Well Knock Me Down…. August 19th, 2005 1:44 pm

Last year we discovered a website that was an exact clone of Loquax. The siteowner had not only downloaded the entire site but also had the audacity to adapt his logo to look like Loquax and include the Loquax duck. After a few emails to the ISP hosting the site the index was removed. However, a couple of months back it was discovered the rest of the Loquax files not only still existed, but were now in many of the search engines.

Emails were again sent to the ISP, but this time ignored. Contacting the siteowner was not possible as the details on a whois lookup are false. Finally, as a last attempt to reach resolution before instructing someone legal to takeover we phoned the ISP and after a brief chat action has now been taken and the content removed!

The shock of this was that the guy at the end of the phone was so decisive. One look at the other site and action was made. Great stuff!

Another shock materialised in the first publisher email from Accelerator Media. Accelerator Media is an ad-network Loquax became part of probably over 18 months ago, maybe longer. It’s owned by eType and we’d been part of their ad-network for a number of years. After restructuring their big clients (e.g. Friends Reunited) stayed as eType and smaller sites like Loquax were put on Accelerator Media.

In effect any representation we once had vanished over night. Communication from eType was never great, but they served us well for the time we were with them. Unfortunately a number of issues came together (e.g. poor quality ads, one of our competitors on the same network, lack of communication) that made us decide to move elsewhere.

For the last 6 months or so we’ve been with another ad-network. No one from Accelerator Media has contacted us about the drop in revenue and no one contacted us even asking why we weren’t showing banners. Perhaps it’s not their way or frankly they didn’t care or we weren’t that important an affiliate or partner for them, but from our point of view it demonstrated their attitude towards partner sites… i.e. they’re not interested!

To get a ‘first communication’ email from them some 18 months after being on their network and some 6 months after serving our last banner also quite clearly demonstrates that moving to another ad-network was a sensible decision. It’s nice to see that perhaps eType are now taking more interest in Accelerator Media, but for us it’s too little too late.

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