13 replies to this topic

[Ax238]

I hope nobody thinks I'm spamming, but I just saw this offer: [link removed] Has anybody else seen this? Has anyone tried it? It seems like a good deal to me, except for those who dislike the new 2007 version of Ad-Aware.

Edited by Blair, 06 December 2007 - 06:31 PM.
link removed

[tallin]

I hope nobody thinks I'm spamming, but I just saw this offer:
[link removed]

Has anybody else seen this? Has anyone tried it? It seems like a good deal to me, except for those who dislike the new 2007 version of Ad-Aware.

HI Ax,

No, of course we don't think you are spamming - thanks for the information, but I still like Ad-Aware SE Personal along with others used randomly on my machines.

Just tested the site, and it is not available "In my Country", which is OZ

kind regards,

Edited by Blair, 06 December 2007 - 06:31 PM.
link removed

[Ax238]

Yeah, forgot to add that in there. It's only for North America and Western Europe. Sorry, no joy for Oz on this one.

*Western Europe includes the following countries:
Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Monaco, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland & United Kingdom

[Jacee]

This offer is through "TrialPay", not Lavasoft. [link removed]

Edited by Blair, 06 December 2007 - 06:32 PM.
link removed

[EnigmaChick]

I've seen a similar product through that system before and I didn't like the way it was done, referring to Jacee's link about their policies.

[Ax238]

Hey, they're doing the same deal with Antivir Personal Premium as well: [link removed]

Edited by Blair, 06 December 2007 - 06:32 PM.
link removed

[Doug]

Ax,

I appreciate your interest in researching this type of Internet Promotion.
But we need to do so without posting live links before investigating, and probably not even then.
You know we don’t promote commercial products and services, as part of our Terms of Use.
I realize it is not your intent to "promote".
Rather you have opened a topic to investigate and gather input from others here at WTT.

My opinion follows:

I am highly skeptical and not at all in favor of such free offer sites.

In my experience, the "survey" or "progressive listing" of offer options tends to be open-choice in the early portion of the listing, and then gradually becomes forced-choice in order to progress toward your goal of receiving the "free offer" especially if you have passed up on selecting any of the earlier "participation options".

It's the "Yes-Set" promotional strategy. (Get a prospect to answer "yes" to a few easy questions early on, and then it will be easier to convince the prospect to answer "yes" to harder/more expensive questions later.

The goal of this type of offer is to get you involved in enrolling and purchasing things, that you often would not have considered except for the "free offer" promotion.

One time, I decided to participate in a similar one.
(I have not even clicked on the ones that you list here)
The "Free Offer" was a component of registration to a news letter of a prominently known MSVP.
I figured... What the heck! ... This guy is well known and respected. The offer has to be legit. Right?

I created a new email account to use for purposes of registering into the Free Offer.
The offer options included seemingly legit products and services, like college grant information, home loan information, printer ink special discounts, discounts on graphics applications, enrollment in music subscriptions, magazines, VISA and MasterCard sign-ups and the like.

I looked for ones that didn't cost me any money or were just free trials that I could cancel in a day or so.
The open-choice/forced-choice gradually narrowed down to "pick one of the following" with only two items available.
Unless you selected one of the two, you could not progress toward receiving the "free offer"
The items began costing money and or requiring more enrollment information than I wanted to disclose. So I canceled out.

The risky part of such offers involves the Offer-Associates.

I still have that dummy email account that I created for the purpose.
It still gets email offers (spam) from every darn one of those Offer Options Associates, even though it is nearly two years since I partially participated in the Free offer.
Please note, that I "CANCELED" out of the "Free Option" choice procedure about 2/3's of the way into it.
But they had already gotten my information.
I have not sent or responded to any item in that email account during the past 2 years. Still they send additional promotions to it regularly in hopes that they have a "live one."
Not just the ones that I selected, but all of the Offer-associates got my information.
They freely shared my choice and registration information to all of their advertising associates.

The original "Offer" is most often for a highly respected Product or Service, like the subscriptions to Ad Aware 2007 or Antivir.
Must be legit! Right?
Not necessarily. Those products may have nothing to do with the structure of the promotion.

Anybody can buy a product like a New Laptop, or Free Security Software, and then offer it as a Prize for participating in a survey or trial offer.

Bottom Line in my opinion: ..... Don't go there.

Now... These specific offers that you've noted in your thread, may be much more legit than any that I've looked at previously.
And I haven't investigated the links that you've posted.
So you may be right!

I just don't think it is worth promoting here in these Forums!
Even if one or both of these offers is mostly legit, featuring them here at WTT gives them additional advertisement exposure on a respected site, and may encourage some of our readers/Members to "believe" in the legitimacy of other similar offers that might not be so legit.

Firmly, but with Best Regards to You,
Doug

[Blair]

I removed the links from this thread. The products are not free. They are exchanged for your personal and private information. We spend too much time removing malicious programs. I don't want it to appear in any way that we may endorse their use.

[Trevuren]

[Ax238]

Alright, well first let me say that I am not promoting these offers in this forum or any other! Mine was a post of inquiry, as in seeking information where it can be obtained. I do apologize if I was misleading or if you took my stance on the topic wrongly.

Another clarification: I don't think Ad-Aware and Antivir are completely blind to these offers, as you have said. Actually it is just the opposite, I found the advertisements on Ad-Aware's 2007 Free download page and Antivir's nag screen. They were not pay per click ads either, as the page is on lavasoftusa.com and also has a redirect page on the same server.

