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Cry Babies

I don’t generally post about internet related shenanigans, but I’ll make an exception in this case. Because certain people might get upset and threaten to sue your good friend David McFarlane, this is only my opinion - make up your own mind and remember that I’m not a lawyer (although my brother has a law degree, which is useful).

Clickbooth are an affiliate network - this means that they have a bunch of offers that people can promote and get paid for when certain requirements are met.

Unfortunately, Clickbooth have a very nasty habit - they don’t seem to like paying their affiliates when they have a good month (basically, you make them a ton of money and in reply they give you bugger all).

On the gay affiliate forum WickedFire, a representative of said company posted one guy’s entire earning statistics. This is obviously a very major breach of privacy guidelines, as it’s the equivalent of your boss showing everybody else in your company your paycheck. This happened some 2 months after he was supposed to get paid, and he is (allegedly) not the only one.

The owner of WickedFire asked Clickbooth to apologise to this poor chap, but in response John Lemp (the owner of Clickbooth) demanded that all the posts in the thread were deleted and that Eli (of BlueHatSEO fame) be removed as a moderator as he edited out the information about the guy mentioned above’s statistics.

The hilarity begins here, when Mr Lemp sends two Cease And Desist  orders to WickedFire to get any offending threads removed from the forum. Jon (the owner of the forum) responds by posting said orders for everyone to see.

The result of this is that Jon is now being sued for emotional distress. Yes, a grown man got upset at some people on a forum criticising his company and through all his toys out of his pram.

Once the aforementioned Cease And Desist orders appeared, some people decided to blog about the whole situation. And what did Mr Lemp do about it? He sent them orders as well.

One blogger had to remove his post as he is a college student and can’t afford deal with lawsuit threats, which is an obvious case of cyber bullying - coming from someone suffering from "emotional distress", this seems more than a little hypocritical.

You really can’t do things like this, especially on the Internet. Can you imagine if somebody like Google started bullying people into not having a go at them? Or Digg? Or MySpace? Or Facebook? I’m sure that if any of them pulled this kind of stunt that users would leave faster than last night’s curry.

The moral of the story is this - if you are an affiliate company you should always pay your affiliates, keep private information private, don’t use bully boy tactics and apologise when you’ve done something wrong. If you do these four simple things (in any business, I suppose) then people will be more than happy to work with you in the future.

As for ShoeMoney (if you don’t know who he is, count yourself lucky) seemingly getting involved in this, it doesn’t surprise me one bit - that guy will do anything for some more publicity for his make money online blog. It’s just a pity that he can’t keep his ugly peanut head out of something that has absolutely nothing to do with him.

But I forgot, Clickbooth are sponsoring his crapfest - nothing like a good old-fashioned circle jerk on the Internets, is there Jeremy?

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