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#DeleteVoluum (25)

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I came across this article couple of hrs back. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/featu...elps-find-them

I wasnt going to post about it. But after thinking about it, I think we should #DeleteVoluum

Go for different alternatives available.


P.S) I will try to get some good alternatives to Voluum and post it here.

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I don't quite get the reasoning for recommending to delete Voluum because of this article.

The article seems to be more critical of Facebook than anything else.

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How people getting "scammed" by affiliate offers is any different from when they pay willingly to participate in a lotto draw?

The concept is exactly the same, targets the same brain region with dopamine receptors of getting something for nothing, yet playing the lotto is being promoted in the mainstream media and is "government approved" thus "allowed".

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I would definitely look at Thrive for alternative tracking. Voluum closed our account with no rhyme or reason a few months back. All links were dead with no notice. After they investigated (taking 10 days or so) they opened our account again and apologized.

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I dont get the point why he should be sharing about affiliate marketing or the stats of amount spend on facebook from people using Voluum. He has tried to put the whole STM community as shady marketers. The tracking tool which got so famous because of STM, he is slandering the whole community.

I know article more focussed on facebook, but still he puts affiliate marketers in bad light.

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The article is now currently above the fold on the website >>> https://www.bloomberg.com/businessweek

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Long winded flog to pimp their ICO at the end...

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will go for an alternative too. I don't like when a company share's private data as the amount people spend on fb ads on their platform. Maybe they are sharing campaigns too.....

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I don't think as well you should delete Voluum after this article. I wouldn't believe all information from this. But I use Thrive for a long time already. It's like a good alternative.

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He didn't try in the sense that he made it up - he talked to members of the community in Berlin and that's what he was told. On a first read, I didn't see anything false. It's the unfortunate reality that affiliates apply or have applied some very misleading tactics.

Over the 3 years that I've been in the industry, I'm glad to see that many people have moved towards more sustainable businesses, that add value. I think the overall space still has some way to go but it's certainly on the right path, at least based on the last 3 years I've experienced first hand. Still plenty of scams to see the light of day from an affiliates laptop, I'm sure though...

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I think his words are true and honest. What private info is sharing the total budget? In what case it would hurt you?
He even protects affiliates by saying it’s not fair to blame us using the tools fully big companies offer nowadays.

If you really care so much about privacy, stop using FB or Google too...

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Hey guys, I feel your frustration, and believe me, this is quite a shock to me. To give you a bit of context.. the original article was supposed to come out in a month and was to be about my journey in the affiliate marketing industry. Then, around a week ago, they told me the editor is rushing it to press, due to the Cambridge Analytica scandal and I started getting tons of Facebook related follow-up questions. I'm no Facebook expert as I've never used it myself for AM so I didn't have much to offer, but I did provide them with the very rough figure of $400M Facebook ad spend tracked on Voluum.

I spoke with Zeke for a few hours in Berlin, I know he spoke with a bunch of other prominent affiliates at the show and then reached out later to me saying he'd like to continue talking about my story. Half a year later he visited me for 3 days during which we talked a lot, but very little about Facebook. It felt good, he was asking interesting questions and I felt this might be an interesting story for some. I was naive. It's rather upsetting to get taken advantage of, but more so, I'm disappointed to see how he vilified our industry.. I suppose the media has to do what it has to do to stay relevant.

We'll be issuing a public statement countering the publication soon, for anyone interested, I'll pop the link in on STM when it's up.

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Interesting thread on Hacker News: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16687361

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Even tho Rob is hella promotional, I don't think it was his intent to associate Voluum or himself with a negative article. It hurts his brand and it hurts his company's valuation.

Deleting Voluum makes no sense. I don't feel like he wanted to be portrayed in the article, the way he was.

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It makes total sense for Bloomberg to write it this way after Cambridge Analytica incident. I am sure Rob didn't approve the tone of this article. It's very common for reporters to do something like this.

