8 ms·

So what else is new. If you work at Facebook or Google you're benefiting directly from the similarly shady practices they used to grow on their way to being "p

• hkmurakami 10y ago
  > Do you remember when at LEAST 20% of Facebook's revenue came from Zynga? Like less than 5 years ago? This was cited in the FB S1 filing, which was around March 2012, so you are correct.
• smt88 10y ago
  One major difference is that Facebook and Google also provide value to their users. They do good and bad things. The company in the article did only bad things.
  • vthallam 10y ago
    Wow! So it balances out? I am not supporting 50onRed here, but the point that doing some good and some bad things is okay, is no good.
    • kbenson 10y ago
      Nobody excused Google or Facebook for their problems, but this was presented as a comparison, and one between companies that have many legitimate and and non-problematic divisions and products to a company whose sole purpose is to circumvent control of the user and the authors of the content they are viewing.
  • avs733 10y ago
    I think the company in the article would argue that they provide value as well.
    • collyw 10y ago
      Ask the end users instead.
      • cookiecaper 10y ago
        Who's the end user? The company that pays 50onRed for ad placement is presumably satisfied and sees a corresponding spike in conversions. In theory, the viewer of the ad is grateful that they were made aware of a product or service that was relevant to their interests and/or needs, as evidenced by 50onRed obtaining a good conversion rate for its client. Pretty easy to rationalize it. The most problematic part would be the way it gets installed on user computers (covertly), but which could also pretty easily be rationalized away by saying that users don't understand all that tech mumbo-jumbo, and they just want to be sold things that they want and/or need.
        • morgante 10y ago
          It's really not that hard. Find a person who uses 500onRed (as a consumer). Ask them how satisfied they are with it. They'll probably have no idea what you're talking about and once you explain that it's inserting the advertisements into Wikipedia and such they'll hate it. In contrast, Facebook is completely honest about what they're doing: providing a free service in exchange for the ability to advertise to you. Hundreds of millions of people are happy with that trade.
• eyeareque 10y ago
  I had never heard about the (3) link and what Google was caught doing. Wow.
  • yborg 10y ago
    I somehow completely missed this at the time as well (the settlement with the DoJ was announced in August 2011). I also find this bit credible: “We simply know from the documents we reviewed and witnesses we interviewed that Larry Page knew what was going on,” Neronha said. Even for Google at the time, a $500M+ revenue stream from advertising illegal pharmaceuticals can't have escaped notice.
• eanzenberg 10y ago
  Not sure how you compare 1) and 2) to ad-injections. Those are companies which purchase ad-space on websites which sell ad-space, solved by visiting those sites less. Not ad-ware installed to deliver ads to your browser, solved by switching browsers..? reformatting hard-drive..? replacing your computer..?
• eloff 10y ago
  Despite the examples you give, I don't think it's fair to lump Facebook and Google in with 50onRed. The former two are mostly above board, with some occasional exceptions, while the latter is completely, morally, underwater.
  • aresant 10y ago
    Clearly it's not an analog comparison, I never said it was. I wrote my comment because online advertising is a murky and often slimy place. Facebook & Google are the world's two largest online advertising companies - they sell and influence your attention for a living. Google now spends more money lobbying the government than any other corporation (1) including GE, Exxon, etc, etc. Depending on Apple's stock performance Google is either the #1 or #2 most valuable company in the WORLD. Facebook is not far behind in either category. Companies, like people, are more complex than the shiny, white-washed PR version. The 50onRed story is about a cockroach who will live & die quickly, like a million other cockroaches. I am less interested in the cockroach and more interested in the elephant given it's weight and past propensity for bad behavior. (1) http://www.dailydot.com/politics/google-political-lobbying-spending-q1-2015/ http://www.dailydot.com/politics/google-political-lobbying-s...
    • kbenson 10y ago
      I'm pretty sure I understand your point, but you're going about it in a way that makes it hard to have a useful conversation. You've essentially said "online advertising is bad, because I say so, and these companies are big and they do it, so you should be worried about them." Is all advertising bad? What makes advertising bad? To what degree do these companies participate in that behavior? Is all lobbying bad? Should we assume them lobbying is bad because it exists? Is the total dollars spent lobbying the right value to look at? Perhaps lobbying dollars per revenue, pre profit, or per employee is a more important metric? I would love to discuss any one of these topics, but your comment is too vague on any details to be able to start from any useful point, so I've resorted to asking for clarification.
