Ah-ha.com announces sell of advertiser email addresses

[keyplyr]

Database of Ah-ha.com advertisers on sale! Our company has accumulated email addresses of 2/3 of all companies advertising/bidding on pay-per-click Ah-ha. This email database is on sale now!

Is this ethical?

[4crests]

you're joking, right?

[4crests]

Where did you read this?

Was it on their website?

[chiyo]

depends on the TOS that Ah-ha and advertisers agreed to. PR wise, it smacks of desparation for revenue and the selling off of a valuable business asset, and will not do much for the trust of customers in Ah-ha and maybe ppc programs and internet business as a whole, no matter what their privacy policy and TOS is.

[rossH]

of course not .. but we knew it was a snake when we picked it up, and on the bright side, think of the bargains on toner that are coming our way

[keyplyr]

Actually, it looks like [bleep] is the one who is selling the db for $240.

[edited by: rcjordan at 7:31 pm (utc) on Aug. 19, 2003]
[edit reason] sorry, no references to specific sites. [/edit]

[chiyo]

Ah-ha, just from memory.. this was an email spam right? If so they did the same for Adwords, overture etc in recent weeks. If so the email didnt come from Ah-ha but from some opportunist.

[akande]

Yes it probably is a scam if the database is being sold for $240. Its not as if Ah-ha is not valuable or anything, they are still a live company so that database would be sold for a high price.

E.g. We got an estimate on the bankrupt company Searchhound.com and their quote was approx 1M USD.

[cagey1]

Yes this is spam email. I've gotten the exact same email but with "findwhat" and "7search" replacing "ah-ha". Somebody is harvesting advertiser domains on the CPC engines and cross-indexing them with a who-is database to get email addresses.

[Andy_Reid]

ditto the above.... just spam.

[ahha_PPC]

ah-ha rep here. <snip> is the site that was sending out spam emails from various PPC engines offering to sell it's current advertiser list. Although there may be a way to make that legal, it is completely unethical and would never be done by us or by any prominent PPC search engine.

They also copied <snip> entire site and played it as their own.

FYI - Efforts from multiple PPC's have resulted in this site being shut down....Hoorah!

[edited by: Marcia at 9:39 pm (utc) on Sep. 8, 2003]
[edit reason] Thanks, but no specifics, please. [/edit]

[EliteWeb]

MwahAhah we bought the list now all you people who advertise there belong to me too! Get ready for your enlargement e-mails! In all seriousness someone I know did purchase the list and it was just full of sales and webmaster email addresses which are not the ones we've ever used with Ah-ha.

[mailpuppy]

Today's spam was targeting epilot.

2/3'rds of all epilot advertisers... for $280...looks like the price is going up!

and yes... they just spidered the sites, the email addresses are taking from the site of the advertiser.

I wonder if their spider visiting the advertiser's site through epilot caused each of the advertiser's to receive a click-through?

Check your logs! ;-)

[jeffb]

This kind of e-mail harvesting and other illegitimate clicks through the PPC engines was getting so bad for us that we had to suspend our second tier PPC advertising. We were getting a bounce rate of nearly 100% from them.