The decision by Singapore based blog advertising network Nuffnang to charge a S$1 (69c) administration fee on payments is causing a bit of ruckus amongst South East Asian bloggers.
Nuffnang was founded in April to offer local advertising solutions to bloggers in Singapore and Malaysia. On the face of it, the company is not dissimilar to Federated Media, offering CPM and direct sale graphical advertising, yet on the other hand it promotes itself a bit like Pay Per Post, complete with blog meetups and sponsored parties. Current sponsorship partners include Nike, Citibank and Clearasil. It’s main local competition is a company called Adverlets, that caters to the same distinct market.
The S$1 administration fee my seem insignificant, but local bloggers are unhappy due to the way it was imposed: with no announcement and only discovered when they went to make withdrawals from their Nuffnang accounts (unlike Adsense bloggers can withdraw money from Nuffnang on request). A number of a prominent local bloggers have said that if they knew there was going to be a fee to withdraw money they may not run Nuffnangs code, and would have used Adverlets exclusively (who don’t charge the fee). There’s even a blog dedicated to why Nuffnang will fail.
Singapore and Malaysia may not be large markets in a global blog advertising sense, but the tale is of note when considering how even small things can cause a lot of damage in the new media age. All the money Nuffnang has spent on PR has meant nothing in the face of bloggers angry over a small administrative charge.
This is just really shady. I know of a couple of bloggers who were using this network before, one in particular being Louiss at BloggingSecret.net. I can’t believe those bloggers who used that ad network only discovered they were missing money once they went to withdrawal $$$. That’s a way to lose publishers very fast.
leave them and move to blogger
show them consumer power
rc
trading tennis blog
I registered for this network and I made a couple of ringgit (malaysian currency ) for months now! It’s really hard to make money on the network and now they want to charge admin fees - jeez… this is a really bad network -
Tasteless and stupid move by nuffnang. “Maybe they won’t notice…”
They’ve been going at it for awhile now.
More blogs/articles on Nuffnang-Techcrunch saga right from the mouth of bloggers in the region can be found here:
http://ping.sg/search/1/1/?q=nuffnang+advertlets
I only wish that losing $0.69 ranked up there with one of my bigger concerns right now. That would be nice.
Seriously. Read the delphi forum posts from “why nuffnag will fail” and you will see that this is a struggling startup with a founder who sounds very honest and genuine about his position.. he seems to have taken a great deal of time to explain the situation in his postings: He writes about the need for transparency, explains why the cost is necessary and admits to making the mistake of not being having disclosed the fee beforehand because they didn’t anticipate the costs.
Was it bad to not anticipate the fee and disclose it? Probably. Does this sound like a genuine mistake by an honest company? Totally.
Duncan are you sure this isn’t the competitor just stirring up trouble, because that’s exactly what it looks like. For [blank] sakes Google won’t even tell me how much of a cut they’re skimming off my cheques.
Who is the one playing dirty again? The company taking $0.69 of every cheque or the company taking [whatever-they-feel-like-this-month] off of every cheque?
Quote this from Nuffnang Blog:
“NUFFNANG COMMUNITY UPDATE 5: OCTOBER 15th 2007
4. Cashouts and Transaction Fee
The transaction fee of $1 has seemed a controversial decision to some, however, is necessary considering the growing size of the community, and also rising costs. The main bulk of this transaction fee is used to cover bank charges for the processing of cheques. Up till now it has been absorbed.
As a concession, we have decided to absorb this cost till October 31st (A 1 month delay).
For all affected bloggers for whom the cost of $1 has been deduced (This only affects Cashouts in Octoer), in the next cashout, we will credit $1 into your account. “
The problem doesn’t only resides in that $1. If you care to read my other post, I explained why. The response & blog selection is also mystifying.
http://www.thebizwalk.com/adve.....out-money/
I would agree with Mark that this seemed more of an honest mistake and hey, at least they are Nuffnang is trying to save face by absorbing the $1 to all the bloggers that were effected. I know that has to effect Nuffnang seeing how they took the $1 because they didn’t have $$$ in the first place.
To Mark, no. In a way, the observations came from me. And also no, I don’t work for Advertlets and not even anything to do with the IT industry. For a startup company not to factor in (possible) operational cost, it tells us how prepared this company is. In truth, a lot of hype or rather publicity was created through bloggers blogging about it when Nuffnang was initially launched. Hence, it can be assumed that Nuffnang spent little on PR on its launch. If these bloggers are paid, then it brings on the doubt similar to what PayPerPost is facing…
In addition, the way PR was done during these crisis also shows us how inexperienced the team is. Response time and such has been long standing issues but until today there are no changes.
Was this a mistake on Nuffnang’s part to not announce the $1 charge? Most likely.
Even though there was an attempt to explain or rectify the situation, the damage was already done. But at least there was an effort to correct the situation yar?
