on small business owners.
I repeat, do not use any Marchex products.
If you have proof there is a department in the FBI for fraud, I’ve used them before and found that a few Cc: to them while e-mailing them will sometimes get your money back. These people want to help but the best is to not tale any offer where they refuse you to use your own host. I have seen this all over the internet, Jeff Paul, Some Herbalife dealers, Freedomonline, shopfreedomonline, they are everywhere. The lure of “help” is very inticing to we small owners, to bad we can’t find a good cpa company.
I ONLY SPEAK FOR MYSELF, AND I AM NOT SPEAKING ON BEHALF OF MARCHEX. I AM NOT AUTHORIZED TO, THEREFORE NOTHING I PRESENT IS OFFICIAL LANGUAGE. THIS BLOG RESPONSE IS PURELY BASED ON MY OWN EXPERIENCE AND KNOWLEDGE.
I am Chinese and I work at Marchex. From my knowledge I am also the only Asian Male that has worked at IndustryBrains from 2007 -2008.
If you were making a general reference about 3rd party click farms from Asia, then i take offense from a very racially charged remark.
If you believe it was me that did something immoral, I take even more offense to your accusation that I had something to do with delivering unconverting traffic. I am seven year seasoned advertising professional, and work with large fortune 1000 companies and agencies to SMB. I build my business and reputation on my relationships with my clients and can assure you my strategy and methods for delivering affluent audience come from tier one publishers and qualified traffic.
In fact, IndustryBrains has a scrub in the technology to only charge on traffic that meet its requirements, which include unique IP addresses and visit that spend a minimum amount of time per visit. The product will deliver ALL traffic, but the client is charged only for traffic identified as non fraudulant. The Product can identify if traffic looks like it comes from a bot, a farm and avoid charging for traffic that comes from certain countries, the same IP with in multiple times a day, and has a short duration per visit. We have internal reporting to support this.
The rebrand has nothing to do with bad reputation. If anything IB had a great brand. Marchex introduced a new product to market, and integrated several companies it owned and operated as separate entities including IndustryBrains, into a new offering and product. With integrating a new product line and services, it only made sense for Marchex to rebrand all its companies’ brands as one brand, becoming a true full/self serve one stop shop.
MCHX is public and traded on the NASDAQ, the board is compromised of several influential and well reputed executives of industry related brands. I doubt that anyone of them, including myself and co-workers would knowingly align ourselves with fraud.
I am now into my third year with the company, our product enhancements are stronger and our publisher/partner list keeps growing with premium publishers.
If you had any inconsistency with your experience in the past, I would be happy to consult and strategize with you a better approach in 2009 using our platform. You might be pleasantly happy with your results and conversation with me.
I also would like to mention, that that IndustryBrains product we are talking about is different from the several other services/products offered by Marchex in 2007-end of 2008. I have only worked on the IndustryBrains product and platform.