Front page on Businessweek is pretty sad. I just hope that it doesn't hurt us and the industry.

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Rob thanks for your reply. If what you say is true, than you were also taken for a ride by the reporter.
I am not worried about privacy, but was afraid if such a thing blows up and than Voluum has to share email and all the data of the person, than that can be used against us.

Looking forward for the public statement.

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Well, you can't really argue with the basic premise of the article itself.

The Facebook twist is to be expected in the current climate.

But two quotes from Rob that caught my eye:

"No matter how successful a company I build in this space, I am facilitating what I deeply believe is a poorly designed system."

"If we ban people from Voluum, they’d be doing the same thing somewhere else the next day. At least we consolidate the bad apples in one place."

As a PR exercise, this is a bit like telling the journo that you like to fiddle with kids in your spare time.

Just completely self-destructive.

I'm sure a lot of affiliates are going to be pissed off, and you can't really blame them.

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also the fact that the data was shown that we spent X amount of dollars on a platform is also questionable. I know he should have known better than show that information to the reporter.

I have a tracking platform if you would like to try and test it out as well, would love for some feedback.
https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...nging-industry

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Thanks Ian on posting about your tracker.
As promised I have listed all the trackers I have reasearched.

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...tives&p=340479

P.S) I dont own any of these tools or affiliated to any.

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After a 3 day interview where every word I said was recorded, the number of quotes that could be cherry picked and placed out of context was extensive. I'm not looking to be defensive, but I'd like to provide some context so some of you can formulate a broader opinion. Many will be pissed regardless, I totally understand. I think I'm a dickhead too after reading that article.

Poorly designed system I was referring to capitalism, this space I meant advertising in general. I was talking economics and sustainability extensively as I am a big proponent of the Circular Economy model. Modern advertising does not coincide too well with this concept.

Yeah, I talked to him for about 20 hours total, I talked about a lot of stuff..

This was in response to the accusation that Voluum is some sort of state of the art cloaking tool. I couldn't explain technically that our rules set is very straight forward and anyone could replicate it in PHP with little effort. So to dumb things down I said, if we were to shutdown Voluum today, anyone who uses our rules for cloaking would be cloaking on any other tracker the next day.

Anyway dudes, I don't feel great about all this.. without affiliate marketing I wouldn't be where I am, it's an incredible industry that requires an astonishing amount of skill and persistence to make a living in, you might forget it, but if you live off of AM, you're a smart SOB and you can pat yourself on the back. There's a reason why not that many people do it successfully.

Word of warning, careful if you ever do any interviews, I've been screwed over a few times, but it's a risk you have to take to get exposure, my word of advice if you do: bring your own recording device and record every single word.

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For anyone interested, here's our statement. Mind you, it's aimed at a broader audience.

https://Voluum.com/blog/faux-news-digital-marketing/

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Thanks for sharing Rob.

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I find the article to be quite poorly written, almost confused in its intentions.

It's as if someone above the author told them they need to use the word scam/scammers as much as possible to sensationalise things, but not mention what a scam is or what constitutues a "scammer" -- probably because by definition, most offers/products advertised are not scams at all, but may use misleading ads, show details in fine print etc., so are not necessarily fraudulent, just using ignorance to their advantage as the advertising industry has done since the dawn of it.

There's some truths and some baseless assertions, overall its irksome to see someone spinning Robert, Voluum, STM, AWE, STM Ibiza etc. together to paint some picture of a "web of scammers" to then try and point a finger at Facebook.

Meanwhile Robert and Codewise's remarkable achievements are brushed over and no positive aspects of the affiliate marketing industry are mentioned.

Definitely an impartial, fair and unbiased article, 10/10, looking forward to the sequel.

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This needs massive editing ... no idea who your PR guys are, but you need to fire them immediately and replace them with those who know the basic rules of English grammar.

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So dramatic... nothing in the article is news to this community. Rob built a nice tech stack for us, and either profit from it or don't. No need to get swept up in the popular sensationalism.

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