Besides the $1 transaction fee woohaa, there are 2 distinct groups of bloggers who love or hate Nuffnang.
Nuffnang only serves direct ads and not CPC or CPM ones.
One is earning good money from Nuffnang, the other is earn nada from the company after months of putting the “I serve Nuffnang” ads.
There are just many bloggers who lack the patience of making moola online with Nuffnang. Of course, there are no such things as get-rich-quick but if the company changes it’s model, things may be a lot brighter.
Announcing a deduction from money earned via a blog posting is absolutely retarded. But hey, they “made an effort.” Yawn.
Mark
possibly, although it did come via a source with credibility. What I am sure of though is that some people are angry about it, whether this is justified is not really for me to say. From what I can gather its the retrospective nature and lack of notice that has made people angry, as opposed to the actual cost which lets face it isn’t a lot.
Once I found this offer, well that chance for SEA but for dig into the detail it just for Singapore and Malay. They are relatively small, advertiser mostly jump to famouse website or TV. That’s the situation even there are a lot of blogger out therer but still can not gain attention for local avertisers.
Running a company require you to be very transparant about your operation.
Many countries and their regulations require to give a notice to your customers in case there is a rise or addition in their monthly fees.
People usually get upset on such rise but then forget about it since they had the ability to switch to another provider, such rise usually are too low to really affect these users and make them switch, the trouble of moving your account is higher than the 1-2$ a month, but for the company its a gold of mine that can give you another 2-3 millions of revenue per month or year.
What nuffnang did is doing such rise and not informing their users, I suspect people are angry about them not because of the small fees but rather of the possibility that their company might take such action and deduct a fee of their hard earned money without consulting or announcing it.
I may not know the whole story, but I think when it comes to money, you’ll need always to give the whole picture to your customers and give them all the options to chose what to do.
Usually customers will stick with you if you’re honest and let them know before the action rather after the action.
http://www.octabox.com
It’s really lucrative when it comes to online advertising. Judging by the number of advertisers on nuffnang, i don’t think that they are not making money - in fact they should have loads of it by now..
But then again, it’s really flexible when it comes to payment in malaysia - sure it will cost you a couple of cents to send a check, but you can also try auto credit into people’s bank account like using maybank2u.com.my or something.
I can’t make any money off this network as it’s really meant for high roller blogs which has tons of traffic. You get a lousy few cents whenever your visitors click on your ads and that’s it. If you have tons of traffic, it’s better to use Adsense as you earn in USD which is x3.4 times malaysian ringgit - more profitable..
Well, it really seems like a black PR by Adverlets. A really minor change, a really big fuss.
Ad networks are a dime a dozen these days… you would have thought with all the competition that charging any type of fee for administrative costs would be a sure sign of either a monopoly or just plain ignorance of that marketplace. That being said, Amazon use to charge 10$ per check as an administration fee… not sure if this is still true though.
I guess shit happens with good intentions, but at least he realized his mistake and made some attempts to rectify the situation before it got out of control. I hope this decision didn’t cost him too much in lost revenues (ei: bloggers leaving).
Jon
Nuffnang is a Malaysian company, which spread to Singapore.
We have had the pleasure of meeting the CEO of both companies and can proudly say that next weekend, we will be launching our own online marketing campaign, and will be doing so exclusively with Nuffnang…
The vibe at Advertlets is just not the same as Tim’s crowd, that’s for sure!
I guess the biggest issue here wasn’t really regarding the lack of announcement prior to the implementation of the $1 service charge. It was more of how the $1 was being justified. They claim that the admin fee was necessary because of an increase in their operating cost.
But in reality, there is only a $0.50 increase (per cheque) in their operation cost. The other $0.50 was unjustified.
http://why-nuffnang-will-fail.blogspot.com/
People don’t seem to realize that no matter how many readers you have you can’t talk something into failure. Ultimately if people find the service useful they will continue to use it even if their CEO just sprayed bullets into a local McDonalds. People just don’t give a crap in this age.
This is a waste of somebody’s life in my opinion, but that’s just me.
$1 service charge? If they don’t tolerate it, they’ll leave. The fact that they started charging it means that they probably have data that people will in fact tolerate it.
I also don’t mean that McDonald’s quote as a disrespect for life, ect… and so on, how people would love to interpret that out of proportion. It’s an exaggerated example to describe a phenomena.
Chris R,
I think that site could be setup by their competitor.
What i think is that Nuffnang expanded too quick. I mean the Singapore market is just a fraction of Malaysia’s market. You setup office in Singapore and there you go, you overheads grew to more than double due to the exchange rate and you tell me you can bring in double amount of business?
Before they consider expanding, they should do well and had broke even in Malaysia. Expanding too quick, unless you have the cash to dump, otherwise all spells trouble.
