Performancing Descends Into Chaos - Shareholders Squabble Publicly
Michael Arrington
18 comments »
Yesterday evening we wrote about the shuttering of the second of three services at Performancing, as well as CEO Nick Wilson’s recent departure.
Apparently Wilson, who says he still owns 35% of the business, isn’t happy about the closing of Performancing’s ad network. In fact, he doesn’t seem to have known it was happening. On his personal blog, he writes:
I don’t know what the communication problem between Performancing management is, but there appears to have been some decision making without the benefit of having all the facts.
When I resigned from the company and passed the reigns to Chris, the situation needed a lot of work, but was OK - we had a couple of options on the table for moving forward including picking up talks with one prominent blog player re the aquisition of PFF, or ScribeFire as it’s now known.
I’ve emailed Chris and Patrick, though at the time I’ve no idea if Patrick will still be playing an active role as him and Bill, from Text Link Ads need to dump their shares in Performancing this year due to non-competes after their MediaWhizz aquisition.
Dont count Performancing out just yet.
It sounds like Performancing needs to have a shareholder meeting to work this stuff out. Soon.
The professional world is so unprofessional.
meeting? sounds like a phone call would be a major step forward….
Over the time, Performancing has always seemed very professional and to have it all go so bad so quickly is a real shame. Most, if not all, their ideas seemed to be grounded in reality and they seemed to operate with a good deal of common sense. Where this has all gone is up to anyone’s guess. Both the metrics and the Partners program seemed to be functioning very well indeed.
Certainly a couple of months ago I would never have believed that they were approaching the dead pool.
I’m surprised you’re even talking about them, to be honest. I followed them for a bit when they first launched, but it became apparent pretty quickly they were a bunch of amateurs. I’ve heard some people say they like the Firefox plugin, but has anyone made a dime off their “ad network”? Seems like all it did was con a bunch of people into putting their logo on their site with a link back.
Matt - I can tell you that I made several hundred dollars off the Perf. Ad Network.
Mike - you say “shareholderS” - is there more than Nick making posts so far? I searched but can’t find anything else at this point.
Allen — congrats, I stand corrected. I rarely saw sites with that logo actually featuring any ads, but maybe I just wasn’t visiting the right sites.
Mike, you have an eye for a title for sure, but squabbling simply isn’t the correct term.
I’ve the greatest of respect for my partners in Performancing, and Im certain that runs both ways.
We DO need to have that shareholder meeting though, no argument THERE…
The company is rooted in the concept of blogging, which is really all about communication…. yet they can’t seem to communicate properly amongst themselves. Alanis Morrisette should write a song about it.
Strange, but after visiting the link to the original post by Nick Wilson, there was a link there that referenced other blogs via Technorati. What I found most interesting was that all of these other “blogs” out there are just copies of this article word for word. I know this is a little off topic, but isn’t the idea of having a blog to have some original content with your own words to say about it?
Check it out:
http://technorati.com/search/h.....b=jscosmos
>>I know this is a little off topic, but isn’t the idea of having a blog to have some original content with your own words to say about it?
People are under the mistaken impression that if they scrape the TC feed, they’ll be popular too.
I think this is a bunch of rich boys playing with daddy’s money…cause I have investors…and a board…and everyone whould know what is going if we were going under.
Ultra small companies have many ways of staying alive. Its a lot easier to make radical business changes with a small staff. I don’t think i would count them “out” yet.
What ? no money ?
I made money on Performancing Partners network
I am amazed that they let things get this bad. I would imagine that they could of sold their user base and have another company keep them afloat until the purchase was finalized.
They are probably looking for that ‘reset’ button about now.
So now there are a few guys left, ppp, blogitive, reviewme and some others. Hey mike if your looking for proof about SEO and blog advertising just watch the short video over at blogitive. They are not hiding it.
“would imagine that they could of sold their user base and have another company keep them afloat until the purchase was finalized.”
Being “sold” isn’t very attractive to the userbase, as Performancing found out when they attempted this move with PayPerPost.
Spot on TDavid.
Great coverage of Performancing btw.