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 COLUMN
Viral marketing goes one step too far -- to a place where friends spam friends ONE OF THE LATEST buzzwords in e-commerce is "viral marketing" -- the basic idea being to use the power of the Internet to spread the good news about a product like an epidemic. OK, but is it a good idea for your friends to be paid to infect you?
AllAdvantage's basic business model is based on paying customers 50 cents an hour to let the company's "Viewbar" display ads on their desktops. Nothing wrong about that deal in itself, but the problem comes from the way AllAdvantage markets this service. Along with getting paid for your own Viewbar time, AllAdvantage pays you 10 cents for each hour that someone you refer to their service uses the Viewbar and 5 cents an hour for anyone your referral, in turn, gets to sign on to the service, and so on. These "extended referral credits" can go down four levels, and AllAdvantage says some customers wind up earning $5,000 a month or more. One obvious problem with this is that it appears to be an open invitation to spammers to make some quick money by telling 500,000 of their closest friends about this wonderful deal. In fact, when I first started getting gripes about AllAdvantage, I assumed it was yet just another bulk e-mail pyramid scheme. Most of the messages that I've seen promoting it were clearly from your typical spammer types, and many of my regular spam-forwarders get at least a few spams promoting AllAdvantage every month. There were a few indications, however, that AllAdvantage wasn't just another bulk e-mailer. One thing I noticed was that the numbers identifying the person who is supposed to get the referral credit were rarely repeated, which indicated that somebody was keeping the spammers under control. On the AllAdvantage Web site, there were warnings that spam was indeed a naughty thing and those caught doing it would forfeit their earnings. There was even a list of cancelled accounts, which included some of the identification numbers of those who spammed my readers. The final piece of evidence that AllAdvantage was not just a spam front came when I called the company and found myself speaking with its chief privacy officer, Ray Everett-Church. You may remember Everett-Church as a board member of the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial E-Mail (CAUCE), which helped defeat the infamous Murkowski Amendment that would have legalized spam (and which innumerable spammers to this day still cite in their messages as if it had passed), so his anti-spam credentials are solid. And he says AllAdvantage recognizes that it must prevent spam and is committed to educating customers to ensure they know what spam is. "When we discover a credible report of spamming, the account is suspended while we investigate," Everett-Church says. "If there is clear evidence of additional abuses, the account is terminated and any referral monies due go into an anti-spam fund. In cases where it appears they just didn't understand what they were doing was wrong -- say a kid spammed his economics class -- we'll smack them around a bit and make sure they understand it's a violation before we give them a second chance." Everett-Church's example of a student sending e-mail promoting AllAdvantage to his economics class raises the more important issue here, and the one that prompted a few gripes from readers who received AllAdvantage pitches from people they knew. Who is and who is it not appropriate to recruit to AllAdvantage for a referral fee? Is it OK to promote AllAdvantage to everyone in your company, or your department, or just those you sometimes lunch with? If I send my mother a message suggesting she join AllAdvantage, it's still acquaintance spam; it's an unsolicited e-mail with commercial intent. Where is the dividing line? Everett-Church said he doesn't have an answer to that critical question. The commercials during last week's Super Bowl were all the evidence we need of the huge amount of money companies are ready to spend to drive customers to Web sites, and a couple of ads sounded like they were adopting a similar version of AllAdvantage's approach to viral marketing. Perhaps the day is coming when most of us will get more unsolicited commercial e-mail from friends than from strangers. If so, I fear the epidemic may prove fatal to the Internet. Got a complaint about how a vendor is treating you? Write to InfoWorld's reader advocate, Ed Foster , at gripe@infoworld.com.  RELATED SUBJECTS  E-CommerceWeb TechnologiesDiscuss this article in our online forums MORE > SPONSORED WHITE PAPERS 
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