Inside Word: How To Crack Down On ‘Scammy’ Offers In The Virtual World

Sean Ryan

The Inside Word is a weekly feature that looks at compelling industry debates and discussions unfolding on the blogs of employees at digital-media companies.

Blogger: Sean Ryan

Position: Chairman, teen-centric virtual world Meez

Blog name: SharkJumping

Backstory: Two weeks after TechCrunch first reported on what it said was the prevalence of ‘scammy’ offers on social games, the fallout continues. On Thursday, Valleywag reported that a law firm was considering a class-action lawsuit. This follows the resignation of Offerpal CEO Anu Shukla and the decision by Zynga to pull all offers from its games until further notice.

Blog post: Ryan writes: “I believe that CPA/direct response-style ads have a place in everyone’s payment options since there are some people who wish to trade time or other types of subscriptions for the currency offered in your game or world.

“The key issue is that the misleading offers are often the higher eCPM (effective cost per thousand impressions) ones vs legitimate ones, so some online publishers need to get used to a lower eCPM than they formerly enjoyed, but in the longer run, it will be healthier for everyone. The advertisers will be happier as well since they will be getting more legitimate buyers, making those CPA (cost per action) deals worth more to them than a bunch of lousy ones. And users will be protected from some of the more scam-like issues that we’ve been seeing for the past 18 months.”

Post-script: I asked Ryan whether — and how — ‘scammy’ offers would ever go away.

His response: “There is no way to fully get rid of the ‘scammy’ offers. … No one wants to say this, but a bunch of these offers are triggered by users, and then they call for refunds, but keep the currency — as soon as you see an offer that seemingly offers a good deal, then users just jump on it until the ‘hole’ is plugged in the offer. Same with really bad or ‘scammy’ offers – (it’s) amazing how quickly users e-mail or call Meez with the extremely negative offers, and we pull them down.

“There has to be a uniform code on how to fully reveal what the user is signing up for when they go through an offer (e.g., there are some people who actually want to sign up for mobile-subscription services and see this as a way to get something extra for it, but there are definitely a set of offers that obfuscate what they

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