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New York State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer’s recently filed suit against Direct Revenue has revealed some of the underhanded tactics and dealings of the adware company, reports Mediapost (via MarketingVox). Among the juicy tidbits of information to be revealed from copies of internal emails and memos found in the filings, which were posted on Ben Edelman’s website, is that Yahoo Search accounted for roughly $200,000 per month of revenue for Direct Revenue during April-June 2005, according to Mediapost.
Yahoo Search distributor Walnut provided the cost-per-click ads to Direct Revenue, but a Yahoo spokesperson is quoted as saying that although Walnut was an authorized distributor, Yahoo had not authorized it to do business with or pay Direct Revenue.
Two weeks ago, an attorney at the New York AG’s office said in a public lecture that advertisers and marketers can still be found liable if any link in the chain of affiliate networks, sub-affiliate networks, and independent contractors is found to have acted illegally. “You don’t want to ever assume that the existence of intermediaries, whether it’s two or six, is going to immunize you from liability,” he was quoted as having said.
Apparently, Direct Revenue’s shenanigans put off even business partners Kazaa and FastClick, which were frustrated by Direct Revenue’s attempts to “deliberately mislead business partners, install ad-serving programs without consent, serve almost incessant pop-up ads, and make it difficult to uninstall the software,” according to the article.
As a result, FastClick demanded that Direct Revenue’s notorious Aurora program stop serving its ads - and stopped doing business with the firm in July.
Direct Revenue has termed AG Spitzer’s suit “baseless,” saying it “focuses exclusively on the company’s past practices - practices we and other industry leaders changed long ago - and says not a word about what we’re doing today.”
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