Hi everybody,
my name is Jan and I am the CEO of Magpie & Friends. I was made aware of this discussion by one of our users and I'd like to leave an official statement.
Our compliance team regularly checks our Twitterer's (and Advertiser's) accounts for violations of our terms and conditions and suspends accounts which are not compliant to protect our users from unfair behavior from others.
We've seen Twitterers who merely try to sign up a lot of Twitter accounts with Magpie, grow an unreasonable large follower base and then feed various RSS feeds through their timelines to maximize their earnings. Those accounts, once detected, are suspended and the Twitterer is warned via email. This email outlines the situation and asks the Twitterer to explain it. If we find that we were wrong, we re-activate the account. If after four weeks we haven't heard back from the Twitterer or the account is still violating our terms, we do shut them down and we do keep the money. You will find all ad networks having the same policy in those cases. We need to keep the money to:
- Reimburse the advertiser. The accounts which are suspended for the abovementioned reasons rarely generate any clicks or conversions for our advertisers, because most of their followers are dead or fake accounts and because the ads could not be targeted due to the high amount of feeds.
- Make a point that we're not tolerating this behavior. If we'd let the Twitterer have the money, he might just start over again with another Twitter account and do the same thing.
Having said that, I'd like to assure you that we do not make up reasons to terminate accounts in order to keep money which is not ours. Suspensions and terminations are only made in accordance with our terms and everyone has a 4 weeks notice. The Twitter Search problem that some are referring to is in fact an issue on Twitter's side. This can easily be verified by looking for one's twitter name on search.twitter.com.
If you'd like you can check out these blog posts from users who talk about their experiences with Magpie:
- blog.adam-jackson.net/2009/04/15/i-stand-behind-magpie-twitter-advertisements/
- jessicagottlieb.com/2009/03/why-i-magpie-tech-talk-tuesday/
You might also search Twitter for "I just received a payment for my latest Magpie-tweets" using this link:
search.twitter.com/search?q=i+just+received+a+payment+for+my+latest+m agpie-tweets
We send a tweet like this whenever we issue a payment.
I hope to have clarified a few things in this post. I won't be able to monitor this forum thread for further posts as I don't usually frequent this web site. If you have questions regarding this, please do get in touch with us over Twitter by @replying or DMing us.
Thanks, best regards,
Jan Schulz-Hofen
CEO Magpie & Friends Ltd.
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