In September 2008 Facebook application developer and advertising network RockYou sent a standard notice to all of their potential and existing advertising partners – which is virtually everyone that creates Facebook Applications. The problem was that they cc’d everyone, creating a firestorm of angry (and sometimes funny) feedback. RockYou basically published a complete list of advertisers and developers working on the Facebook platform.
RockYou VP Business Development Ro Choy apologized in the comments to our previous post, saying “We take privacy of all our partners very seriously and have reviewed and corrected the process that enabled this.”
Despite Choy’s assurance that the problem had been fixed, they did the same thing on November 25 (we gave them a pass that time). And now they’ve done it a third time. In a thinly veiled mass mailing advertisement, RockYou asks scores of developers to buy some of the “600 million impressions that we deliver each day.” And once again, they cc’d everyone, which annoys the recipients to no end. The message is below.
On an unrelated note, if you are looking for advertisers for your Facebook application, I’ve got a very high quality list for sale.
Subject: RockYou Ad campaign
Hi,
Thank you so much for working with us as a pub and/or advertiser. I
wanted to check in and find out if you need help reaching new users to
install your app or engage with your site.As our long-term partner, we want you to have access to the over 600
million impressions that we deliver each day across our network. We’ve
been running ad campaigns consistently with most of the top 20 app
developers on Facebook and MySpace– driving over 30,000 installs per
day for several clients– so there’s no reason why we can’t help you
grow your application or site through an ad campaign.If you’d like to find out more about setting up an ad campaign with us
to drive thousands of new users to your site in a matter of hours,
please shoot me a response email or feel free to give me a call. Thanks
a lot!Regards,
Danielle
—
Danielle [removed]
Ad Sales, RockYou
Email: [removed]@rockyou.com
Office: 650-421-[removed]
Website: rockyouads.com
I have made a point of avoiding all RockYou apps for over a year now after they tricked me into spamming my friends. They have no integrity over there.
I agree that they are light on integrity.
R u really selling the advertisers list? I wld be interested to buy for my new twitter app.
no, i’m not really selling the advertising list.
i thght so…..
unfortunately, spamming works.
Michael, you should send everyone a message telling them that it’s RockYou letting you spam them and letting them know TechCrunch has their back.
“Thank you so much for working with us as a pub and/or advertiser.”
They could have at least used the full word “publisher.”
wow …. people do review the posts and emails word by word ….
facebook was such a nice place before the apps came out, all the information was legit, names, photos, events, everything. The apps came, the culture of ‘trueness’ of facebook is gone, everyday i see more nicknames, more avatars and other virtual crap culture brought by virtual anything app shit. Considering the spammy nature of apps and user disappointment right after installation in it (most of the time) it is interesting to me why investors put huge money into this spammy nature business.
I received this email and the past ones from RockYou (I signed up for their ad network, but didn’t end up actually using their services).
This time they didn’t CC all the developers, they BCC’d it or whatever. So, there is no advertisers list to be had.
So, this latest message is no more annoying than any other mass email I get everyday.
Just to clear that up.
see image below.
Oh snap!
Maybe I’m just not cool enough to be part of the great echo chamber this time.
Keep up the good work!
I really like that line…
“light on integrity”
LMAO!!!
I count over 100 emails in the To line.
There are 81 names in that list actually and you did not quite blur the last email address.
There were about 450 addresses in the former list.
well then, admin@scrabulous is screwed.
This is basic e-marketing and e-business 101:
Always Bcc your contact mailings.
It is just tacky to blow up everyone to everyone like that.
$68 Million in funding for not knowing how to Bcc?
Perhaps knocking on the house doors of the money people at companies will get a start-up $200 million in funding…
http://images.i...80947327586.jpg
Fail
And I’d think they are happy about the mention on Tech Crunch. Exposure is exposure. I’m not sure giving PR to spammers is the ideal way to get them to stop.
yes, i’m sure they’re super pleased to be called out for habitual stupidity and loose ethical standards.
its companies like Rock You that keep our grandmas afraid of getting on the net….
Well, I guess I was one of the lucky one Michael – I got the email.
And the other ones.
I don’t even work on Facebook Apps anymore, please stop sending this to me RockYou!
They make so-so apps anyways!
BestJobsOnline
http://tinyurl.com/7uj5ay
More bad PR. For a few hundred bucks they could’ve purchased some email marketing software or even have jumped on one of the SaaS platforms for a few bucks a month. We’ve got both – from $10/month to a once-off $495 and up (Interspire.com)
It astonishes me how VC’s invest in companies like RockYou which are 100% built on the back of other successful companies. It’s like investing in iPod accessories instead of the iPod.
Are there really that few, profitable business ideas in Silicon Valley?
