An Interview with Zango Myspace Affiliate, Mark Arruda

Somebody just sent me a link to this interview with everybody's favourite Myspace man, Mark Arruda. It mentions going from a $6 hourly job to a $60,000 a month wage, his Chrysler 300 and the fact that he rakes in big money from his webpages aiming to "enhance" Myspace profiles.

No kidding.

Mark, you may remember, is the guy who advises people with Myspace accounts to add Zango videos (complete with Adware) to their profiles. He doesn't mention Zango will be served to visitors in return for them hosting the clips on their profiles, and all of these antics also completely break Myspace Terms and Conditions.

The article mentions him pulling in 70,000 hits daily, and "over two million hits" a month.

That's a lot of hits, and quite likely a lot of installs - no specific mention of Zango, either, though the final section of the interview mentions him doing a "recent deal" with a "marketing firm". Hmm. At any rate, we often hear a lot about how the age of the people using these sites are "over eighteen" and all that jazz. But guess what? On a ring of eight websites - a number of them pushing Zango content (where you have to be over eighteen to install the Zango Adware)....a poll on his main website says:

Most visitors to Mark's Web sites are between the ages of 13 and 18.

Note, the above says sites, not site. As in, across the board.

Now, if you click into the poll he used to obtain these results, you (strangely) see results for a poll about what the "next Myspace layout" should be. I wonder why? Must be a technical glitch.

So we can't see the figures, but we can get a good idea of how many people do his poll. Here, you can see a total of 111. Here (via Google Cache), you can see a total of 510. It's not unreasonable to assume the "age poll" would be something along those lines.

Regardless, we have a site whose main userbase seems to be (in his own words) "Between 13 and 18". If he has "more than two million hits per month" and the bulk of his traffic is kids, well, you do the math. Not exactly the most scientific way of determining the results, but hey, he said it, not me.

Effectively, we have an open admission from the webmaster of these sites that the people most likely to install the Zango videos on their Myspace profiles and / or run them are under the age of eighteen, on the basis that if that's the main age of his visitors, it stands to reason that a higher proportion of that age range would also interact with the Zango content.

Not only that, but despite the main age range of his userbase being between 13 and 18, he is apparently not paying any attention to the Zango Terms and Conditions either and knowingly presenting his young users with Adware that requires you to be over the age of 18 to install it in the first place.

I don't know how much more rope this guy needs to hang himself with here, but he's doing a pretty good job of it. The question is, in light of this latest "revelation", will Zango do anything about it?