Zynga’s most recent Facebook game, FishVille, has temporarily been taken offline by Facebook for advertising violations.
FishVille will remain suspended, Facebook tells us, “until Facebook is satisfied that Zynga demonstrates compliance with Facebook restrictions — as well as Zynga’s own restrictions — on the ads it offers users.”
This is a relatively light slap on the wrist since the game only launched two days ago and had a couple of thousand users (Update: Zynga says FishVille had 875,000 users yesterday. wow). Zynga’s other games, including FarmVille with 63 million monthly users, remain online, despite the fact that they were showing the same ads.
But this does send a clear message to Zynga and other game developers that Facebook isn’t ignoring the problem. Whether it’s a real concern over the user experience or simply embarrassment from the press suggesting Facebook is a haven for scammers is somewhat irrelevant.
Facebook has also shut down a total of four ad networks in recent months for ad violations, including Tatto Media and Gambit. Other networks, such as SendMe Mobile, which was founded by ex-CNET executives, have largely taken their place by offering similarly questionable offers that trick users into mobile subscriptions.
This is also a bit of an arms race. Zynga may be specifically filtering Facebook employees from seeing ads that violate Facebook terms and conditions, making it difficult for Facebook to enforce the rules.
And the relationship between the two companies is complicated. Facebook battling Zynga on the advertising scams. But Zynga is also one of Facebook’s largest advertisers, probably accounting for between 10% and 20% of total Facebook revenue.
Notwithstanding the dirtyness of the CPA ads they are running the fact that they are playing cat and mouse games with journalists and facebook employees by blocking IP addresses is ridiculous an shows complete contempt.
On a lighter note I’m curios as to how many more cliche blog titles you can come up with whilst this debacle continues to play out
“I’m curios as to how many more cliche blog titles you can come up with whilst this debacle continues to play out”
i can probably go on forever.
Please Please mention the backing Venture Capitalist by name as part of this scam – You’ll get your job done faster! As a reminder:
Bing Gordon, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers
Fred Wilson, Union Square Ventures
Sandy Miller, Institutional Venture Partners
Peter Thiel, Managing Partner Clarium Capital
Are active accomplices in one of the biggest scams ever generated on the web / social media, and should be held accountable with Mark Pincus.
These investors will never allow their kids to get caught in these scams. These VCs take money from pension funds, who get their money from teachers/state employees, and then go and invest that money in companies that scam and bankrupt their children.
this article shows one of the better sides of techcrunch
Keep it up Arrington. Your silly titles put a smile on my face. Don’t listen to the haters.
http://www.traderbots.com
Try: Phish Ville, Link Bait, Scampi, Sharks, Soled Out, etc. My favorite is “Sleeps with the Phishers”.
Personally, I think the story about ad violations is bogus. I could be wrong and all, but if it was ad violations as reported, why aren’t all the other Zynga games affected? Think about it.
Um. Because Zynga is a huge revenue generator for Facebook. They just wanted to give them a light slap on the wrist (as Arrington said in the article) to scare them – killing them completely would be a big mistake.
By the way, there are no proof that zynga is doing IP filtering for ads. This is what Arrington suspect and let not jump to the conclusion on that right the way. There could be many reason why it didn’t show up for him. I think Arrington should get to the bottom of this.
“There could be many reason why it didn’t show up for him.”
Sure there could many reasons why, but the overwhelmingly logical reason would be IP filtering. It’s a completely valid suspicion. And very likely, it’s pretty common for people in the CPA space to try and cloak IP requests coming from northern California.
It didn’t show up for him because they targeted his Facebook account. Jeesh, don’t you people read the articles?
zynga used ip/location filtering in the past to hide gambling ads on their games from facebook: http://bit.ly/1fYXOm
Oh, quit your carping.
I’m glad facebook is taking initiative on this. Curious to see how this whole ’scamville’ situation pans out eventually.
Here they’re firing a warning shot over Zynga’s bow to be more invisible about their scams. Putting Farmville on the chopping block is way down the line, Facebook isn’t all that serious about this “problem.”
What you think they only knew about this now? They’re just covering their asses.
Clearly they’ve always been an unethical company. They only do the ‘right thing’ in response to a) user revolt b) lawsuits or c) media pressure.
