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Airbnb admits rogue sales team used Craigslist for stealthy property drive
- jarin 15y agoDoesn't "black hat" usually imply some kind of hackery or gaming of a system? Assuming it was people sending the emails and not automated, I would probably classify this as deceptive cold calling. It's not something you'd want your own people doing, but you might just look the other way if some PR company is doing it on your behalf. Morally, it's probably the equivalent of making a fake viral video.
- karzeem 15y agoAt the risk of revealing some intrinsic immorality or something, I don't really see what's wrong with this. It would be wrong of the sales team to claim to have used Airbnb for stays that never happened, or to invent false testimonials, but that's not the charge. The allegation is that they emailed property owners and said, effectively, "Airbnb is great, you should use it" without saying how or why they came to hold that opinion. It's untruthful in the sense of not including the whole truth, but I'd put it decisively under naughty, not blackhat.
- Joakal 15y agoThey 'illegally' spammed users for at least a year. > It never fails that I get at least 20 marketing emails a day from airbnb when I post a property on craigslist. I hope they do more of these PR stunts than filling up my inbox with unsolicited messages. [0] "I'm not a lawyer but I am an anti-spam expert. They most certainly are illegal. They are unsolicited advertising (which is fine under CAN-SPAM, sadly), and contain none of the requirements of CAN-SPAM - a legitimate business address, and a clear unsubscribe link. Just because they come from gmail accounts does not exempt AirBnB from the law." [1] [0] http://techcrunch.com/2010/06/21/airbnb-brian-chesky/ http://techcrunch.com/2010/06/21/airbnb-brian-chesky/ [1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2605565 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2605565
- karzeem 15y agoI don't know enough to have an opinion about whether it's illegal, but even assuming it is, that doesn't mean it's immoral.
- thomasgerbe 15y agoImmoral: not conforming to the patterns of conduct usually accepted or established as consistent with principles of personal and social ethics. Typically, what is ethical is respecting the user wishes. If I say, "Don't contact me for commercial interest" (the checkbox when you post something on Craigslist) and you do so, I would say that doesn't conform to business ethics.
- j_baker 15y agoI'm not saying this was a good thing for AirBNB to do, but is violating the sanctity of the craigslist commercial checkbox the worst AirBNB has done? Sure, that's not a respectable way to do business, but we're not exactly talking about Enron or Bernie Madoff here.
- Alex3917 15y agoThe only reason anyone posts anything on Craigslist is to get emails for commercial interests. That's what classified ads are for. Because everyone posting apartments for rent is by definition looking to rent their apartment, I think it's well targeted enough that AirBnB would get a pass on cold emailing people if they were doing it in an ethical and upstanding way. It sounds like they weren't, but if they were then the 'one bite at the apple' law would be the governing ethical principle. (Of course the design of Craigslist makes following this rule impossible, but that's a separate issue.)
- karzeem 15y agoSurprising downvotes. I wouldn't have thought that the HN hivemind feels that something illegal is ipso facto immoral.
- bxr 15y ago
- Joakal 15y agoIs there an official response yet from PG regarding contracted use of Black Hat tactics as a starting YC company? I understand breaking the rules but black hat? It seems like I could contract a spammer and discontinue the contractor services when getting a HN frontpage. The contractor would get a sizable exit sum. All because AirBnB is allowed to 'get away with it' after at least a year of doing it [0]. [0] http://techcrunch.com/2010/06/21/airbnb-brian-chesky/ http://techcrunch.com/2010/06/21/airbnb-brian-chesky/
- coryl 15y agoIt would be my opinion that PG probably doesn't care. If this wasn't already clear, we're not looking for the sort of obedient, middle-of-the-road people that big companies tend to hire. We're looking for people who like to beat the system. http://ycombinator.com/howtoapply.html http://ycombinator.com/howtoapply.html
- Joakal 15y agoI understand that, going against unjust rules, regulations and industry monopolies because otherwise economically; people pay more (taxi monopoly) or inconvenienced (no driverless cars allowed). But these black hat email marketing tactics are akin to harassing people automatically without discrimination. Posted two properties? At least two emails from two 'women' advertising AirBnB. It's effectively destroying Craigslist if every company including my potential own escape backlash for spamming users. Some people like me look to PG as a chaotic good role model for entrepreneurs.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- arthurgibson 15y agoI'm pretty sure everyday rental companies (with real agents) in the Boston Area post fake apt listings on Craigslist to attract customers. Also I know for a fact that they harvest listings from Craigslist and rental sections of newspapers to call and email owners hounding them to list and show their apts. Whats the difference?
- Zakuzaa 15y agoNot sure about difference, they do have a similarity though - both are illegal & unethical.
- arthurgibson 15y agoIt sounds like if the industry isn't enforcing itself and operating out in the open, no one really cares. Also once these companies get their hands on you they make you sign contracts so that you can only exclusively list through them. Its a screwed up industry full of commission based workers.
