One of the best groups I have joined on Facebook is the Internet Advertising – People Who Dont Pay Group. This has been a helpful resource in researching Advertisers and has allowed us personally to dodge a few bullets this past year. One of these bullets has been PROLERO.

I am actually surprised that with so many networks in this space you dont see many of them going mainstream and public about this. Of course, we have a lot of those networks out there with “boards” “corporate tables full of morons” and basically people without the courage to put something like this out there for fear of public lashback. Times are a changing, I’ve personally aired a ton of dirty laundry over the last year and honestly, I dont see any end in sight. Fortunately for us, it’s just been damn good business.

Every event I’ve been to so far, someone has come up to us and thanked us for a fraud post or some other content we have put out there that has saved them heartache. So here’s another one of those posts:

Prolero – Owned by Pete Maughan

Currently he is the highlight of the Internet Advertising – People Who Dont Pay Group. Outstanding balances are owed with quite a few people but one that is really out of control is the invoice from Unique Leads which is now 160+ days outstanding. Invoices are also due at Maxbounty and MediaTrust. The networks are now going public ESPECIALLY on 3rd party sites now and starting to network with each other to rid this industry of Advertising Fraud. If you thought Affiliate fraud was bad, I assure you that on the Advertising side of it, it IS WAY MORE organized, sophisticated and so much harder to spot.

Prolero was approached by us, or approached us, (cant remember and dont care) and I distinctly remember at that time Bizopp Advertisers were rampantly scamming Affiliate Networks so we sought a 50K prepay 2-3 times in which they couldnt commit. Honestly if you are in the bizopp space and cant afford a 50K prepay on continuity offers, you really dont have any excuse for being in the space. It’s common sense.

Anyway, fellow networks, managers and publishers who are readers of this blog, I encourage to join the Internet Advertising – People Who Dont Pay Group on Facebook. I wanted to share just one story with you here with a situation I knew about and was personally involved in (as in dodging these shady B’s). The more we communicate and network with each other, the better off everyone will be. Ridding the industry of shitty advertisers is just one aspect of the problems in this industry but it’s one aspect that is going public and start to mainstream.