SensoryMetrics

So GroundUpAdvertising only wanted to confirm your email address so they can start spamming you.

Hi Mitch,

Great post! We love to hear about interesting and surprising search results. It is very exciting to see so much interest in TinEye!

Thanks for being a fan, if you have any other feedback or more interesting searches to share, please let us know at tineyefeedback @ ideeinc.com.

Have a great weekend!

~ the TinEye team

Fiew! I’m not the only one with an eye for stock photos. The oddest moment for me was landing on a competitor’s site and finding a picture of brother-in-law’s daughter. (She’s a model.)

Strangely I had some dealings with them and they paid me for the ads with no issues.

Its not uncommon for me to get asked for reviews and ads via email so initially had no reason to worry….. this however makes me worry now.

What info could I have possibly given them? I gave them my paypal address and installed links onto my blogspot blog!!!!

How random, I received an email from Melinda Hathaway’s co-worker, Casey Ferguson, today.

In my due-diligence, and OCD about researching companies, I came across this post. Glad I did. I was nearly duped by a stock photo!!! I will have to check out this TinEye.

I was just contacted by Casey Ferguson today offering to pay $30 to put an ad on my site.
We don’t do ads but a quick check of their 2 page website was interesting in what it did not reveal:
1. No contact information
2. No portfolio or testimonials or real info of any kind
3. Numerous typos in the copy, what there is of it
4. This on their Advertising Packages page:
“To see a sample report or to contact one of our past clients for a reference feel free to ask us.” There is no way to do that.
5. And, thanks to Mitch’s research, bogus “employees”

Everything about it reeks of a scam.

I was contacted by Amanda Howard with the same type of thing ($30 per ad on my site) and she wants to send me $600 for advertising. It just feels fishy but they’re text based links and nothing about them seems off.

I don’t want to pass up $600 for something I can do in 15 minutes, but where there’s smoke there’s fire…

It’s a scam for sure! I received the same offer from the beautiful Megan. It’s funny how most of the employees are young, gorgeous women. Stay away…. stay FAR away and don’t send them any data. They’re either seeking a path into your PC or plan to scam you like typical Russian dating sites. They become friends first and then oh my, I need money, just broke up with my mate and I’m so lonely. Get the idea?

That sounds pretty good. I think I’ll go for it! I wonder if she’ll look like Nicole Kidman?

Interestingly, I came across this site after receiving an email from firstdayads.org.

The gig is that same – they offer to pay you $ to include some links on your site with payment via paypal. I was cautious about this for reasons expressed by others above and the fact that the email came from an Owen Anderson but was signed off as having come from Frances. The employee listed on the company web site is Frances Owens. WTF?! Someone in the company has a Dissociative Identity Disorder…

I sat on it for a few days then checked it out again today when I had more time to think about things. I checked out the Internet headers on the email show that it’s coming from:

mail.groundupadvertising.com.
IP address 72.10.215.230
Hostname static-72-10-215-230.albyny.csvoip.net
ISP INOC, LLC
Country United States

I’m with the others above – given the questionable site content and the fact that this sounds too good to be true (which on the Internet means it undoubtedly is) means I’ll be avoiding this offer like the plague.

Wow! You all really, really need some HOBBIES. To sit and post about this?!?!? i CANT believe 15 minutes of my life is gone. So you really had time to rip apart a website that is trying to come across as anything but SPAM? The harm!?? And i checked out this so called site. Stock photos? I think they would have been sued if it wasn’t legit don’t you? Any sense or brains here people? Are we really THAT upset we got offered money? I mean come on this is borderline pathetic. Grow up! As if you aren’t taking money to support your sites from advertisers in the first place!

The debate is heating up, I had a similar rant on my post, also from Albany. My Feedjit showed about 8 or so hits from Albany before the comment came, so perhaps the gr-ads.com office is doing what they think is damage control.