- bxr 15y ago>It sounds like if the industry isn't enforcing itself and operating out in the open, no one really cares. Thats some very strange reasoning you're operating on there. The fact the industry isn't enforcing itself only suggests that people don't care enough about this to reach the tipping point at which the upset people involved start to negatively affect the business of the perpetrators to the extent that not engaging in the undesirable tactics would no longer be profitable. Most people do care, and do hate it, but renters have to deal with that world for very short and limited periods of time over the course of a year and can't afford to invest the kind of effort needed to affect change in an industry completely unrelated to them. Its like you're saying no one cares about all the generic spam they get just because the 0.001% conversion rate spammers have make it a sustainable business model.
- jonknee 15y agoOne has a billion dollar valuation and was YC funded...
- philgo20 15y agoBy the amount of emails sent and the similarity of emails, one could guess that they were indeed automated. Honestly I don't really have a big problem with the tactic as both parties were winning, but I am not buying the 'rogue' sales team explanation. Great product and business anyway.
- sorbus 15y agoSimilarity and number are both explained by copy-pasting a pre-written message, which is not considered automation.
- bxr 15y agoJust like my direct mail campaign is not automated because when the letters come out of the printer/stuffer machine I still have to lick the envelopes.
- adharmad 15y agoWould be interesting to check the email headers and see where they are originating.
- nhangen 15y agoBetter off saying nothing that trying to pretend that some rogue salespeople wanted to make money so badly that they spammed CL.
- Zakuzaa 15y agoThey can't blame a sales team for this. It was their own responsibility to monitor sales team's activity.
- chailatte 15y agoI applaud PG for showing incredible constraint on this issue, on this board. It's like a father standing firm alongside his guilty son, while tomatoes are being thrown on them, while the cowardly son keeps mumbling lies 'It wasn't me, my friends did it. I just watched', while the father just stands there and takes it.
- cheez 15y agoHey, I'd be fine too if someone was badmouthing my company which just took $100 million in investment :-) Comes with the territory, I assume.
- chailatte 15y agoWell, these threads could've suffered mysterious deaths by now, but instead the other one has like 580 points :)
- kylelibra 15y agoThis the internet, I'm sure pg knows that would only make the situation 100x worse.
- jimmyjim 15y agoFalse premise. It's not as if by killing the thread the issue would have been capped altogether, no, it would have instead exploded and done exponentially more damage with accusations of censorship mixed in.
- patrickgzill 15y agoCue the speech by Al Pacio's character in "Scent of a Woman", with PG as the father standing beside Philip Seymour Hoffman's guilty-looking character ...
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- guelo 15y agoThe way the link between companies and spammers usually works is that the spammer is contracted at arms length as an 'affiliate' and is paid per lead. The company will try to be willfully ignorant of the tactics being used so they can claim that they just have an affiliate program and they don't know how the traffic is generated. Edit: To clarify, I'm not saying that this is what Airbnb did. In fact the original post said the emails had clean urls without referral IDs. To me that suggests a sloppy internal campaign with no metrics.
- noodle 15y agoyeah, any company caught doing something like this would likely respond pretty much just like this, intentional or not. rogue contractors or unauthorized employees, they were acting without the knowledge/consent of higher ups, they've since been fired or contracts terminated, etc..
- btilly 15y agoYour description presumes too much that the company intends the result. It is true that there are some willfully ignorant companies. However companies that try to have good affiliate programs often find those programs difficult to police. Until you have specific evidence otherwise in any particular case, it is best not to be too fast to ascribe to malice. (Of course that benefit of the doubt is exactly what unethical companies are hoping to take advantage of.)
- koudelka 15y agoThis is exactly how affiliate marketing was handled at the dating site I used to be employed by.
- btilly 15y agoThere is one part of this explanation that seems weird to me. If you read through http://davegooden.com/2011/05/how-airbnb-became-a-billion-dollar-company/ http://davegooden.com/2011/05/how-airbnb-became-a-billion-do... and look at the links delivered, they don't have any sort of affiliate IDs. Which means that Airbnb had no way to tie this traffic to that advertising campaign, and had no tracking. It is possible that they legitimately were willing to pay a third party contractor something based on all of their traffic, no questions asked (I've seen that kind of deal with SEO companies before), but it seems odd.
- thewordpainter 15y agomore & more, i get the sense that a great % of the b2c startups that achieve critical mass do something 'sneaky' along the way to get over that initial hump. in facebook's case, the untold story is they basically blasted the university email databases -- how else could you scale a social network when everyone's attention was already so diverted? (i'll give them credit though because plenty of companies have prob tried similar tactics (e.g. uloop comes to mind), but haven't turned it into much) another semi-related one that stands out is how i've heard the reddit founders originated the conversation from a number of fictitious accounts and once the conversation picked up around them, they just let it take off on a life of it's own.