“I think that site could be setup by their competitor.”
ihatewalmart.blogspot.com/
It’s like the websites that were set up to hate walmart after they crushed all the unionization attempts. They totally didn’t do any good and Walmart simply closed the only store that successfully unionized. It was in Quebec, where we are BTW:
http://www.commondreams.org/he.....210-13.htm
People that have money and power will always beat you unless you can fly under the radar for long enough. These websites that sign up to TC are actually stupid, because once they hit the front page of TC, Google will assemble a team to destroy them. As long as you seem underfunded and out of reach, you’re ok. Garages are good hide out places, so are small offices with Penguins on the door
Seriously though, the only good thing that came out of the wal mart hate was the playboy “girls of walmart” where they got the hottest wal mart chicks to show their stuff. That was entertaining, and people like entertainment. They don’t like bad news and hate material, no matter how corny.
So move forward and not backwards! $1 is a pittance, such as we’re gonna charge people WAY the f more than a dollar. Free W2.0 services are for sucker cap. If you don’t like it simply don’t use their service! Go cry to your mamma.
Um. that was a bell curve of utter nonsense I just wrote. Nevermind all that.
I am using Nuffang now but won’t last long. I will WAIT until the minimum withdrawal and take the money and leave the ads. The HUGE leaderboard just too much for many blogs.
Sharing my experience here, the 1st ads campaign really made me happy as I earn RM 33 in a week with around 2.5k visitors. So, I guest I will get the money very soon. But, after the first ads, I got only RM 1.75 for each ads campaign which is also weekly based. Some of the weeks I even achieve 5k visitors.
Well, they gave me a reason stated that my visitors are came from US and their ads are Malaysia based… but so how about the first ads? After that, they announce some US ads, I was so happy that time. But, I only earn RM6 ….
After all, they are a monthly prizes when I sign up but so far there are only 3 winners. Stop for couple of months without any notification…
Josh Lim, CEO of Advertlets.com here.
Woot! Techcrunch! Not exactly how we hoped to be featured here, but still great to know that our little startup didn’t escape your attention…
In the interest of transparency, and to our new international audience, we’ll be keen to answer any questions here that users might have about our policies or earnings.
We believe that bloggers should get the fair share of their earnings, and are happy to announce that we will definitely continue to absorb transaction and service charges. After all, it is something that we as the service provider should and would have logically have factored into operational costs.
In the meantime, would like to point out that AdverTlets is spelt with a “T”, but the link is correct, thanks
Hopefully they would waive the fee soon. But it is really something when being charged without notice. It’s like receiving bills with hidden charges.
I am very impressed with the scope and depth of TechCrunch’s coverage. Having launched in Malaysia in June, we should have known about Nuffnang, but didn’t. It so happens that we needed a good advertising partner to help publicise our site in Malaysia, and Nuffnang may be it.
Their fees are ridiculously low, I don’t know what the bloggers are complaining about. Go figure.
Jali, Nuffnang have already reversed the admin fee.
But Nuffnang’s problem isn’t only with admin fees. There’s a whole bunch more to it.
a surprisingly badly post from tech crunch with no research or depth.
“A number of a prominent local bloggers…”. Translation: a tiny fraction of the Nuffnang network that are probably just too bloody stingy and bitter for words.
“with no announcement and only discovered when they went to make withdrawals from their Nuffnang accounts”. please, get off the moral high horse, even with a bloody announcement 3 months before implementation, they will still kick up a fuss. why? 1. stingy 2. bitter 3. Asian 4. Blogger
Not earning enough from Nuffnang? Suggestion: start blogging quality posts instead of contaminating the Internet with keywords rigged posts to jack up your traffic with Mr. Google. 3000 traffic, 5000 traffic, so what? it’s all just search engine magic…congratulations on your SEO skills but really, learn some bleeding manners.
Nuffnang is a great thing that will be beneficial to all bloggers in the long run, don’t kill it just because a few ones that are too thick to see the big picture. Many are enjoying Nuffnang, what about the hundreds of posts praising the company? Anyone took notice of them?
69c for lord’s sake.
Juliet Ruetens >>>
Out of nowhere you had this passion in protecting Nuffnang. Your own company? peace out.
tony tan: out of nowhere you had this passion to shoot down nuffnang? you are competitor? peace to you coz yeah, you’re really out of peace.
Transparency and Trust are very critical even in Web 2.0 operations.
http://www.meetingflex.com
Social Network + Video - Crap
Personally I feel that Nuffnang has to work fast to salvage the entire situations. Made some suggestions which I hope will help them better.
http://tomato75.blogspot.com/2.....an-do.html
paddy tan
BAK2u.com
Juliet Ruetens
Please, I did not use any SEO before this and those traffics aren’t from search engine… Please don’t simply shot here and there before you know what is happen.
