IZEA (PayPerPost) have suspended Zookoda, the blog to email service they acquired in April.
According to CEO Ted Murphy, the service has been suspended due to “elevated levels of abuse on Zookoda.com” and goes on to explain that the service is being used by spammers. For those that think that PayPerPost pollutes the blogosphere with spam content, the following from Murphy is rich with irony:
We hate spam. Honestly, I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone that really enjoys spam. Some people hate spam even more than we hate spam and those people complained to our network hosting service. Our network hosting service REALLY hate spam….We’re not spammers, we don’t support spammers and we do support everybody’s freedom of choice when it comes to opting in and out email lists.
Murphy suggests that the service will return in January, but we’re putting it on deadpool watch; Zookoda has been failing for months. Most Searched reports that the service started deteriorating when IZEA took over and had gotten to the stage where it simply stopped sending out email distributions in early December. Erno H on LinkedIn reports similar problems. An email distribution service that doesn’t provide email distribution is a business with nothing going for it.
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Post
Pay Per Post isn’t actually that evil. Sure, it’s not for everyone, but all they are doing is articulating into something more measurable what already goes on day in, day out in the blogosphere, and for that matter the rest of the world as well.
A more realistic, and less TC biased, view on PPP by Duncan here.
First deadpool of the 2008 maybe…
Hey TC,
Thanks for the weekly update on the state of payperpost.
I wonder if this is related to them not posting any new videos in their “RockStartUp” for several weeks now. There are some big changes occurring in IZEA which they have stopped documenting ever since the Google PR fiasco.
Jon
Duncan,
I will be the first to acknowledge that there have been problems with the Zookoda platform. As soon as we took over the service the user base and subscribers started increasing at a rapid rate. We quickly found that the underlying software we purchased had some major issues under heavy load. In addition to the increased load by legitimate users a handful of users began using the system to send out spam, causing Zookoda’s IPs to be flagged by some ISPs. These issues compounded to create email deliverability issues not only for Zoookda users, but for all of the properties operated by IZEA.
We are making infrastructure changes that will allow us to continue offering this great FREE email service with greater reliability. The system will be back and better than ever in January if not sooner.
franky
I’ve never changed my tune on that. As we’ve seen in the computer game review space this year folks are paid/ fired over what they write, to me there’s not a lot of difference, there has always been outlets that take money for positive reviews (TC isn’t one of them and I haven’t even so much as been offered even a free T-shirt). I’ve always been against PPP personally, but I’ve never been on the PPP is the root or evil bandwagon either, and if you check anything I’ve written at TC on PPP you’ll see that I’ve remained consistent. As I’ve also written previously as well PPP is on borrowed time because the model is flawed, they’re losing advertisers and “posties” now due to the Google crackdown. I also believe Ted Murphy knows this which is why we’ve seen PPP diversify a lot this year. Unfortunately for them Zoodoka wasn’t their best buy, but to be fair bulk email is always a risky business to be in….there was a very good reason Zoodoka was on the market for 7mths before being bought
A broken feature does not a deadpool candidate make…
Duncan, I’ve been reading you since the old BH days, and totally expect that you still stick to your original stance on PPP (and similar services).
I thought it were appropriate to point out you weren’t part of the PPP=evil camp, because reporting on IZEA at TC might raise those assumptions. Maybe I might have commented with an inappropriate tone, but heck it’s 3.00AM here on a Saturday morning. Blame the Russian lady, AKA Mrs. Smirnoff.
And if I remember well, we were numerous to support/endorse/announce ReviewMe when they launched. Yes, it all were opportunities and some chose the path of disclosure, others only saw the $$$.
franky
no probs. As I said I still don’t believe them to be the root of all evil, but I do think it’s a business idea on borrowed time post Google crackdown.
I’m not sure I’ve ever written about ReviewMe (if I have apologies), but I know they started on a better foot by insisting on upfront disclosure, and to Murphy’s credit he eventually came around on the disclosure side on PPP. End of the day though Google doesn’t like any of them today, and that’s what’s going to hurt them going forward. Some of the stories I read when doing a quick bit of research for this post would turn your hair gray, folks disappearing from Google altogether, destroying their online businesses etc after using PPP. They’re far from being the most evil people online, but today I’d recommend ppl don’t use it; it’s as risky has taking illicit drugs, you may get a high but the crash could kill you.
Good riddance. What a bunch of blogosphere pollution.
Hmmm…shouldn’t you appropriately call it Izea and not PayPerPost now? I guess the PayPerPost title probably got you more views.
Told you!
fakesteveballmer.blogspot.com
“An email distribution service that doesn’t provide email distribution is a business with nothing going for it.”