- Zakuzaa 15y agoReddit's way of solving the chicken-n-egg problem looks relatively much OK to me. It's tolerable even if it's deceiving. It's an acceptable way of kickstarting a community, IMO.
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- kn0thing 15y agoSteve and I did submit on reddit for the first few weeks after launch under multiple usernames (there were no comments or self-posts, so it was just link submissions). We also asked friends & family to use the site, and a few of them did, but we had to go beyond our limited personal network to ensure new and interesting links on the front page every morning. Fortunately, we only had to do it for a few weeks and there was enough momentum after that for us to just routinely post under our proper account names.
- patrickgzill 15y agoI don't understand the excuse-making ... if it is OK for 1 company to spam you, then surely it is OK for 1000 companies to spam you... Craigslist should be considering legal action at this point.
- rkon 15y ago'Rogue' sales team or not, it looks like they could be facing some hefty fines under the CAN-SPAM Act: "Each separate email in violation of the law is subject to penalties of up to $16,000 ... both the company whose product is promoted in the message and the company that originated the message may be legally responsible." http://business.ftc.gov/documents/bus61-can-spam-act-compliance-guide-business http://business.ftc.gov/documents/bus61-can-spam-act-complia... Sites like Craigslist would probably be unusable if everyone spammed users the way Airbnb did, so maybe the penalties are warranted.
- mrchess 15y agoI don't know why so many of you are looking for an official response from pg. Just because he invested in the company doesn't mean he can or will make statements on their behalf. Honestly pg just probably invested, said good luck, and just went his own way checking up occasionally to chat. The guy has like 500 other things on his plate why would he micromanage airbnb? It's their business, not pg's, so let them run it how they want to.
- qq66 15y agoI'm not sure pg will comment here, but it's not like this is insignificant - AirBnB is over 20% of YC's portfolio.
- Lucadg 15y agoThis is from 9 months ago "OK, I've finally had it with this company. I post some properties on craigslist from time to time, and I get tons of spam and scammers, but one that really sticks in my craw is airbnb.com I have emailed them more than a few times asking them to cut it out, and that soliciting clients who post properties on craigslist is not the best way to do things. Yet, here we go with the latest round of email solicitations from airbnb.com. I really hope someone from the company reads this. I know they are well funded by Y-combinator venture capital, so why outsource this type of work and spam?" http://www.vacationrentalscommunity.com/forums/t/2767.aspx http://www.vacationrentalscommunity.com/forums/t/2767.aspx Interesting. Anybody know when this spamming actually stopped?
- ChuckFrank 15y agoCan someone explain the 'on' in this statement? >> Airbnb does not publish the number of properties featured on the service but has confirmed today that it currently has around 110,000 listed -- around half of those on rival rental service HomeAway. >> Does that mean that half their rentals are not exclusive, and are listed on both, or Does that mean that they list half of their on HomeAway?
- Zakuzaa 15y agoNumber of listings on AirBnb == (1/2)*Number of listing on HomeAway
- ChuckFrank 15y agoThanks, that makes the current 1B valuation proposition even more unsettling. Does this suggest that HomeAway has a 2 B dollar valuation?
- untog 15y agoWell the valuation isn't for the number of listings alone. I would imagine (though I don't, in all honesty, know) that AirBnb has a far steeper upward trajectory than HomeAway at this point.
- uptown 15y agoApparently, yes: "HomeAway Prices IPO Between $24 And $27 Per Share, Now Valued At $2 Billion" http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/16/homeaway-prices-ipo-between-24-and-27-per-share-now-valued-at-2-billion/ http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/16/homeaway-prices-ipo-between...
- smackfu 15y agoYou know how people say you should never use bare "this" or "these" or "those" in your writing? This question shows why, because it leaves ambiguity.
- ChuckFrank 15y agoHere's my advice. -- Never have sales people at an arms length. Instead keep them close, carefully monitor their work and fire the rogue ones.
- originalgeek 15y agoThat's if you want accountability. I believe Airbnb wanted plausible deniability.
- lwhi 15y agoIt depressed me when I hear about this kind of story, because it makes me realise tech and startups often aren't focused on creating a positive brave new world of possibility. Instead, it seems a lot of companies are simply emulating the arrogant stance of 80s big business.
- jasonwocky 15y agoIf this goes mainstream, I can imagine the hotel lobby trying to beat AirBnB over the head with this issue. Perhaps even doing their best to instigate legal action by the government for potential violations of the CAN-SPAM Act.
- jhowell 15y agoWould it different if this were HN instead of CL?
- lurker19 15y agoHeadlines that quote false statement should use quotation marks for clarity. It is impossible to "admit" something that in one's self interest and is not a proven fact. A defendant in court can admit guilt, but can only claim innocence.