31–40 of 78 posts
I wouldn't discount the guy completely and frame him as the "bad guy" here. Most of the ad sales industry guys are very similar to this guy. They operate in a realm going from deal to deal, sometimes only a single deal separates them from extreme success and utter destruction. Sadly, this guy seems to have a grouping on the negative side of things and might have been just starting out in the ads business himself. I w…
Why do companies wait till the dying moments before informing employees? I have seen many articles now which read like 'we went to back to the drawing board to realize that we have to close down in 2 days. Our bank was empty'. Is this just dramatization? I cannot believe people can run business without something so basic. Like paratroopers jumping out of an aeroplane and then saying 'we checked before hitting the gro…
>Why do companies wait till the dying moments before informing employees? Because if you tell employees how close to the edge you are they often run out the door, moving your odds of failure from 50% or 70% or whatever up to ~99%. Personally, I'm a stickler for integrity and scrupulous honesty so I have never hid facts from employees even when it was dark (and for a couple of years, it was often really, really dark).…
This. For many (most?) early stage startups, every single day you're on death's door. You learn to live with it.
[OT] My mind somehow associated "Amanda Wood" with "Jessica Hyde". Where is Jessica Hyde?
s/Amanda/Angela/Earlier quoted context omitted.
AND they forgot to discount his invoices until right at the last minute. I respect the author's transparency but there are a huge number of lessons to be learned here before jumping head first in to any other new business startup that relies on other people's money to launch.
On their about page "In 2015, Reframed.TV exceeded investment expectations with no commercial revenue." No details of the metrics but that itself would be an interesting post considering the staff numbers and investment.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
AND they forgot to discount his invoices until right at the last minute. I respect the author's transparency but there are a huge number of lessons to be learned here before jumping head first in to any other new business startup that relies on other people's money to launch.
On their about page "In 2015, Reframed.TV exceeded investment expectations with no commercial revenue." No details of the metrics but that itself would be an interesting post considering the staff numbers and investment.
Based on the post, it appears that management didn't have basic financial skills.
"stuff and thangs.js"
If you are reading this and wondering, the Simon character in this play follows a very common pattern for the "Ad Fraudster." This particular con takes advantage of two victims, a web site which thinks it can make money with advertising, and advertising networks who have excess advertising to sell.
One convinces the web site to host the javascript that will fetch ads from the network (they do that with an ads API call or when they are super bold they ask the web site to host a script that will fetch the script from the ad site and run it (yes people actually do this)) Then our fraudster drives traffic to the web site (botnets, click farms, what have you) to generate traffic and ad clicks. Which they collect from the ad agencies (and if they add affiliate tags affilliate fees) but tell the web site that it will take "90 days for the transactions to settle given everyone wants to limit click fraud."
Now depending on how much work they want to do and how much organic traffic the website gets, they can leech thousands of dollars a day off a web site. They feed fraudulent traffic in that keeps clicking on their ads, they spew affiliate cookies like confetti, and try to gather that revenue, and they sometimes "mirror" back to the actual advertiser network (taking one click on one ad and tell several networks it was a click on their ad)
And here is the sad bit, while its fraud, if the advertiser gets upset they go after the web site, if the web site is upset they go after the advertiser, if everyone starts yelling our fraudster just moves on with all the cash they have pocketed.