Flyers Exchange Tries to Take Down Facebook Ad Competitor Cubic

Flyers Exchange (now known as Flyers Ex) came on the facebook ad scene a couple of weeks ago with with an "in-facebook" application and interface to advertise on facebook. Henrick Shyu was the creator of the network and started off with the developers on the wrong foot. He devised a workaround so that the Ads from his network sat outside the application canvas. What is the harm in that you ask? It violates the facebook Terms of Service and interferes with facebook inc.'s own advertising placement. Everyone complained that it was not allowed and trust wasn't high among the developers. Mr. Shyu then told the developer forum that this practice has been stopped. The editors (of this article) checked and it was still being offered. He was lying to the developers in the forum. A start on the wrong foot I guess you could say.

The network started to go along a little better and ad impressions and clicks were being delivered. Mr. Shyu was on the developer forum constantly slagging the Cubics ad network and pumping his own Flyers Exchange network. People started to tire of constantly hearing his promotional posts on the developer forum but, the network seemed to be growing a little and impressions and clicks were still being delivered.

Then IT happened. It was exposed that Mr. Shyu has code in his Flyer Exchange Ads that hit the cubics server 5 times for every time a Flyer Exchange ad is hit, effectively bringing down and overloading the Cubics server. In the forums there were many complaints of Cubics slowing and even crashing a couple of times. Next, the eCPM started to drop and application developers delivering Cubics ads started to complain about low payouts and loss of revenue.

There are developers boycotting left right and center. He has been reported to facebook. In our view this is corporate sabotage. Trying to overload a competitors servers so his customers get mad and leave is dirty business. Or maybe he was somehow faking to deliver Cubics ads and getting paid, which is stealing. What should happen now? We don't know but there are sure some strong feelings and discussions on the developers forums about it.

Here is a picture of the code..

Update: Henrick Shyu posts a reply to the accusations and the developers are not buying it. Also, no apology. Here is what Mr. Shyu had to say:

"Dear devs,

There's been some bad rumours in the past few hours and we feel like we owe you an explanation. I apologize for not responding earlier. It is a national holiday in Japan.

We here at Flyers Ex take pride in our business, and as amusing as it would be for us to be running our competitors' ads, the profit if any would be marginal compared to the lengthy load times. If you'll remember, Cubics was slow and crashed often long before Flyers Ex launched last week, and we do not like being blamed for our competitor's problems. Also, as flattered as we are for some to think that a 1-week old site has enough users to DOS attack Cubics, the number of users on all of Flyers Ex combined would equate to no more than 10 large apps. For "Facebook's official ad network", that should be no problem.

We are always trying to improve our services, and note Cubics as our primary competitor using a CPM system. The reason we use CPC as opposed to CPM is because of the likelyhood of view-fraud. We noted that they allow no more than 1 of their ads to be shown per page. The Cubics ads you saw on Flyers Ex this afternoon were done in short 6 hour intervals during 2 days in a study to learn more about Cubic's CPM and view-fraud protection system. Obviously our quality rating and CPM on Cubics dropped to near $0.00 but we were more curious than concerned about making a few pennies. We also noted that Cubic's downtimes had NO relation with the times we ran this experiment.

Also, Flyers Ex has never scammed anybody. You've not heard a single post on this board about a publisher not being paid, or an advertiser not receiving points he/she paid for. The conversion rate for points is not "randomly set" as some have speculated, but adjusted weekly on Fridays at 4pm (PST) as stated on the site. The conversion rate depends on the number of publishers/advertisers, and as we just launched, we need the flexibility to adjust it to attract more publishers if there are too many advertisers. Also, using a point system instead of money allows Flyers Ex to serve out its primary purpose of allowing developers to exchange clicks with each other without having to pay a commission on the transaction.

I hope your trust in us is not damaged by such speculation, and we hope to continue serving you in the future as the ad network for developers, by developers. If you have any further questions, please let me know.

Yours truly."

and here are what some of the developers had to say so far:

"So you decided to "test" Cubic's fraud detection system…
Riiiiggghhtt "

"You're doing shady business and this post lacking any kind of apology regarding this "test" shows that you clearly aren't someone to be trusted."

"Its just like you try to rob a bank and say that you were only testing the bank's security arrangements."

"ouch. That's fraud, pure and simple. You are not only defrauding people publishing on your network, but also Cubics. Your ethics are beyond the pale."

"Thats the most bullshit excuse I've ever heard.

I've reported you to Facebook and Dwayne, I hope others do the same. "

Update II - A further response from Mr. Shyu was posted on the facebook developer forums:
"Perhaps I'm missing something, but we promise you a certain rate for placing an ad on your site, and we pay you for it. You get to preview the ad, and when you place it on your site, it loads instantaneously and looks exactly like you expect it to.

What does it matter if there's other information hidden in the ad? For example, all good ad networks track ad views/clicks and referring URLs, and must embed such tracking code in the ad. If we're researching our competitor by placing their ads to track their statistics, that has absolutely no affect on you as the publisher. And as I already mentioned, Cubics was laggy and crashy before we came along. In fact, that was one of the main reasons we wanted to build a new ad network.

We do apologize for the confusion and will be careful to notify publishers of such changes in the future.

Regards."

Update III - After this response Mr. Shyu took a pounding in the forums (some of the responses to follow). Also, he then backtracked and deleted his posts and they are no longer in the thread. Good thing we saved it, one of them anyway! There were three more posts from Mr. Shyu that were deleted, you can see where they have been deleted in the picture below. In one of the posts, he went on to bash appsaholic and accused them of being the crooks because he thought their pay scale was unfair and then went on to basically say that he had done nothing wrong. Have a look at the next dialog and see what you think. (names and faces are blurred to preserve the identity of the other forum posters.)