Too funny. Yeah, Mitch don’t ya have anything better to do than to point out the usefulness of tin eye?
You know, you’re only pointing out a single spam email out the hundreds that we get ever day. It makes you wonder if they’re all coming from one lonely guy in his parent’s basement in Albany.

I was contacted by “Casey Ferguson” of GroundUpAdvertising. I responded without thinking, because I thought it was just a small company. They asked about a banner, and I was willing to give them the space for free on that one page bc we don’t do ads either, as long as the picture was high quality and good.

Then in response, I get an email from Casey Clarke at webmatchers.net . She didn’t hide the fact that she had already written to me on a different account with a different name. I went to the website and read her profile and saw a picture of her with her two boxers. I looked through the other people’s sites and the CEO.

Then I went back to the email and looked up groundupadvertising. Same website structure, same voice/tone in the copy and VOILA! Casey Ferguson has the exact same bio as Casey Clarke, only the photo is different…

Definitely a scam of some sort, but not sure what.

me

That’s funny, there are lots of people contacting me about purchasing text link ads as well. Do you happen to know which of these small companies are realiable?

Recently, I gave text link ads a try and as far as I could tell they’re a real company that would pay you something. The enticing feature was that I got to see what would be advertised on which post before I approved it on my site. However, I wasn’t too crazy about the way the link insert worked. The links they inserted were not contextually relevant to the conversation of the post. We had to turn off the plug-in and cancel text link ads. Perhaps they’ll improve the way their text ads links work. We’ve also been very reluctant to use Google ads because we do not have sufficient control of what shows up. As an experiment we were able to target some of our favourite blogs with ads with whatever we wanted to put there. Further, with the way Google works, the owners of the site never know what’s showing up in those ads. For the time being, we’re not getting paid for any of the links on our site. If you find anything good well paying sites out there, please let me know and I’ll try it out.

You could try Project Wonderful’s pay-per-day ads, as opposed to pay-per-click. You will get paid whatever the advertiser bids, whether anyone clicks the ads or not.

Publishers have full control over what ads are displayed on their site, and can opt to approve every ad first.

Unlike Adsense that requires you to earn at least $100 to get paid, Project Wonderful will pay you after you have a minimum of $10 in your account. You can also use the funds in your account to pay for advertising your own site on others.

How much you can make depends on the traffic you have, what ad format you display, how many slots you have in a unit, but mostly on how much others are willing to bid on your ad slots.

Some people are making over $20/per day on a slot…others are making $0.

They allow you to set a minimum bid amount and some publishers set it unrealisticly high. Nobody is going to pay $1.00/day for a site that has only 5 page impressions, but some publishers set the minimum at that and they make nothing.

Others, like myself, set the minimum at $0 and while they might be providing free advertising some of the time, generally they will make more than $0.

If you are going to set a minimum bid amount, I would probably start with $0.10 and see how it works for you, adjusting it if necessary.

I wrote a sort of a review about the service shortly after I started using the it, and it gives examples of some of the types of advertisers you will come across when using the service. A lot of blogs and an incredible amount of web comics are signed up as advertisers.

http://cranialsoup.blogspot.com/2008/02/my-experiences-with-project-wonderful.html

Wow, what a bunch of losers you people are. Don’t you get that these people are just doing a legit job of advertising for their clients. I found this via a search in Google because I was also contacted by them, I was interested and did the deal and it has worked out great. There is no scam about it from what I can see and I have not received no spam emails or anything of the sort. The sites they advertised on my site were legit, good websites that I am totally comfortable with endorsing and I have actually bookmarked some of them and will use them frequently.

Last night I watched the tv show ‘W5′ they were doing a story on the Pigeon King. You know, the one that you had reported back in January: http://sensorymetrics.com/2008/01/02/business-models-dont-count-your-ponzi-pigeons-until-theyre-hatched/

Sure enough, the King declared bankruptcy this summer and they say he stole millions of dollars from hard working farmers.