TopTVBytes promotes Video Advertising via pop-ups, defrauding Advertisers.
A few weeks ago I wrote about “TopTVBytes”, a video site that kept on appearing on pops while I was browsing. A company spokesman admits a history of being involved (accidently or unbeknownst to them) with adware in the past, but having claimed to hire Ben Edelman, known adware expert to stop this practice. When I spoke to video advertising networks about this specific company, I heard a wide variety of answers. The CEO of BrightRoll told me point blank that the company was complete junk and a bad-player and that everyone in the industry knew about their scheme. On the other hand, another network said there was no problems and claimed the site was a valuable partner. Based on this, I tried to right what I felt was a balanced blog post and research about the company presenting both sides at that time. However, after extensive research, I can only come to the conclusion now that one of the top video advertising site sources is using unacceptable means to show videos and defrauding their advertisers.?
It’s very important to also note that most of the advertisers being promoted on the videos were major brands on major video networks. During my investigation I found five major networks showing their videos, and frankly, despite calls and emails only three of them ever spoke to me about this issue. The ones that did speak to me were extremely upset and said they did not condone this type of promotion and wanted more information. I don’t want to claim that some video networks are complicit in what is going on, but with the evidence presented how can any company that promotes brand advertisers and charge a high CPM continue to do business with this website?
In looking over the report, please remember that there are tons of complaints on the internet involving this site, from users saying they were flooded with an avalanche of pops promoting videos from this site, with posts like “I have been invaded by an advertisement: TopTVBytes.com.” It was obvious that this method, as the representative of the company admitted to me, was being used to promote video auto-plays. The only question then to be asked was to what degree it was being used and if advertisers were getting value for their advertisements. If the consumer complaints, and my own experience was the norm, the proof should be in the analytics that are readily available for any video network to see.
This report can also be downloaded in a PDF here
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Overview
TopTVBytes.com claims and presents itself to advertisers to be a major source of internet TV clips, where users have come to the site looking to find specific clips about specific TV shows. After writing about this, I was asked to examine TopTVBytes.com by several video networks and look more in depth at their traffic patterns. The claim by TopTVBytes.com is that their traffic is from organic sources and pop-up advertising was a very small source. They did however admit that they have worked with some video advertising networks that allow them to use this method to auto-show video ads via pops. Various major video advertising networks have admitted to doing business with them, including what they described as being “significant,” but all of them denied that they would ever allow their videos to be shown auto-play in popup advertising.
The company TopTVBytes.com has an anonymous registration, and the company that I could track it back to is an offshore company registered in Bermuda. Neal Weinberg admits being involved in selling the advertising, and being the representative of the company, but says that their company only represents them and handles business development. However, he has identified himself in the past as the President of the company leading me to believe he is intimately involved. The company has done business under the name FlashPoint Media and InvolvedMedia/InvolvedVideo.
Owner/Representative
Neal Weinberg
Partner, Involved Media, LLC
The issues here are simple:
1) Video Advertisers pay a premium for people to watch their clips, assuming that they are engaged users browsing a content site.
2) TopTVBytes.com pays advertising networks of all kinds to “pop-up” their site without permission onto users browsers, then auto-playing the advertising. Since many pops are cheap junk traffic this is a type of “video spam.” The cost of popping up these ads can be anywhere from $1-$2CPM, (or less) while some video companies pay TopTVBytes.com in excess of $10CPM.
3) TopTVBytes.com admits to this practice but claims it’s a very small amount of their traffic, and the video ad networks they work know about it.
4) They claim that they had appeared on adware without permission, but had hired an expert to stop this. However, there is proof they are involved with the adware themselves.
5) They work with the top video ad networks, many of them who described them as significant partners in distributing video advertising and defended them, claiming that TopTVBytes.com was not engaged in this. All the video networks I spoke with denied that they allowed TopTVBytes.com to do this.
I believe that TopTVBytes.com uses pops to drive most of their traffic, and not only do they work with adware companies but are behind the creation of one of the adware applications themselves that has driven views to advertisers clips in the past. This is not a question of the legitimacy of adware or pops, but instead if numerous video ad networks have given considerable money to a site that is showing the videos in pops and in theory, providing little or no service to the advertiser.
The Proof & Analysis
Traffic Trends
According to Alexa, in the last two years, the traffic has gone up and down significantly, from almost no traffic to being one of the top 700 websites in the world.
In fact, if you zoom in, you will notice this month, their traffic has decreased to virtually zero after questions were asked about the source of this sites traffic by several video networks after I queried them. It is impossible that any site with organic traffic, unless it was completely shut down could suffer this type of traffic trend – unless almost all of its traffic came from non-organic sources, such as advertising.