For a few hundred milliseconds they could have used BCC and avoid all this mess…
I agree Mitchell.
It’s kinda like using the Techcrunch comment area to spam your offerings to unsuspecting masses. I mean what kind of a “legitimate” company would leach off of another company like that?
Oh yeah, apparently yours.
Her name is Danielle [removed] and send her an email at [removed@rockyou.com
editor’s note: sensitive info removed. let’s keep it civil.
That poor guy at Belkin had his full name and linked profile posted on TC while Danielle gets her privacy (name and email) after she exposing others’ emails. The good news is that she will be able to get a job after this internship is over
I’d say there’s a bit of a difference between clicking the wrong button and deliberately soliciting false feedback to dupe consumers into purchasing an inferior product, wouldn’t you?
yeah, the belkin guy was committing fraud, not stupidity.
I’m amazed, no one has filed a lawsuit.
Michael:
Your article does not give a fair shake to Rockyou! which is an excellent company. As an angel investor, my portfolio teams have gone-on to raise $55 million in Tier 1 funding since April 2006 and many have had occaision to interact with Ro and his team and they are excellent, first-rate, with a very compelling business proposition. Their are very few companies, maybe 3 in the United States, that really understand the relationship between and ad distribution lift, kfactor, and viral retention a la RPU and I would put Rockyou!, Max Levchin and Keith (Context Optional) in this category.
Kind regards,
Hugh J. Sloan III
General Partner
SHP LLC
Atherton, CA
sandhillroadvc@gmail.com
dbsloan@stanfordalumni.org
I can’t decide if you’re satirizing VCs or are just that grammatically challenged.
Or, more than likely, he does not care. How many VC’s have you emailed with?
Gimme a break Mr Sloan, understanding the theory underlying virality has very little to do with success of a viral app.
Also, if I may point out, you’ve just shown a complete lack of understanding of your audience – us – to whom you are talking now. What do you think we care about kfactors or virality or even rockyou’s success? What we see is a booboo anyone could have made, but a bigger booboo only you have chosen to make in defending when you should be contrite! Hope you don’t ever take up a PR or Sales job.
You mention all these virality terms and yet to fail to realize that what RockYou has done is completely and utterly USELESS! In the large scope of things, none of this stuff matters… NONE OF IT! The value that RockYou provides is close to zero.
Who do you think you’ll be able to sell RockYou to?!
PS: You should try to get some of this money you ‘invested into RockYou’ by shutting down RockYou and liquidating its assets (if it has any).
With all due respect, Ro came to you asking for money, of course he’ll be nice. How many arrogant F***s do you see everyday?
In a VC meeting there could only be one side with all the Arrogant F***s
RockYou got a ton of money… $68.5M to be exact!
ANd what do they have to show for it? LOL!
What a gigantic fail! I wonder what their dumbass VCs have to say for themselves… I wonder where they expect to exit with this smoldering pile of crap.
Their logo is a little spooky!
I guess that in IT, with its multimillion funding do involve people who are daft (ie, people in the company that received funding). C’mon VCs, funding web apps don’t involve very costly R&D like developing/inventing a new type of fibre optics or developing new cutting-edge nano-technology stuff.
Either the money is being used for the inflated salaries of managements/employees and in that case, it would be obvious to VCs that it is a risky efforts.
Can someone tell me, what sort of R&D spending this company is doing that justifies this $68 mills?
Are they R&D’ing of how to learn to cut & paste PHP/HTML codes? Jesus, I thought that you can recruit a group of high school students to do that without spending much on them.
Hugh said…
Their are very few companies, maybe 3 in the United States, that really understand
the relationship between and ad distribution lift, kfactor, and viral retention a la RPU and I would put
Rockyou!
Really?
Anyway, you might find the following journal proceedings useful for those online ad companies that you’re involved with Hugh, because I doubt that their developers have read those articles or implement the algorithms/techniques described in those papers.
2007 Proceedings of the 1st international workshop on Data mining and audience intelligence for advertising
There was another similar conference in 2008 but the proceedings of that hasn’t come out yet perhaps in the next month or so. You can always check out ACM for new publications on online ad, which they do regularly.
The materials published in those articles in the proceedings are original, ie, they’ve never been done before (well , until now since the proceedings is now made available to the public). Most of those articles were published from Google, Yahoo, Microsoft researchers (and also others).
This is why I am shocked about the $68 mill funding of RockYou, since I believe that most of what they do is non-original, ie, they don’t do expensive and original R&Ds such as (PhD) researchers from the biggies , Google , Microsoft, etc… Or may be that programmers from RockYou get paid like CEO from Wall Street?
As someone who has also worked in the social app space I’d agree that the level of integrity on display is remarkably low. This characteristic evidences itself in a variety of ways, including but not limited to a complete disregard and disrespect for users and blatant ripping off of other developers.
