Thalasar Ventures

I recently used loudlaunch.com as a supplementary marketing effort for my recent Playstation 3 console giveaway. It seemed a great way to potentially announce your campaign to the blogosphere. There are serious problems in the way Loudlaunch.com operates and any advertiser thinking about using the service should be aware.

First off you cannot specify what blogs or category of blog that will post on your subject. As a result while the individual posts are solid, the blogs target audience might not be a match for what you are looking for. As you cannot control who may or may not post on your subject. Worse yet your money may go to support terrorism! This has happened to me and my promotion for Earlymiser. A blog call Israel Watch (I REFUSE to link to them) which openly advocates the destruction of Israel and the Jews chose to blog about my PS3 promotion. I find it astounding that my advertising dollars are being spent supporting anti-semitic rantings. More importantly who knows what group is behind the site Israel Watch? I find the views on the site deeply disturbing and I didn’t authorize the post. So the brand of my comparison shopping site is at risk. Can you imagine how I felt about the situation? Worst yet Loudlaunch.com doesn’t have a customer service number and their whois is protected by Domains By Proxy. I have fired off several emails but haven’t gotten a response. Why does Loudlaunch support terrorists?
If you use Loudlaunch, there’s a good chance your brand or site will be featured on a hate site. Don’t do it.
Update:I have spoken with Phil at Loudlaunch who informed me
“This blog is being removed from our approved bloggers list and will not be able to post ever again. The person that approved it was viewing statistics and did not pick up on the political undertones which are not appropriate for our advertisers. Apologies.”
to which I said, “Not a lot of fracking confidence in your “reviewers”. Missed the whole destruction of Israel thing huh? Yeah well it was the whole point of the blog.”
Loudlaunch is issuing me a credit for the campaign. Thanx. Spend $100 testing something and do thousands of dollars of damage to your brand. This after I was told the following by Chris over there before I started my campaign.
“Thanks for signing up as an advertiser. We appreciate your business. I spoke with Phil today about your online conversation. Let me quickly give you a bit more information about the way we rank our bloggers and how they are paid for blogging on your campaign.
Our model is simple: we pay bloggers based on the expected exposure/ traffic that they can bring our advertisers. To do this, we rank our bloggers based on Technorati stats, Alexa stats, and a personal review of the blog. Therefore, there is no exact model to publish.However, based on your feedback and suggestions, we will add some additional instructions or tips on our site that help better explain how this works.
One final note. You can check any bloggers stats, who has posted on your campaign, by entering their information in technorati.com or alexa.com. We could have an all day conversation about how to interpret those stats, but in general, they are used as guidelines along with a physical review of the site to determine their rank or payment per post.”
Now thanx to Loudlaunch all the Israeli hating/Hamas supporting terrorists know about my Playstation 3 promotion. How much personal attention could they have paid to the blog? I went to it and it took me all of 30 seconds to determine it was an anti-semitic hate site. Un ‘frackin’ believable. Clearly no “physical review” took place. Avoid Loudlaunch.