Arrington is the one taking the initiative here, not Facebook. I bet Facebook and their investors won’t be too happy when they start losing their spam revenue.
Mike, did you mean “sleeps with the fishes?”
I’m pretty sure that’s what they say in mafia movies. Swims with the fishes? Heck, they do that in Finding Nemo.
damnit.
Context overlap. “Swims With The Sharks”, “Sleeps With The Fishes”, “Bowls With The Muppets”.
http://www.usin...the+fishes.html
but you’re right.
yeah.. “sleeps with the fishes” was there in Godfather too… “Luca Brazi sleeps with the fishes”.
fyi – m not comparing Luca with that fishy &Zyanga game!
“It’s a Sicilian message. It means Luca Brasi sleeps with the fishes.” – Fat Clemenza, “The Godfather”
“Bonasera, Bonasera, what have I ever done to make you treat me so disrespectfully? If you’d come to me in friendship, this scum who ruined your daughter would be suffering this very day. And if by some chance an honest man like yourself made enemies they would become my enemies. And then, they would fear you.” – Don Corleone.
Keep it up, Mike.
I don’t quite understand why FB wouldn’t simply ignore the problem.
No one complains/complained (aside from some techies and bloggers), Zynga is obviously very successful and generates good business for FB.
Sometimes the right thing to do is just wait it out.
Sometimes “waiting it out” makes it worse.
You cannot bite the hand that feeds you. Facebook is doing just that. Only problem is that this ‘hand’ is on the wrong side.
If they are as apendexterous as most teenage boys, they would be good as covering their asses.
seems otherwise.
i ‘ve posted it before, but facebook did nothing for months when zynga shamelessly ran gambling ads on facebook. what’s more , facebook has featured zynga’s posts about moneymaking in social games.
link: http://bit.ly/1fYXOm
Igni, the DOJ people will be please if you send them the evidence of what you are talking about in the post. Seriously. They are conducting investigation right now regarding JUST THAT. Ping them.
wow the point view of gambit….. http://blog.get...-offers-debate/
is it me or they wear pink glasses?
I suggest we just tie a cement boulder onto Zynga’s leg and throw her into the Hudson.
goddamn Michael, 2730 Unread messages in your Inbox!?! You busy, godless antisocial you!!!
2727 of them are “HAVE YOU HEARD OF FARMVILLE?” notifications
lol..!
I love the Luca Brazi fishes headline none the less!
“But Zynga is also one of Facebook’s largest advertisers, probably accounting for between 10% and 20% of total Facebook revenue.”
I wonder if Facebook got really serious and booted all these income generating (yet scammy) companies…if other, more honest customer friendly, companies would come back to Facebook and fill in the holes in their income. …and make up for any temporary losses.
My guess is that they would. We would.
The lesson i’ve learnt from this post; Do not send Mike Arrington a Facebook message. It will not sleep, but DIE in the inbox
bye bye Zynga.
Don’t mess with Arrington.
I think the real story here is how in the world do you get almost 3000 messages in your facebook inbox?
I know: facebook text messages
Are you sure Gambit got shutdown? I still see them on Facebook. Haven’t heard any other announcements about this.
I was wondering the same thing.. since when did Gambit get shut down?
“Zynga’s other games, including FarmVille with 63 million monthly users, remain online, despite the fact that they were showing the same ads.”
I’m not sure if this is the case for all users, but for me, FarmVille is backed by OfferPal and only has LoveFilm, Amazon, and Mobile Phone Direct Payments (UK). FishVille was backed by DoubleDing, but I didn’t check the offers before it went down. So, it might be the case that FarmVille and FishVille were displaying different offers and is why FarmVille didn’t get taken down.
honestly, all of this is just ridiculous. who cares if offerpal or zynga are built on the backs of spammy offers. the people in this world that are getting tricked into these offers are dumb enough to do them in the first place. i say chalk this up to survival of the fittest and be done with it.
for zynga, good for them. they’re making the millions, but at the same time, they’re offering games to the world that a hundred million people are enjoying. you can play the games without paying, you can pay with paypal, or you can entertain their offers… i say let the people sort out how they want to screw themselves. why make such a big deal about this whole thing?
if myspace and facebook want to get their hands dirty in this cesspool then good for them. let them worry about it. let them go and police their own back yard.
techcrunch, let’s see some real journalism on things that people actually care about…
So according to your logic it’s ok for pedophiles to rape kids because they’re dumb.