Organic traffic has a pattern to it, especially in video sites. Two competitors, Hulu.com and Break.com, while their traffic goes up and down, if you see below, do not vary widely. Yet, TopTVBytes.com up and down growth on a weekly basis is significant.
Same when compared to FunnyJunk.com, a very low quality video site, which quality wise could be considered comparable, you see the difference also.
If the traffic patterns aren’t enough, there is significant other evidence that pops/direct traffic are the main source of the company’s traffic. The daily page-views per user is basically one page view per user, which means that almost all the traffic is going directly to one page. If this is a content based site, where people are searching for TV clips, they would be seeing at least 2-3 page views before finding the clip and then possibly viewing more clips.
Other video sites however, show an average of 5 page views per user, showing a significant different.
The bounce rate is clearly extremely high, meaning that anywhere between 80-95% of the users view only one page and leave the site.
In comparison Hulu and Break, and Break is known to buy a lot of “direct traffic” from banners and links.
In case there is any doubt that users are not engaged, that they are not really “interested” in the site, the average time on the site shows this. The actual time is actually around a minute per user, often less than that, sometimes in the sub-minute category. This means that they have just enough time to see an advertisement, perhaps watches a bit the clip and leave the site completely. Compared to CollegeHumor, Heavy.com and Veoh.com.
Traffic Sources
According to Alexa, the #1 traffic source is Zedo, and advertising server that is widely used for serving pops, Fastclick and then MediaFire a free file hosting company.
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Click for full image.
The site also has almost no traffic from search engines, and in the last 30 days according to Alexa less than .07 of the traffic comes from search engines. Break on the otherhand has 17% and hulu has 7.9.
There are some other issues that raise question to the source of traffic, mainly that it doesn’t show up on any major television show keywords or event television clip keywords in any google rankings. This basically means that it received almost no traffic whatsoever to specific tvshows, yet it is a “large” player in the TV clip industry. If this was the case, you’d think there would be some keywords besides their own domain that would be sending traffic to them?
If the company would claim that they receive significant traffic from other sources, such as links in, or perhaps from press releases (and thus the up and down traffic) a simple search of Google reveals that very few sites link into TopTVBytes.com and the top sites are actually complaints about the company’s practices. There are hundreds of message boards filled with people saying as of the last year that they are getting TopTVBytes.com pop-ups.
On top of that, the site has very limited content – despite claiming to be a clearinghouse for TVClips. When I tried to navigate the website, including clicking on “Comedy” I received what seemed to be a screenshot of a video player but no actual content (screen below) Additionally, from the search, it seems that they post no more than a few clips (average of 3-4 a day) on the site themselves, and their total database of clips ranks in the few hundred.
When went to the site and used the top navigation bar, it usually only showed that they had a few clips in most of the categories they list, and in one circumstance, their own navigation bar went to a error message of below.
Adware Issues
The company admits at one time that they were showing on adware without permission, and hired Ben Edelman to prevent this. They used when I spoke this, as a “proof” they were doing things legit. I find this interesting, because main way of adware is currently CPV, where they pop up a site. This means that in fact, they were buying enough pops that adware companies started to promote them via that method. There is significant proof that they themselves are affiliated with adware and have had their own adware application in the past. It should be noted that they did in fact hire Mr. Edelman to track sources of adware, but at no time contracted him to determine other types of traffic, whether it be pops or otherwise. Please note this change: I know they hired him, but can not confirm with Mr. Edelman exactly why. They claim it was to find adware and have used him as a reference.
A simple analysis of their domain names, and the other domains they own and host on their server, they are actually involved with a source of TV Clip Adware.
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Click to enlarge
They are hosting all these companies on the same mailservers, which are registered to them and the domains broadcastpc.tv and flashpoint.bm. Both of these companies and domains are registered and affiliated with their offshore company in Bermuda.
BroadCastPC.TV is a known adware applicant that delivers video ads:
http://www.google.com/#hl=en&source=hp&q=broadcastpc.tv&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=&pbx=1&fp=b7ba7271bf89c8c4
McAffe says of the program: The software seems to hijack the Windows Media Player, forcing a new interface skin and autoplaying one of the downloaded video clips when the player is launched.The video content consists essentially of commercial advertisements, as one might see on television.
The company in the past has gone under the name FlashPoint.BM which is using the same server and in some reports is shown as the owner of TopTVBytes.com.com. Alexa shows that at one time the site was registered to this company, in Bermuda, and spyware guide also shows there relation. The first address is actually the address of an offshore lawfirm that forms corporations.