RockYou is certainly up there with the worst of them. They are willing to engage in almost any tactic to increase their user numbers. Furthermore, they’ve proven themselves willing on several occasions to screw their business partners in order to achieve their goals.
There’s nothing wrong with an aggressive and competitive corporate culture, but when companies like RockYou raise an absurd amount of cash and then seek to prove the validity of an obscenely inflated valuation, they cut ethical corners. Lance, Ro and the rest of the management team seem to have lost sight of integrity and honesty in the pursuit of riches.
Good luck with that.
When the genesis of the company was a result of stolen Intellectual Property… is it that surprising that the company is lacking any integrity?
http://ventureb...ns-first-round/
Amazingly, the comment that I wrote was removed. I mentioned that there is some sort of feud between Arrington and RockYou, and that Arrington, with his conflicts of interest and willingness to use his blog as a weapon in his feuds, is not without sin. Even worse, he writes a stinging blog post about RockYou but edits out any comments that are critical of him. What a hypocrite.
I have worked with RockYou and I agree that they lack integrity. But they are one of many companies in this space who think all is fair in this business. The ethical code of the tech world started dying once it started making money and attracting the sorts of people who are concerned about nothing but money.
Ummm … speaking of protecting privacy … why don’t you just give out her SSN already? Doesn’t take a genius to put together the pieces of the puzzle here.
i am sepaking tech with gilad
I’ve been working with RockYou for quite a while now and I have to disagree that they have no value. They have exactly the same value that a reality TV show has. They entertain and push media to the masses. I will happily continue to work with them as they are simply the easiest and most effective way to spread content on facebook.
ps – everyone is human. mistakes happen. hell, even stupidity happens every once in a while.
Hello mountain, meet molehill. Yes it was stupid, yes it was a mistake. Outlook’s evil and we’ve all hit send too soon. Get over it. I’m sure you can find something better to rant about than the mistake of 1 salesperson.
made the mistake 3 times. do you work for RockYou!
Cuz you equally stupid. Count “One, Two, Three” dumb-ass
Ro’s an arrogant MBA type who made the same mistake at eBay with his comments re: Google. Lance and Jia are merely engineers and know nothing about how advertising works. Combined with a revenue base at the mercy of social networking sites’ policy whims and changing strategy vis a vis the marketplace and you have a doomed enterprise.
RockYou! is a great company created by great people. We have been working with them for two years and for me, these guys represent the spirit of the new web. They are open minded, they are honest and they are smart. This is an accident that definitely shouldn’t happen, but let’s keep it as such and show respect to the people who work so hard to bring successful new products to the market.
Mistakes and accidents do happen, and should be moved past. Patterns are less easily dismissed. Sloppy manangment, poor hiring, and diminishing revenue streams are signs of much larger patterns aren’t they?
Spammy? Yes
Stupid? Yes.
Profitable? Fuck yeah. And that’s the only shit that matters. Web 2.0 turds like Seesmic should close shop and give the money back to the investors.
“Profitable? Fuck yeah. And that’s the only shit that matters”
This is exactly why the US economy is completely f***ed. You suck.
Rooly/Hugh: who cares if RockYou is a good company? They may be good. They may be profitable. However, they are clearly stupid.
Is it really *that* hard to use BCC? I don’t get it. Why can’t they learn from their mistakes?
They are just a bunch of young guys running the company. No one knows what the hell they are doing over there. Bunch of Arrogant F***s over there.
check out RockYou’s linkedin profile. You’ll see.
One of the issues managing a self-motivated, aggressive team that’s under significant pressure to perform is that occasionally mistakes are made. We went through the process of building aggregated group email identities for partners and customers of our services to avoid this material issue from happening after the initial occurrence. But as our team and partners/customers have grown quickly, we failed to update those group emails and train new team members of their use sufficiently, which led to this unfortunate repeat of non-BCC use. I’ve asked my team to be rigorous about this process going forward and, once again, take full and personal responsibility for the fail. Please address any concerns directly to me (ro@rockyou.com).
For the individual comments regarding stupidity or arrogance on our part, I accept that as the price of the error (even if I don’t necessarily agree about the arrogant bit). That said, managing a fast growing startup and team (having done this a few times over the past 10 years) usually involves a long series of mistakes and, with luck, immediate, lastin corrections. My sincere apologies to all of our partners and customers impacted.
Ro Choy
SVP Business and Ad Operations
RockYou
Is this really that newsworthy? Cmon Arrington, if there’s anyone who needs to worry about ethics, it’s you. This is a blatant attack on someone you don’t like very much. Great journalism.
How annoying. And I was going to use them for a project. Can anyone suggest a good facebook application vendor???