And a “news” service that doesn’t report the whole news doesn’t have anything going for it either. You guys just sit there ALL day waiting for the slightest sign of failure coming from the payperpost camp then you pounce all over it whether it’s a story or not. From the sounds of what ted murphy is saying and the gist of the real article, zookoda most likely had a bunch of spammers abusing the system to the point that the isp complained. instead of being irresponsible and letting it continue, they put a temporary hold on broadcasts so that the problem could be addressed correctly. you guys really have no integrity what so ever.
God forbid TC succeeds as the know it all of Tech. I’m sure TC will have a party if PPP goes under. ‘We got ya we got ya’. I thought PPP would run out of cash and blow it, but considering all the hate mail they have gotten from TC et al, I somehow suspect they will make it into the black with sheer will power alone.
Zookoda was really lame when the Australians ran it, mostly due to zero technical support. It improved a bit under PayPerPost. Then a few months ago mailings stopped going through due to some error in our settings — the message said. We couldn’t figure out what was wrong. No response from tech support. We were on the verge of moving from an RSS regurgitator to a more custom e-mail newsletter, so it wasn’t worth the trouble to pursue it. But for what it did, straight RSS to e-mail weekly, it was great, while it lasted. It gave us a newsletter with zero work every week, once configured. Feedburner won’t let you import e-mail addresses, so that wasn’t an option. And we’re not going with a small startup again.
how ironic that the previous Tech Crunch post is a “thank you” to your sponsors with in effect are “paid links” which pass page rank from Tech Crunch. Isn’t this what google is against? slippery slope guys and these look a lot like PAID LINKS to MOI
, TechCrunch Sponsors!
* Panther Express
* PartnerUp
* ONEsite
* BrightCove
* PageFlakes
* IDrive
* Text Link Ads
* Ads-Click
Told you
~ CARversation.com
Distributing content through rss feed would have been worked out better than email, just wondering how PPP was not aware about such awful consequence before acquiring them?
This one cannot be dead; it never even was a live.
Check out the latest article about Google-Zero:The Eco-Friendly search engine
@bsmeter - It certainly looks like paid links here (which they are as sponsors), but take a closer look, and you’ll see the “nofollow” property in the link that doesn’t pass along page rank.
As a former sponsor of TechCrunch, this periodic posting is just another way to deliver value to their advertisers — some (most?) users tend to ignore the ad space in the right gutter.
Ironic? Yes. BS? No.
Check out the ‘no follow’ attributes of those links….
steve ballmer said…
btw.
I have been accused of spamming your little blog or whatever here. Gimme a break! Do you people know who I am? Do you have any idea what I can do? Spam? I don’t think so!
What I do, I do out of concern for my fellow man. It hurts me to my core to see you people sitting around using these little toy computers with candy looking interfaces.
I beg of you! Save the children! STOP this Mac madness now, Vista awaits you, reality is out there waiting for you to join it!
Just get up, slowly!
Back - away from the keyboard.
Now get the credit card, go to any electronics outlet and buy a Vista PC!
Now does’nt that feel better?
Glad to help.
fakesteveballmer.blogspot.com
I’ve been using zookoda to send out my daily newsletter and it is the worst service ever. The folks at Payperpost are absolutely clueless with tech support. They have absolutely no idea how to fix anything and this only proves their incompetance.
Anyone sugggest any other free mailing list software we can use? I’d be glad to see the end of them. I hear NYimes are writing a big feature on their failure as a business
I’ve used phplist before and it works pretty well. I know I had to tweak the rss importer to work the way I wanted it to.
I will rather consider adding subscribe button for rss feed in my blog.
FeedBlitz is happy to welcome legitimate Zookoda publishers. FeedBlitz haas full self-service tools, including import and export, excellent deliverability and great ISP relations. Circulation has grown from 2.6 million to 4.4 million since the end of August. With free (ad supported) and paid plans (i.e. a real business model to ensure we stick around), we have the features and the price points to suit everyone. FeedBlitz delivers nearly 30 million emails for bloggers monthly.
Send your scheduled updates and broadcasts with FeedBlitz.
Phil Hollows
Founder CEO
FeedBlitz, LLC
http://www.feedblitz.com
This is interesting and I have used Zookoda to send emails to my users and they worked ok. Personally I don’t think PPP is a bad thing as bloggers should be paid to write about things of interest. Now if a product is bad and it’s reviewed as good which may have been the case then that’s a bad thing for everyone.
I’ve not really kept up on the whole PPP thing to be honest. I think all sites just add more pollution to the Blogosphere anyway. The only problem I have is sites that are just for the purpose of delivering ads. I think anyone legit has an issue with that.
So the question I have for anyone that want to answer it is how do you make legit money from you blogging efforts? My blog has become somewhat popular but I don’t see the ad revenue actually making a ton of money for the site. Given that fact a site like Zookoda was a positive for me since I could send a decent looking email to all my subscribers and not have to spend lots of time tweaking it, and free is good… any other suggestions?