Mark Arruda Responds

I was rather surprised to see Mark Arruda (a Zango affiliate pushing Zango videos across Myspace) left a reply on my site in relation to the articles on the whole Zango / Myspace fiasco. In the interest of fair play, I'm pasting Mark's statement below, with my reply underneath. As you can imagine, things do not go to plan...

Actually since your last article all zango has been removed from my own personal sites. The reason there is no mention of zango in that newspaper article is because zango was long gone from my sites by the time i was interviewed. As far as the "recent deal" with a "marketing firm"....it's not zango. If you were curious if it was you could have just emailed me rather than attacked me in this article. I have not been involved with zango for some time now. The figures of revenue shown are entirely from yahoo and nothing else. zango was a 1 month expirement that went wrong. Part of being an entrepreneur is trying new things. I can admit my mistake of trying it. The only thing i can ask is that you recognize that i have fixed that mistake.

marksgraphichelp.com does not link to any zango video sites, the only reason you have found "hidden" pages is because i'm too lazy to remove them. Those pages will not be added back in any way, shape, or form. As far as the other sites that you are claiming to be mine, because you looked up the owner, they are not mine. I did built those sites, but they were sold long ago. Any sites owned by me have zango content removed. Please do not use me as your zango spokesperson because i no longer use them. There are many other sites out there much larger than mine, using zango, and making much more money than i could ever imagine....attack them.

...and my response....

Mark, I'm not "attacking" you - merely attacking the process that results in Zango videos being placed on Myspace accounts which stinks. To be fair, you can't take the full weight of the blame because it turns out Zango themselves gave their affiliates the greenlight to go out and do this. You would (reasonably) assume that the people in charge actually know what they're supposed to be telling you, but oh well.

The Interview you had was published July 23rd. You claim Zango was "long gone" from your sites by this time. Dude, here's your flagship website pushing Zango from July 9th. More importantly, here's your Myspace profile popping up a Zango installer prompt on July 12th.

This is not "long gone", by any stretch of the imagination, unless time is somehow running backwards nowadays. And the Zango videos only vanished from your flagship site and your Myspace profile a few days after the original story broke on July 14th (screenshot of the page minus video links here).

"marksgraphichelp.com does not link to any zango video sites, the only reason you have found "hidden" pages is because i'm too lazy to remove them. Those pages will not be added back in any way, shape, or form."

Wrong - you link to four sites from your "Partners list" that promote Zango content via Myspace. Pimpmycom, Videocodelab, Myfreevideospace and Lol-pages (which pops up a Zango install prompt as soon as you land on the page).

Out of those four sites, two are very interesting, because they're the subjects of some of my writeups which you claim you no longer own, despite the Whois details for both lol-pages.com and Myfreevideospace.com pointing to you. One - if you haven't bothered updating the registration details, that's your problem. Two - Here's why I don't buy this anyway:

1) Both Lol-pages and Myfreevideospace carry Yahoo Ads (they take up over half the page, as you can see from the screenshot). The affiliate ID for the Yahoo Ads on those sites matches the Affiliate ID for the yahoo ads on Marksgraphicshelp.com. In other words, you "sold the sites" but for some reason they're running huge adverts at the top of each page that finance you rather than the new webmaster? First time I've heard of a deal like that.

2) This is the killer - you say you've "had no involvement with Zango for some time now", and you sold the sites mentioned. That being the case, why did the lol-pages site in the screenshot below pop up a Zango prompt as I was writing this article, and also have an "add me as a friend" link that takes you to....your Myspace profile?

It doesn't pop up an installer prompt anymore, by the way, because the Zango video embedded in the page was pulled literally within the last 15 to 20 minutes or so. One second it was there, the next - gone. You can prove this by checking out the Google cache screenshot (note the Zango installer), currently up to 26th July - that's after the date the website interview was published, by the way. If you keep checking Google Cache, you'll see the popup will remain until today's date assuming Google continue to crawl the site.

In addition, here's a screenshot of the same site from July 30th - as you can see, still pushing the Zango content with the popup.

By all means remove the Zango content, but please don't talk to me like I'm stupid and pretend you're not running round removing all the content right now.

A better trick would be explaining why lol-pages has removed the Zango content just now, even though you don't own it anymore (yet it links to your Myspace profile).

Must be another oversight of that new webmaster ;)

Finally - Mark, if you're going to post here, realise that your IP Address is logged. With that in mind, it's probably not a good idea to have posted this fifteen minutes after your last two posts under the wonderful guise of "Benny Bananas":

your all just haters...mad that you didn't have a million dollar idea and that your website flopped...let the kid do what he does and move on...it takes 5 minutes to uninstall if they have a problem with it..blame zango not Mark Arruda for zango installs...he didnt invent it...mcdonalds gives millions of peopl heart attacks and you dont post articles about the people who work for them...leave the kid alone...congrats mark

Yep, congrats Mark...from Mark. Still, I'm sure Zango will appreciate you saying "blame them" for everything. I think this sound & vision link says it best.