MySpace has an embarrassing situation today involving their new MyAds self service advertising product - they’ve repeatedly rejected ads from a startup called HubPages as competitive to MySpace, despite the fact that the site isn’t a social network.
Ryan Hupfer from HubPages (who coincidentally is the author of MySpace For Dummies) writes:
This is a follow-up for these 2 posts (here and here) that you guys have written on the new MySpace MyAds advertising platform, which I was initially excited for and now wish that I’d never seen due to it being a complete waste of my time. I thought that you might enjoy hearing a first-person encounter with the system and from a business that actually utilizes these types of campaigns as a way for new member recruitment. I will give you a brief overview and if you’d like more information, I’d be more that happy to talk more about it.
Who I am:
My name is Ryan Hupfer and I’m the Communicator of Awesomeness! (marketing manager) at HubPages.com, a US top 250 website that focuses on helping writers monetize topical content. I believe that Mike knows one of our founders, Paul Edmondson pretty well and you wrote about our launch back in 2006. You last wrote something about in May of 2007 when we changed our look and added some text ad optimization to the site.Why I’m contacting you:
Part of my job is to keep new writers coming into HubPages and we do all types of CPC campaigns and other online partnerships to help with this. Well, I have been using Facebook ads for quite a while now and have been very pleased with the results. It’s super easy to use, targets well and is very easy to create, update and manage as the campaigns progress over time. Well, when I heard that MySpace was coming up with the same type of self-service ad system I was pretty excited to try it out. I even had one of our designers come up with 2 versions of 5 ads that I wanted to start running. Well, as I started creating the campaigns, I first noticed a few things:1. The targeting isn’t nearly as good as Facebook (I couln’t even target Finance or Autos topics)
2. The platform is very Flash heavy and super slow/clunky compared to Facebook
3. The campaign setup was fairly confusing and it seemed like I could only add one ad to a campaign, which dictates the ad budget (which had to be over $25). So that’s a daily spend of $25 per ad.
Despite these slowdowns, I still continued on and entered in each of the ads, with 2 versions of each (300 square and 728 banner). But, as I began to enter them in I noticed that they were starting to get rejected just as quickly as I was adding them in. I wasn’t really sure why they were getting rejected until I received an email from MySpace with a reason. This is where it gets interesting, too due to the fact that I received several different reasons for rejection for the same ad after I resubmitted it again. Also, 5 out of the 10 ads made it through, no probem so I have no idea why the some were rejected and some weren’t. Here are some screenshots of the rejection from the platform and here are a few quotes from the email that was sent to me (2 of them are different and they were for the same ad):
Rejection #1 (same ad as Rejection #2, but with different reason)
Dear Advertiser:The Write 300 advertisement in your campaign(s) MySpace Writing 300 was reviewed to ensure that it complies with our editorial guidelines. We would like you to know that your ad was not accepted for the following reason: Other - Not accepting this type of business.
Rejection #2
Dear Advertiser:The Write 300 advertisement in your campaign(s) MySpace Writing 300 was reviewed to ensure that it complies with our editorial guidelines. We would like you to know that your ad was not accepted for the following reason: Other - Promotion of a Myspace Competitor.
Rejection #3
Dear Advertiser:The auto 700 advertisement in your campaign(s) auto 700 was reviewed to ensure that it complies with our editorial guidelines. We would like you to know that your ad was not accepted for the following reason: Other - Myspace competitor, cannot promote.
So, not only did they continue to reject my ads (and my money), but they did it in a very inconsistent way, not to mention that I would never view HubPages as a competitor to MySpace in the first place.
Anyways, I thought that you and the rest of the TechCrunch crew would find all of this pretty interesting and I would be curious to see if anyone else is having the same issues with the new MyAds platform. As an advertising platform it’s not even in the same ballpark as Facebook’s system, but maybe other people would say otherwise. If you’d like to post something about this, feel free and if you’d like more information, just let me know.
I contacted MySpace and they said the rejection is an error and will be reversed. They did confirm that they reject ads from “direct competitors,” and point out that Facebook does the same. In this case, though, they said that their customer service representatives were overzealous in rejecting the ads.
MySpace also says they now have 10,000 advertisers on the platform. Earlier this month we reported early revenue numbers for the product.
Update: MySpace emails to say:
- You can target Autos…car tuning, muscle cars, trucks, motorcycles. Finance is coming next week.
- Facebook only allows text ads - MyAds gives you complete creative control which is why there is an ad builder.
- There’s no daily budget. You set the start and end dates and the amount. Min $25 total budget.
- Yes you can only have one ad per campaign but you can have up to 100 campaigns.
