This is a very different type of post from me than those you are all familiar with.
It is a post borne out of frustration and a desire to prevent other website owners from being cheated by a company with clearly unscrupulous practices.
If you are not a website publisher or just not interested in this subject matter, I will forgive you if you do not read on.
Maintaining this website costs me quite a bit of money. Because our traffic has grown in leaps and bounds, I have had to purchase a hosting plan which can deal with the traffic.
One way I try to offset these high costs is by charging for banner ads on the site. Mostly, they are Google Adsense, but I have also dabbled with other companies who allow you to monetize by placing some code on your site. They serve up ads, and you receive some money each time someone clicks on an ad.
Mid last year, I was contacted by a Ajinkya Pawar, Business Development Specialist for a company called Vertoz.
Hi,
I represent the Publisher Partnerships team at Vertoz (www.vertoz.com) and I wanted to drop you a quick line to understand different advertising opportunities on your website. I believe the nature and content of your site presents significant potential to increase your advertising revenue.
I am happy to discuss the options I have in mind in more detail over a call or email. Do let me know how we could take this forward.
Best Regards,
After some back-an-forth, I decided to try it out, and over the course of many months, I earned about $100. Their payment terms are “Net 45 term through either PayPal or a Wire Transfer”, with a PayPal payment threshold of $100. So clearly I was entitled to be paid.
During this time, the same Ajinkya Pawar kept contacting me, asking me to join, as if he was that guy from Memento.
The constant badgering, coupled with the fact it just did not pay enough to be worth making the site too ad-intensive, led me to quit the program. I requested payment of the $100 to which I was legally entitled.
Pawar promised me I would be paid in May.
May came and went so I shot off another mail.
All of a sudden, Mr Memento was extremely quiet.
So I emailed again.
And again.
Still nothing.
So I tweeted to them/about them publicly.
That forced them to finally respond:
Which I did. Extremely kindly might I add.
And…nothing.
That was a mistake.
When I next checked their Twitter feed, lo and behold.
Hence this post. I hope with Israellycool‘s relatively high Google Page Rank, this post will appear relatively high up the search results for “Vertoz Media.”
I plan to also explore other avenues to force them to pay the money owed (not involving guys with baseball bats). But I also want to make sure no-one else gets suckered in to carrying ads for these scam artists.