Nobody will shot down Nuffnang if they are really good. People will only speak out when they find something was wrong… please calm down…
Good suggestion Paddy Tan. Although the problems have been spilled out it is time for some very good public relation to refrain it from getting bigger.
Juliet Ruetens>
I shoot them down? Hardly. I can’t even if i try. I was just giving my honest reading of the predicament they’re facing. If they are down suddenly it definitely aint because of what i said in this post.
But you are telling us “Nuffnang is a great thing that will be beneficial to all bloggers in the long run,”
That dont work that way dude, one down and there are hundreds more advertiser.
>>Juliet Ruetens
>>
We do not have the power to kill it, only them can kill themself.
@ Josh
Good PR move there!
We wonder where the hell is Nuffnang @ this moment.
The author quoted 3 blogs complaining about nuffnang. But if you were to surf around Singapore and Malaysia blogsphere, you would find quite a few blogs talking about their displeasure with nuffnang.
Have anyone ever wondered why there isn’t much bad press on Advertlets (Nuffnang’s competitor)?
Seriously speaking, SGD$1 is nothing. But its the way that they justify the charges that is causing the problem.
Truly disappointed with techcrunch for this post. It lacks depth and is very biased. Shows the lack of research committed before writing this. Nuffnang did not charge a transaction amount sneakily, like the way you’ve written it out to be!!
Nuffnang has contributed so much to the local blogging community!
We tend to be over over critical and look past Nuffnang’s contribution to the community by their multiple fully sponsored community events.
I do not support either Advertlets or Nuffnang but I personally feel Nuffnang’s transparency should be complimented.
The blog why-nuffnang-will-fail has been terribly unethical by using guerilla marketing by pimping his own blogsite on my chat box, and many other bigger bloggers. That is absolutely detestable. Sounds like he has a personal grudge.
The site against nuffnang totally seems like something the competitor set up. Duncan, I think you should have done more research into this before this post. Very very uncalled for.. did you even check or get your facts straight?
I think start ups should have transparency, and by them breaking down their costs for all to see, I think that in fact should be celebrated. Shows that they are not afraid of coming clean when in the face of opposition. I think $1 is ok.
For crying out loud, does anyone remember them lowering the cash out amount from $100 to $50 so that smaller bloggers could cash out quick instead of having their money stuck? Didn’t anyone say thank you or praise them for doing that? Isn’t that something that we should have taken notice of and commented?
Can we all look at the bigger picture????
eStee said: “Nuffnang has contributed so much to the local blogging community!
We tend to be over over critical and look past Nuffnang’s contribution to the community by their multiple fully sponsored community events.”
Right, maybe I am blind or I haven’t been a real blogger or whatever, but where and how has Nuffnang contributed much to the local blogging community? What community events? Those that are limited only to a handful elect that we read about in a handful of blogs and almost always the same ones?
No, I am not bitter or anything. Neither do I blog to make money nor crave attention from blogging. However, I believe that if you want to make a statement like that, the onus is on you to qualify that claim. Obviously, a good number don’t feel the same way and that’s the story here.
Juliet Reutens: Maybe you should get off _your_ own moral high horse and not discriminate against the “stingy, bitter, Asian bloggers”.
There’s no reason to be racist.
It is very funny to read comments that this plot was manufactured by Nuffnang’s competitor. More ironically, some of these commentors are also fully aware that none of us are working for Advertlets. Yet, to charge out with such a statement of “positioned opposition” sounds a little silly. I don’t know if we should consider that as living in denial. (You know who you are.)
For a company to assume that every bad press coverage is setup by the competitor, is also an obvious hint of the maturity we are looking at here. It’s always not our fault, it must be somebody else’s fault. On the business platform, this is a very very terrible attitude to behold.
The best benchmark and truth is to take a realistic visits to most of the sites that displays both, that is sufficient enough to say who has the ad, and who not. The answer, is out there before our very eyes. There is a truth, that no amount of words can replace.
Coincidently, I happen to read from another blog… Advertlets scored again in good customer respond even through informal means. Can anyone deny that too? I guess not.
http://lly316.blogspot.com/200.....-down.html
While the bulk of praises of Nuffnang comes from a very tiny group of users and often the same few faces, the criticism comes from all diversity. From the average bloggers right up to the professionals.
Look at the big picture indeed, but can we face the truth?
I agree, since I’m joining them about 3 months ago, my earning only Rm3.70. that’s equivalent to usd0.80+. but i’m giving them a chance, let the code run even without any advertisement. Well, my patient towards them already reach the limit. So, I’m dropping their code, will not looking forward to work with them anymore. While advertlets although not much, yet still giving me about Rm2-3 per day. more or less, they are featuring me in front of their homepage!
DK > There isn’t much bad press about Advertlet because they do not project faces to the company. They work as a team and you can see clearly their teamwork is better, while nuffnang gives you the feeling something is not quite right in the team like they’;re lacking of something somehow.