Most of the users being scammed are kids and those who don’t know any better. The bull in the china shop is Facebook, Zynga and their scammer buddies. The bull is what needs to be controlled.
Hey confused,
It’s children and young teens who are being scammed. This is some of TC’s best journalism. As you can see from the comments, there’s a big audience for these posts.
Couldn’t agree with you more.
@Jan….your logic is screwed up. Crappy comparison.
The hand is on the wrong side and that is actually very frustrating.
These spammers are the reason I stopped using facebook. The site is way too spammy for me, I used to be on facebook everytime am online, but now I login into facebook only about 3 times a month. Twitter is what i use everyday.
Yes, but can you poke people on Twitter? Thats what I thought.
wanna see how facebook sucks? loot at this report.
It gets even more complicated when you find out Pincus is a early investor in Facebook…
You morons need to get off Zynga’s balls. They didn’t do anything wrong. They are the reason that Facebook is seeing its FIRST year being profitable.
All those IQ Offers have terms and conditions that explicitly state that the person is signing up to a subscription, so how the fuck are they scams?
Hmm, anonymous, mot a familiar TC commenter.
*Dude*, why bother?
“This is also a bit of an arms race. Zynga may be specifically filtering Facebook employees from seeing ads that violate Facebook terms and conditions, making it difficult for Facebook to enforce the rules.”
Wow for journalism without investigation. This statement is simply a lie. There’s no specific blocking of anybody’s account, especially not Michael Arrington’s, because nobody thought he was important enough.
There was probably something like a 50% test for user experience, so a random 50% of the population didn’t see ads. That’s that.
As for calling the game scamville, has any of you played it? I’ve been playing it since it first came out, and there was no scam, just a simple, clean and fun game that’s suitable for all ages. If anything, it lighted up my day when I saw my cute baby fishes swam in the tank. Thanks to Michael Arrington’s slander, facebook shut the game down. He should pay for the amount of pain he’s causing all the users.
Hmm, anonymous, mot a familiar TC commenter. Apparent access to intimate ad serving stats.
Are you people f*cking serious?
Specifically filtering by location or username is completely feasible, at least from a technical perspective.
Why should any of the accused parties (e.g. you) be given the benefit of doubt? Because you said it was lie?
Oh, ok…
Hey, if you really want to play a fish game, STFU and go play the original game that Zynga copied from.
Great blog, really opened my eyes to the world of scammers on the net…nice one….
OOh and someones very popular with the 2730 emails lol.
Wow really educational!!
Maybe its time some effort was expended on educating users so they don’t fall for this kind of ads because this is beginning to look like the beginning of a long cat and mouse game and unless Michael can put in the sort of consistent effort required to monitor these, which is nearly impossible the offers will in all likelihood reappear after some time.
Beyond that since so may people get scammed perhaps the payment gateways can implement system that either bar recurring payments or have a much higher bar of user consent to enable a recurring payment.
Darn! I wish I had seen this article in the first few minutes when the Title said “Swims with the Fishes”.
Does anyone have a screenshot? That would be the modern day equivalent of having a first edition of something with a print error that was quickly corrected afterward.
Seriously, Mike is doing now what main stream journalists were *supposed* to be doing and who obviously missed the boat on this topic as well, despite Facebook being the world’s fourth largest country.
Relevance my dear Watson…
Its a good sign to remove such sticky adds and such violation to retain the good will of Facebook. by by Zynga
There’s even a facebook group for people who hate Zynga:
http://www.face...id=130081795866
pls comebacking the fish ville because its is so nice..playing in face book..please..face back the fishville game..!!!!???
The game appears to be coming back soon:
“Hey everyone,
Good news! Issues have been resolved and FishVille will be back online tonight at approximately 12:00am PST. We have been feeding your fish to keep them happy and growing during the downtime, so they should be just fine when you return to your tanks. Thank you all so much for your patience and understanding.
-Team FishVille ”
http://forums.z...amp;postcount=1