If this was a matter of an offer I saw as a banner ad or something, it would have completely escaped my attention and we would not be here right now discussing this. The reason I posted it was because the offers were found in legitimate sources and I wanted to see how legitimate the offer was. Are Ad-Aware and Antivir are putting on spammy scammy promotions? I'm not sure I'm in complete agreement with this, but thanks for letting me know your thoughts.

Sorry for posting the links Blair, I probably should have just set them as text. I didn't realize that it would produce such a raucous, you know what they say, hindsight is 20/20.

Doug I do understand what you are wanting to say, and it is rational, but I think it was your wording that has perturbed me. It's better now

With Regards,

Ax

Edited by Ax238, 08 December 2007 - 01:35 AM.

[Blair]

In my opinion, shame on Ad-Aware and Antivir. Unfortunately, as I've learned here, it's sometimes difficult to control or deny advertising. I don't fault you for posting the links. You didn't intend any harm. You're not a spammer. I think it's important for people to be aware of these programs, and their potential drawbacks. However, we get lot of inexperienced computer users and I don't want them clicking the links, not reading the terms of use, and thinking they're getting something for free, without strings attached. Essentially, it boils down to software as a service. Google has built a multi-billion dollar business on it. Searches, Gmail, Google Analytics, Checkout... how much personal information do you suppose Google has on you? They use it to target advertising. Some people are comfortable exchanging advertising and personal info for a free application or product. I think the site in question made too of an effort to hide that fact, instead of presenting it openly. To make an analogy, I think it would be like this site offering free malware removal, in exchange for downloading a removal program that served pop-ups and ads. So, your malware is gone, but you have adware in exchange? That's pretty much what you agree to in order to get the "free" version of Ad-aware or Antivir. I'll have to look for those ads. I think this would be a good topic for the homepage.

[EnigmaChick]

They seem to have many of the security products down pat, the first time I'd heard of them before this post was for Zone Alarm Pro. I don't remember where I saw it but the point is for some reason they have got sweet with many of the money making anti-spyware makers but all I can say is that I'm not surprised, how many times have we seen this with business and that's what they are, they may help our plight but in the end they are not immune to such things, it's more that we see that nothing is perfect and that free is not a title to be taken at face value. I am having a go at any of the businesses participating in this, it's just an observation because there's probably many that are totally unrelated to malware removal. P.S I didn't think the topic stater was spamming but I posted because I knew the terms and I felt it was important to help people know, no offense to the topic starter!

Edited by EnigmaChick, 07 December 2007 - 05:34 AM.

[Ax238]

No offense taken EnigmaChick, it appears to me that TrialPay is different than some of the other free product offerings out there. I disagree with you though, I don't think they've gotten sweet with anyone more than any other marketing service would (more on that later). Contrary to what has been said, I have found nothing about TrialPay downloading anything to your computer, save for a cookie. In fact, a quick Google search on the company reveals many more positive reviews than negative ones (negative ones mostly deal with slow responses, but that is acknowledged on TP's website). I do understand how we need to keep these types of things under wraps, as less legitimate offers prevail more often than not. I also agree with you Blair, that we should have some sort of communication to new users that most free offers are not legit. With that, I think you all are painting a little worse of a picture on this company than it needs. Again, I'm not attempting to promote any offers, but to look at the facts. For example, the history of the people behind the company: Founder of FraudEliminator (acquired by McAfee), founder of yub.com (acquired by buy.com) and involved in Facebook product design, an ebay/paypal sales team member, director of ecommerce for Roxio, and it goes on. Not only this, but they are also backed up by investors behind Skype, Google and Akamai. Am I to believe that all these well-to-do people and companies turned to the evil dark side of malware/adware? Also, the extended list of Merchants (+1700) using TrialPay to turn browsers into customers has to say something. Here are a few of the security-related ones: Ad-Aware Antivir ZoneAlarm Sunbelt (Kerio Firewall and CounterSpy) Outpost Firewall McAfee IObit UltraSentry HS CleanDisk Backup4all Spy Sweeper Kaspersky In order for merchants to use TrialPay, they have to sign up for it. To me, the only thing these merchants are doing is attempting to attract more attention to their products through a legitimate method. Attempting to turn window shoppers into buyers doesn't exactly classify as shameful in the world of marketing. Besides, I don't see why any of these companies would want to purposely tarnish their names. Customers choose what they sign up for, the list is so extensive that it's very probable that one will find something one wants to sign up for anyways. It's a win-win-win-win situation: merchants get their money and customer on a paid product, customer gets paid product for free, third parties get users signed up for their services, and TrialPay gets its cut. To me, that's just a plain old-fashioned good marketing technique. WSJ (non-linked): online.wsj.com/article/SB118826557728510540-email.html TechCrunch also has an positive article (non-linked): www.techcrunch.com/2007/10/26/fuzzy-math-that-seems-to-work-trialpay-says-they-can-make-money-from-free/ The only reason I'm posting all this is that I feel you all are dealing this company a great injustice, without having all the facts in order. Just because some free offers are bad, doesn't mean they all are bad. If we look at all things like that throughout life, we'd be doing just about nothing. Some PC repair shops rip customers off, but that doesn't mean they all do. The same goes for auto mechanics, restauraunts, department stores, gas stations, phone companies, and on and on. Don't knock it if you don't have information about it. Thanks to all of your concern, I was prompted to do some more research and find out for myself that this one truly is legitimate. Consider my original inquiry answered by OP. Ax

[EnigmaChick]

I guess I should have worded my response a little better, they are probably involved with many diffferent companies, I just didn't like their policies, any user should read such things and consider what they are getting themselves into whether it be legit or not, the problem these days is many see the word free and get overexcited and don't follow such things.