See all
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Sorry to hear about that Ryan. good luck man.
I am pretty sure that i have seen ads for Microsoft and Yahoo on Google
sure, Google knows they are king and will gladly take money from MSFT and Y!
Ryan, they probably have many different junior or intern type traffic folks viewing tons of ads. Different people were probably just selecting a reject reason based on some predefined options in a drop list so the inconsistencies will happen. On a separate note I would be interested in hearing about your success with facebook if you want to talk about it. You can reach me robb at retrevo dot com
-Robb
Would love to see conversion data from myAds
myAds are about as effective as Circuit City turn-around plan circa 2006. the biggest problem is that a MySpace click in worth about $0.0025 and they are trying to stick to a minimum of $0.25 — traffic is what it is and it’s worth $.25 to me or anyone I know.
Totally agree with the marketing guy from hubpages in that Facebook ads are streets ahead. Franky, FB is more efficient for me than Google right now (that’s just for me and my biz — suggest you kick the tires on everything regularly to see if there’s some bang for your marketing buck).
correction:
traffic is what it is and MySpace traffic is NOT worth $.25 to me or anyone I know.
at $0.25/click minimum, you’re better off spending your money on google instead, since the myspace traffic everyone knows has extremely poor conversion rates.
rejection is underrated and can be a major motivator. most the time you realize that you really didnt need that company or person anyway. dont sweat’em. i agree with Mik.
CompetitionLocator.com - let the games begin.
You really need to locate yourself someplace else. Such as anywhere not on the web. kthx
ur a dictionary bot dude
can you blame theme?
I guess that I wasn’t so much frustrated as I was confused, but thanks to Mike everything has seemed to magically get all cleared up.
As far as running ads on social networks, I have had some pretty solid results - especially from Facebook. However, it’s more work that say, AdWords, due to the fact that you have to keep your ads fresh and really think about the audiences that you want to hit. I’d suggest giving it a shot if anyone is thinking about checking it out.
haha thats pretty funny. I love hubpages. I will take google anyday instead…
Hey Ryan,
I read your situation and wanted to say that I am sorry to hear about. Sounds like just a simple mistake on MySpace side. I actually agree with
Robb Lewis - …Different people were probably just selecting a reject reason based on some predefined options in a drop list so the inconsistencies will happen…
I actually represent a recording artists that is on MySpace and we were part of the beta for MyAds. The system does have several differences from FB and other systems, but mostly because they want to make it as simplistic as possible for the average person to jump on and market their music.
We have had great success with our campaigns and the conversions have been good given the type of marketing to music interests. The system is still in the beginning stages, so I expect more changes over time as people give feedback.
All in all it works great if you are looking to target people by age, location, gender, and interests (they do get pretty detailed in music, not sure about other areas). The pricing of clicks is pretty good from what I have seen, but does require some testing.
Overall its a great system and I would give it a shot again or feel free to reachout and I will give you more thoughts. Sorry for the long message, but I felt i should give as much feedback as I could.
Don’t worry, hubpages will become so popular very soon comparable to Myspace.
But they advertise cafemom…which is a social networking site?
Hopefully things will work itself out, because Hubpages is here to stay and will only continue to grow.
Never forget that all these sites, MySpace, Squidoo, Facebook, etc, began as virtual unknowns. When folks discovered them and began exploiting them, they exploded in popularity.
I expect HubPages to be the next wave so it’s fertile ground right now for those who figure out how to use it.
Jim DeSantis
Hub Pages Videos
Hubpages is a fantastic site. I can’t see MySpace refusing your money, but you’re probably better off with Facebook (less 14 year olds)
I’ve enjoyed watching this site grow, which is why my own site is dedicated to its success.
this shit sucks ya suck
I mainly use adwords for my guitar lesson website. I tried using myspace several times, but I always get an error when I want to create a new ad, so I’ve never been able to even create an account
lol
i like to do ads on myspace and also on hubpages its great services and also google adwords and yahoo
ya too bad sorry dude but you should try again for succes and i surely say you can get it
I really love this guy, he is so pissed off its funny.
Hubpages are a total joke, rather than getting bigger, all their best talent, is taking off. 2 top ones in the last week Quoted censorship Hypocrisy but most of all Bore with it.
Get over yourself. Hubpages, will never be as big as Myspace or Facebook Thats stupid talk. Everyone knows that they rely on their Membership, and equally they need their Members less than their Members need them. Its a really boring Site, I wouldn’t Socialize with what is on there. Facebook Fan.
As for their articles Too many, Stuff all has been done before. Its just very droll.