Surprise! A first time anonymous poster bashing SI.
"Steve Hunt,"
Adbility.com is not a "respected industry professional." The site is run by Lee Bottemiller, a gentleman who purchased the site for a few thousand dollares from it's previous owner.
I can buy a website about Mars and it does not make me an expert on all things martian. It means I own a website.
Just because someone puts up a
website, and other
websites are about providing
"independant verification" , doesn't mean that there is any validity to their nonsence.
I contacted Mr. Bottemiller about his accusations. His responce was not what I would expect from a "respected industry professional."
1) Mr. Bottemiller does not even know if the persons supposedly complaining about SI are even our affilaites. I asked who specifically was accusing us of not paying them. He refused to answer. I informed him that SI recieves many emails every day from people asking for address changes or asking questions and they do not even belong to SI's programs. We get mail daily from affilaites of PopUpSponsor, SearchReferral, SearchBucks, etc.
2) Mr. Bottemiller does not know if the same person hasn't sent him multiple complaints. Nor has he bothered to check.
3) I offered to allow Mr Bottemiller (or his proxy) to visit our offices, completely unnannounced, and inspect documents, cancelled checks, or whatever else they like. He refused saying "send me whatever you want."
4) Mr. Bottemiller has no qualms at all about opening affilaite accounts with SI and profiting off of the signups he refers to us. He has open and active accounts in most of our programs earning referral income. He hides this by using javascript rollovers to hide the affilite ID's.
It seems illogical to me (and to most honest webmasters I suppose) that any affilaite program would find it in their best financial interest to rip-off their super-affilaites. Wouldn't logic dictate that affilaites earning over $1000.00/month would be the ones in the best position to persue legal action? Why $1000.00/month? Yahoo!, ESPN.com, Hotmail, MSNBC.com and other companies currently advertise for SI. I assure you that they make well, well, in excess of Mr. Bottemiller's threshold.
Unfortunately the larger a firm gets, the more persons there are with their own private agendas for wishing that company ill will. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that someday SI will be able to have 10,000 sites devoted to how terrible we are just like
Wal-Mart.