Zango was targetting Myspace: The Proof

An anonymous tipoff (who claims they were an affiliate of Zango, but got fed up with them emailing him all the time) recently saw the whole "Zango on Myspace" thing and was surprised to see Zango claiming they have a "hands off" policy towards Myspace. From the InformationWeek article:

"Those two test accounts were actually created by one of our developers who was exploring possible opportunities, but he didn't realize it was Zango business practice not to target MySpace," said Stratz. "He should not have been doing this, and we want to tell MySpace that we didn't mean to target them." The developer, said Stratz, would soon be deleting the profiles.

Surprised, because he claimed they sent him what appeared to be a mass-mail shot from a Zango rep, showing all these fun ways to push Zango on Myspace. Intrigued (and having this confirmed by another source), a third person then went and sent me a copy of (what I presume) is the full Email, completely unnanounced. As you might have guessed, it's a rather spectacular read.

You can see the full content of the Email (minus names) here, in plaintext format.

Here's a brief timeline:

The zango profiles created by the zango developer had been on myspace since at least the 28th of May 2006 (when it was last updated, though of course it could have been online longer than that).

The email I'm referring to is dated 8th June 2006.

My article about this didn't appear until 9th July 2006.

Now, Zango told InformationWeek on July 10th 2006 that they "didn't target myspace" - with the emergence of this email, its clear that they were indeed targetting Myspace and in quite an innovative fashion. I'm not reproducing the full Email, but here's some choice snippets (all extracts are in Italics):

"Zango is fairly new with myspace sites and it took me some time to see what works and what doesn't."

...fairly new?

An interesting phrase to use, and yet another snippet of evidence that this has been going on for some time. But wait, it gets better - first, they suggest the standard method of attack....placing the videos directly onto the Profile page:

"Put one of our videos on to your myspace profiles and all of your friends will see it"

Already a major no-no where Myspace is concerned. Then the stakes are raised - the Zango representative goes on to suggest that...

...more profitably, *go to a bunch of your friends* who have popular profiles and pay them (it's up to you so much. One of my partners said 5$..maybe offer to split the money with them?) to put a zango video into their profile through your site. This will give you hundreds of extra installs a day (this probably works even better than having them on your actual site).

Myspace forbids people making money from piggybacking the system. Simply placing videos pushing Adware on a profile to make money is bad enough, but encouraging people to hand money over to one another to put money in the pockets of both an Adware company and an affiliate is yet another step down the murky road of "not allowed".

He also recommends putting up things like "a Karate guy doing flips, and link it to a gallery of 100 Zango videos". Apparently, it's "WAYYYY more profitable".

Finally, they also mention filling their websites up with moving gifs, because "people love that shit". Here's the site linked to as an example. Note that the content is consistent with the kind of thing kids like - sparkly banners, fluffy kittens and smiley pictures of mice. Hardly the kind of thing someone over eighteen is likely to jump at.

This Email is entirely inconsistent with the comments made to the public - Zango were clearly targetting Myspace as a way of increasing their revenue stream, and I rather doubt just one employee was sending Emails of this nature to Zango affiliates.

It also explains why Zango may be so reluctant to condemn their affiliates for promoting Zango content on Myspace. After all, who knows how many more Emails like the above have been sent out to people with a Zangocash account? They'd seem a little silly convincing everyone to go do it, only to recant and tell everyone it's a really bad idea five minutes later. At least we now know why so many websites out there are promoting Zango Adware in relation to Myspace.

Because at least one Zango representative was telling them to do it!

For someone "not targetting" Myspace, they're doing a damn fine job of it so far. There's more to the email, but it's not particularly relevant so I'm not covering it here.

Add to that the fact that they let Mark Arruda continue to push their content across Myspace - because it's not against Zango's "terms of agreement"...and you have yourself a mess. I say again - what about the Myspace Terms & Conditions (specifically Section 5, Non commercial use)? Are they less important than Zangos Terms & Conditions? Looks like it.

And yet one of the most common excuses for Zangos rogue affiliates is that "the Zango T&Cs are always displayed".

If we're not supposed to care about Myspace T&Cs, why should we care about yours? That's a side-issue anyway, because Zango needs to wake up and realise that the issue here is not about terms and conditions (though it is important). It's about decidedly dubious business practices on the part of their affiliates and seemingly not doing anything about it. Mark Arruda's continued existence as someone promoting Zango via Myspace is a shining example of this.

The question is, is anybody listening?

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