      • TeMPOraL 10y ago
• cookiecaper 10y ago
  Yeah, I think one of the dirty secrets that doesn't really come across until you've been in the entrepreneurial trenches for a while is that most people who make a lot of money end up doing so not by being paragons of morality, but by skirting rules and doing things other people may find questionable or unfair. YC itself acknowledges this to an extent by saying that good founders are moral, but that they are not "goody-two-shoes" and they break rules "that don't matter". Of course, the material value of each rule is in the eye of the beholder; surely the cab drivers of the world felt that there was material value to adhering to their regulations and that it would not be moral or necessarily safe to circumvent those regulations. Then Uber came along and its founders entered the pantheon of those that break "rules that don't matter". Ditto for Airbnb. Most types of marketing and PR are morally dubious. But you have to play that game if you're going to get anywhere. That's the secret that entrepreneurs have to learn, the secret that doesn't get shown in the profile pieces or the television specials. "Might makes right" in this world and if you want to be a successful entrepreneur, you need to loosen from a theoretical moral ideal to a practical one that is informed by the competitive landscape of capitalism. You can nitpick and find fault with most money-making techniques, so you just have to try to do something you can be reasonably comfortable with, acknowledging that in a competitive landscape, sometimes uncomfortable choices have to be made. If you do find something that makes money and has no competitors, thus allowing you to not worry about underhanded techniques to steal your marketshare, take advantage of your early position to decisively corner the market. That means employing the same techniques that would be employed against you, because those techniques will be employed against you pretty soon. I know this because one of my companies was roundly beaten after a spammer started a competitor and engaged SEO link rings to inorganically alter his ranking, among other tactics that I was morally "above" until my company was pwned that way. Now I understand you must play that game, that everyone plays that game, and they just don't talk about it because it doesn't help them to do so. It helps them to keep potential competitors naive. Playing by the rules may be the cool way to do it, but in the real world, it doesn't work, because there is someone who is willing to break those rules. How many entrepreneurs started on something like Uber but quit because they saw the regulatory landscape and a) didn't have the millions to fight cities and the cab industry; b) didn't want to run afoul of city regulations in the first place? Do what YC does: break whatever rules are in your way and then afterwards say they were rules that "didn't matter". If you say this from a position of success, people will believe you.
• fiatmoney 10y ago
  Every nation is built on a hill of skulls. "Has done in the past" is not the same as "is currently doing".
  • chao- 10y ago
    The logical extension of that is a justification for current, smaller players building new "hills of skulls" in their quest to build their own new nation. But hey! You know, once they're big too, they can put it all the shady dealings in the past and be one of the good guys, and it'll all be fine! It's a weak justification.
    • kbenson 10y ago
      > The logical extension of that is a justification for current, smaller players building new "hills of skulls" in their quest to build their own new nation. Maybe you can explain this logical extension, because I don't see it. At a minimum, it's not self-evident.
      • lhc- 10y ago
        You're saying we should ignore past bad behavior because Google, Facebook, etc. are good guys now. Logically, that would lead us to excuse current bad behavior by smaller companies because everyone does it, and they'll do good once they are big enough.
        • kbenson 10y ago
          > You're saying we should ignore past bad behavior because Google, Facebook, etc. are good guys now. No, I simply asked for someone to explain on their reasoning. > Logically, that would lead us to excuse current bad behavior by smaller companies because everyone does it, and they'll do good once they are big enough. I don't think that's necessarily logical at all. It assumes a lot of things which we don't know. For example, what rate of companies that exhibit bad behavior survive to become companies that later exhibit good behavior? Does whether the bad behavior was endemic to the company or restricted to specific divisions matter? How much does a change in management affect outcome? In my experience, plenty of people do things when they are young that they are ashamed of later in life, and would not repeat. Why should I believe the same can't be said of a company, which is made up of people?
• Apocryphon 10y ago
  Facebook and Google at least have products that are mostly consumer-facing. One wonders what it would be like to work for Palantir.
  • linkregister 10y ago
    It's interesting that you mention Palantir. Can you give some more detail as to what unethical business practices are conducted there, or are you simply referring to the HBGary business proposal scandal revealed in the Stratfor leaks in 2012? Disclosure: if you look through my comment history, I have a moderate pro-Palantir bias. So "shill" accusations are slightly appropriate.
    • Apocryphon 10y ago
      It's more of a general perception of shadiness: https://www.designernews.co/comments/85691 https://www.designernews.co/comments/85691
      • linkregister 10y ago
        Why didn't you just post the links themselves instead of the indirection to Designer News?
        • Apocryphon 10y ago
          I wanted to cite the original poster who found and assembled those links as a secondary source.
    • morgante 10y ago
      > It's interesting that you mention Palantir. I consider building software to purposefully enable dragnet surveillance one of the least moral things you can do.
  • trhway 10y ago
    >One wonders what it would be like to work for Palantir. these young excited guys running around on University look to be quite happy to be on the cyber front line of defending Motherland against internal and external terrorists and various other enemies.
• alaskanloops 10y ago
  Considering 50onRed started as an ad network on facebook helping companies like Zynga, as explained in the article, point 1 can most likely in part be blamed on them.
• prostoalex 10y ago
  I think what you're describing as dirty transgressions is a natural cycle in evolution of auction-based ad systems. When early marketplaces price the leads at several pennies an action, weight loss and herbal supplement affiliates crowd in, as it makes financial sense for them. As the cost per lead is bid up, they are eventually forced to drop out.
• fredgrott 10y ago
  you act like its news..Yahoo use to take big ad partners to strip clubs not 5 years ago
• wdr1 10y ago
  Did you read the article? It talked about how MS, Google, and others worked to prevent this type of behavior.
• notatoad 10y ago
  Or in a similar vein, when YC funded the adware distribution company InstallMonetizer. https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130115/17343321692/why-are-y-combinator-andreessen-horowitz-backing-drive-by-toolbaradware-installer.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130115/17343321692/why-a...