Bolt.com - Inducted into the Hall of ShameBolt.com and Orbitz in the hall of shame
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Two more additions to online advertising's hall of shame: Bolt.com and Orbitz. The teen community site and the travel booking engine have both inflated their audience numbers by "popping up" pages of their sites on the screens of unwitting internet users, according to a new study. It's a sign that some big-name internet publishers, desperate to grab a bigger piece of buoyant online revenues, are using underhand tactics to appear more impressive to potential advertisers. This is the online equivalent of an offline publisher dumping thousands of magazines on doorsteps, and claiming those copies as part of circulation.
Ben Edelman, a researcher into spyware at Harvard Business School, says Bolt.com, which claims 15m unique visitors each month, was referred traffic by Paypopup, a marketing agency known for tricking internet users into visiting sites. Away.com, part of the Orbitz online travel group, received traffic via Web Nexus, another agency, this one registered in Bosnia, known for running pop-up advertising without a user's consent.
Bolt and Orbitz are by no means alone. Edelman earlier identified other culprits: Heavy.com, the video humor site, Conde Nast's travel site and one of the leading online business titles, Forbes, which is owned in part by Roger McNamee's Elevation Partners. It's typical for these companies to say that they used marketing agencies to attract new users, but didn't know they were in turn connected with less reputable internet marketers, such software distributors which sneak spyware onto users' computers, to spawn unwanted ads. That's simply not credible: if the publishers claim ignorance, it was simply because they chose not to discover how the traffic was obtained.
Edelman's discovery isn't simply embarrassing for these publishers; it has the potential to damage their advertising business. For instance, Verizon has a stated policy, that it does not advertise on pages spawned without a user's consent -- a policy contravened by its banners on Away.com."
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Makes me laugh really because when Bolt first came onto the scene as Boltfolio it has SO MUCH PROMISE, infact listen to this from December 2005
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BoltFolio - Online Portfolio (For the Cool Kids)
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So what’s BoltFolio? It’s a media-sharing site in the style of OurMedia, or perhaps “the Flickr of everything”. Now normally being called the “Flickr of Something” is a bad sign, but this attempt is extremely well executed - the UI is pretty slick, too (thanks, ajax!). What’s more, the site appears to have a target audience in mind - the 4.5 million(!) young people who frequent the company’s hella mad(?) youth hangout at Bolt.com. From the about page:
With all the excitement about file sharing, and ‘bigger pipes’, and blogging, and camera phones, and ‘Really Simple Syndication,’ and social networks, and movies on ipods, we starting daydreaming about an online portfolio- a place where you could store, organize and share all the media you create in the course of your digital life. A place where home movies can attain cult status. Where snapshots from your last vacation might inspire a stranger to make the same trip. Where the most timid voice can find a listener, and the most obscure subject, an audience. We built it, and called it Boltfolio.
Clearly, Bolt is incorporating some web 2.0 goodness into its offering. And with such a deep understanding of their audience, I’m guessing this new venture will do pretty well for the Bolt team. But there’s a wider point here: all these “web 2.0″ features are slowly becoming part of the landscape, reaching out to new audiences and a more varied demographic. Personally, I think that’s pretty gnarly"
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So it went from the hub of your digital life to the seething mess of retro-mergered, sold out, souless website that we all love to hate. By closing down it's original media flagship Bolt.com (Later Bolt2.com), Bolt Media disevowed what was left of its roots and went on a mission to make money. Except that by being sued for Universal for $30 million [link] stopped that mission dead in its tracks. So while Aaron Cohen, the then Bolt CEO, started out on a "User Generated Way Forward", ended up being a music pimping, underage boob popping, advertising slut. Flash, advertising and pop up should never be considered a good match and with Bolt making these things not only appear in the same sentence together, but "synergising" them, we have unfortunately entered the 7th circle of Hell. Although maybe one saving grace for the now seriously listing website is that Universal settled for $10 million [link] and GoFish.com (The now Bolt parent company) saying they will hang onto the site in it's present state, Aaron has conceded that content generation is the way forward, not media distribution, which got Bolt.com busted by Universal for music copyright.
For those that would like to see what made me so in love with the original incarnation of Bolt, check out my video I made for the 1st birthday of Bolt. My how things have changed. [link]
Promiscuous
love if you could attend!
Sydney dA Meet: [link]
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Interested in posing for a TFCD (time for CD) trade? Send me a note - North Coast NSW, Gold Coast and Bris.
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