FlashPoint.BM from a simple google search shows that it is affiliated with Malware
http://www.malwaregroup.com/Domains/details/www.flashpoint.bm
Another report is here:
http://allentech.net/parasite/FlashTrack.html
While I cannot specifically prove that TopTVBytes.com itself was showing in the adware, it is clear from the reports that the owners did own at one time an adware program that showed TV clips and advertisements.
Video Rights
On top of all this, the company has no rights to broadcast these clips which they themselves have put up. Calls to Discovery, ABC, NBC came back with the same response – the company was not authorized to put up their clips and they have no licensing agreement in place that they know of. It’s clear this is why they are registered offshore – they are using these segments without permission and uploading them in violation of the copyrights. There is no way to get in contact with the owners, and the registration is anonymous probably specially for that reason.
Conclusion
It is my opinion that TopTVBytes.com.com, Involved Media and associated companies are not being honest with the video advertising networks that they are working with. There is a statically insignificant amount of traffic coming from organic sources. Almost all of the traffic is direct in nature and the traffic patterns, combined with the bounce rates, time spent on site show an overwhelming amount of traffic coming from direct type of advertisements, most likely pop-up advertising. Compared to other video sites the statistics are nowhere similar, showing a user who is not engaged, who is not interested in being on the site and spends an average of a minute or less on the site. I could not find any similar reputable site within the industry that had an 85%+ bounce rate of the users except those that were specifically associated with adware and pop-advertising. The only similar traffic patterns came from Zedo.com the advertising server used to send traffic to TopTVBytes.com.com.
It is clear that no reputable video advertising network should be running advertising with this site. It is also very clear that many advertisers have had what could amount to hundreds of thousands of dollars of advertising, and the networks involved need to examine their relationship with this site, the money spent and consider refunding some clients. Tod Sacerdoti, the CEO of BrightRoll, the largest video advertising network in the world made it very clear on the phone and email that they had become aware of the company’s tactics and stopped doing business with them. He said that they were a “known bad-actor” in the industry. He claimed that the networks that continued to work with it, must not be paying attention or “profiting so much they don’t want to dig in.”
TopTVBytes.com representative Neil Weinberg refused to comment on these findings and wrote me the following: “Pace, I think I tried to work with you in a direct and straight forward way. You reported in a very inaccurate, unfair manner. As such, we are done dealing with your “publication.” Good luck.”
NB: Again, please note that the owner of the company, Mr. Weinberg admitted to me on the phone that he actually does use pops as a source of driving traffic, but that the advertising networks that he works with knows that he does this and that its a small portion of traffic.
Major “video-clip” site promotes advertising videos via pops, defrauding advertisers.
Major Video Networks caught in web,
In a report to be issued Tuesday, interactive advertising expert and advertising fraud fighter, Pace Lattin, revealed that a major source of video advertising was using dubious means to show advertisements to users. In a ten page analysis of the traffic patterns, he shows that the company TopTvBytes.com has been stealing revenue from video advertising networks by “popping” up the videos on other websites without being requested. This method is highly condemned by the interactive advertising industry and video advertising network, none which allow this promotional technique.
“I became aware of this technique while browsing some website as was being inundated with pop-ups from TopTvBytes.com automatically playing loud video advertisements,” says Lattin. “I googled the company and found that there were hundreds of complaints from consumers saying there were having the same experience, sometimes with adware.” What turned originally into an article on his blog, IndustryPace.com turned into a full investigation when some of the advertising networks involved asked him to dig further. He looked over the traffic patterns of this specific site, compared to competitors and noted that the traffic patterns were significantly differently than other video sites. In his report he shows that on average 90% of all visitors would come to the site, spend less than a minute, view one page, backing up the hundreds of complaints that the site was being promoted by pops.
“When I approached video advertising networks about this, they all said they did not allow this,” according to Lattin. “However, the owners in the original investigative piece told me that they did in fact sometimes use this technique but the advertising networks knew about it. Something didn’t seem right.” During his investigation, one CEO, Tod Sacerdoti of BrightRoll, said “The bad actors are limited to a very high volume, small group of video publishers and video ad networks,” said Sacerdoti, “Everyone knows who they are, and they know who these bad actors are.” He indentified this specific site as a bad actor and that the only reason some networks would work with them was that they were ignoring the facts, or didn’t care because of the enormous revenue.
Mr. Lattin’s report on his findings can be accessed at:
http://industrypace.com/frontpage/2010/9/3/large-video-site-promotes-video-advertising-via-pop-ups-defr.html
(C) 2010 Pace Lattin. It is the policy of this blogger to not edit or remove any content and comments, unless it is specifically attacking a protected group or irrelevant to the conversation, such as a spam. These are the OPINIONS of the respective writers, posters, commentators. All DCMA Notices shoudl be sent to pace@pacelattin.com