Affiliate Marketing Blog

On Wednesday I was at the Bristol a4uexpo Road Show and had a really great time, it was like an event of old! However it was lacking a bit on Affiliate attendance so you can’t have it every way, however the people that did turn up and stayed the course until the early hours. I had a great time, made loads of new contacts and re-established old ones and I even seen a few people in a new (better) light!

Now what was interesting is that very few business cards changed hands, but is that a bad thing? Well I am sure a few people sent by their bosses will be asked so how many cards did you get? Well the new way to reply is, I only got 1, 2 or 3 cards but I am now tagged on Facebook, I can remember everyone I met, they are adding me as a new Facebook contact or have requested me to be added to theirs. It may look like I am very drunk, dancing away, spending your entertainment budget, I am in fact an amazingly great networker who might not have got the traditional business card but I have something better than that-a solid contact that I know on a personal level (well as personal as you can get while taking rubbish drunk).

So all you network and merchant staff that need to justify your expenditure send your boss to this blog post, educate them in how the Internet has change the Business Card for good!

Last week the BBC published an article about spam and a video accompanying it unfairly shows one of my websites Free UK Stuff, while talking about spam. I am pleased to say that after publishing this blog post and having received a number of blog posts (see list at the bottom of this message), forum posts and folk filing complaints on reading the article, the BBC made contact on the Friday of last week after receiving these complaints and reading this blog and others and removed the video later that day.

Today the BBC made contact to say they have agreed to publish a statement that I requested to be put at the bottom of the news article in question, so I could show suppliers, merchants and site users should they have any questions or doubts about what the video contained.

Ian a Journalist from the BBC who handled the investigation, removal and getting the statement published about this article is the type of person I kind of expect all BBC employees to be. He was very professional, didn’t take sides and while he had to report to his bosses before action was taken, he clearly done so quickly and called me back when he said he would, so I thank him for understanding the matter at hand and dealing with it swiftly.

Hopefully next time when a technology article is published an editor or journalist will be involved who understands the issues raised in the article and any accompanying video before they get published. Indeed it was pointed out in the past that some really good articles have been published on the BBC News about the very important subject of spam and how it gets in the way of legitimate communications between site owners and their members. The person who invents the total solution to spam will be a very rich person indeed.

Here is a list of blog articles posted in support, if I have missed anyone out please get in contact and I will edit this post.

BBC Spam Email Experiment Badly Researched

The BBC hasn’t a clue

The BBC Make Spam Out Of Fish!

BBC Investigation Into Spam, Poorly Researched?

“Clarke Duncan sold my daughter viagra”: BBC Reports

Lies, Damn Lies and the BBC (my personal blog)

Statement on BBC News Video featuring Free UK Stuff

And the A4U Forum where lots of messages of support where also posted in the thread BBC spam article featuring aff sites.

Thanks again for the support, shows what can be done when Affiliates stand up for each other, happy days

I found out last night that BBC News ran a story and video about spam that clearly shows my website Free UK Stuff and domain name and screen shots from the website and double opt-in email sign up system.

What is unbelievable in this “experiment” conducted by McAfee is that they have totally no clue about what is email communications for registered site users and what is spam, the stuff you get that you never agreed to. If you watch the video you will be left thinking Free UK Stuff sells on your email address and you will get thousands of spam messages because of it, its totally shocking just how poor the editorial process has been in allowing these slanderous lies to make it on to the web as if it was news worthy facts.

I have run Free UK Stuff since 1997 and have over 1/4 of a million users. Since 2000 we operated a very strict double opt-in system that records the person that joined, at what time, from where, what browser they used and so on to prove without a shadow of a doubt that someone has asked and then click on a link to complete the sign up process to join the Free UK Stuff Members Newsletter, a weekly email that tells members what is going on at the site and often features 2 or 3 site sponsors or adverts. This is all clearly stated to the members before they join and they can opt-out automatically at anytime.

So I have done some research on the person that joined our site and who agreed to receive our newsletter, and here is what I found.

Log Evidence

She first arrived on the site having searched Google for “free stuff”.

82.10.200.6 - - [09/Apr/2008:09:42:08 +0100] “GET / HTTP/1.1″ 200 6014 “http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=free+stuff&meta=” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; .NET CLR 2.0.50727)”

She then started the process to join the site 1m 47s later.

82.10.200.6 - - [09/Apr/2008:09:43:55 +0100] “POST /cgi-bin/join.pl HTTP/1.1″ 200 10675 “http://www.freeukstuff.com/join.html” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; .NET CLR 2.0.50727)”

3 days later she finally clicks the link to join the site as a member, the only email she had from us was at 9.43am asking her if she wanted to be a member, 3 days later she decided that yes she did and completed the double opt-in process. An email was then sent welcoming her as a member.

82.10.200.6 - - [12/Apr/2008:12:35:12 +0100] “GET /gsgxCihwbdgxrvrdvAyx/h HTTP/1.1″ 200 20325 “http://webmail.mcafeespamexperiment.com/horde/imp/message.php?index=8″ “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; FunWebProducts; .NET CLR 2.0.50727)”

3 hours later, when she was filmed for the video showing on the BBC Website she clicked the link again, and this is what they filmed.

82.10.200.6 - - [12/Apr/2008:15:41:11 +0100] “GET /gsgxCihwbdgxrvrdvAyx/h HTTP/1.1″ 200 20327 “http://webmail.mcafeespamexperiment.com/horde/imp/message.php?index=8″ “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; FunWebProducts; .NET CLR 2.0.50727)”

Time Line of BBC News Video

Here is the time line of the BBC News video destroying our hard earned reputation as being the UK’s number one Free Stuff website.

0.07s - Site name is clearly visible on screen, it’s the only one highlighted with a blue bar.

0.43s to 0.48s - Site web address is clearly shown on screen, they roll over and highlight it.

0.48s to 0.51s - They click on the email from Free UK Stuff will talking about the “spam” that arrived.

0.52s - you can clearly see the link you must click on order to join our double opt-in email newsletter, If you compare that part of the video with our log evidence you can clearly see this is the same persons email.

01.01s - she claims that by clicking on our link, the one she just clicked on again that it generated “more spam” now it’s funny how she could know this as if you look at the log evidence above you will see she was only a member of the site 3 hours before they filmed her clicking the link again. Clicking the link again won’t make you a member twice, as you have already joined, so you get sent to the welcome screen.

01.06s - she says it’s not just her, and that her 14 year old daughter is receiving daily emails, then we see footage of her going on about spam that has nothing to do with us what so ever but if you watched this “news” piece you think we are the worlds worst spammers and not a shred of evidence to say we have ever spammed anyone yet we feature so highly in this report.

What makes this all even more unreal is that we are regularly asked by different BBC departments to list “freebies” such as games, show tickets and so on our site http://www.freeukstuff.com/atoz/b.html I wonder if this lady signed up to the BBC mailing lists that they would consider their own mailing lists spam also, because that’s what this news article is saying in this day and age it is preferable to send an email instead of chopping down trees to send a letter, that irresponsible and reckless reporting destroys the reputation of hard working people like myself can pass as a worthy news story. Not once did the BBC contact us in the making of this news article.

• View the BBC News Article here, view the video and compare the times above.

• Visit Free UK Stuff.

• Make a complaint about this shockingly poor news story to the BBC and help educate them on what is spam, note if enough people complain and more than enough Affiliate voices around, they have to publish a response to this. It’s very easy to do, just email, write or call the complaint line.