An Urgent Message -- And Apology -- From uSphere
To the uSphere network of students, parents and schools:
We have just received troubling news from a student who tried to use our service, and we wanted to communicate with you about it.
Cutting to the chase: some visitors to the uSphere.com site were shown pornographic ads. This is an egregious error by one of our advertising partners -- but we'll shoulder the blame, as it's our site and our partners should have been chosen more carefully. Especially on a site that serves students.
WE VALUE THE TRUST YOU PLACE IN US. We will do everything in our power to make sure this does not happen again.
uSphere uses some ad networks to show ads that, in our judgment, help you better plan for the going-to-college process. We have limited our ads to those that we think make sense. In fact, we have a long-standing relationship with two ad networks -- Google and Commission Junction -- whose service is exemplary.
It's another ad network that has caused this problem, and they assure us they're addressing this matter.
It's a shame that this had to happen on a day like today -- when hope should win out over fear, and we shouldn't be too cynical to think that a website that helps students find the right colleges can actually do so without offending people.
We're truly sorry.
Dave Van de Walle
and the
uSphere team
We have just received troubling news from a student who tried to use our service, and we wanted to communicate with you about it.
Cutting to the chase: some visitors to the uSphere.com site were shown pornographic ads. This is an egregious error by one of our advertising partners -- but we'll shoulder the blame, as it's our site and our partners should have been chosen more carefully. Especially on a site that serves students.
WE VALUE THE TRUST YOU PLACE IN US. We will do everything in our power to make sure this does not happen again.
uSphere uses some ad networks to show ads that, in our judgment, help you better plan for the going-to-college process. We have limited our ads to those that we think make sense. In fact, we have a long-standing relationship with two ad networks -- Google and Commission Junction -- whose service is exemplary.
It's another ad network that has caused this problem, and they assure us they're addressing this matter.
It's a shame that this had to happen on a day like today -- when hope should win out over fear, and we shouldn't be too cynical to think that a website that helps students find the right colleges can actually do so without offending people.
We're truly sorry.
Dave Van de Walle
and the
uSphere team
Labels: ad networks, college admissions, usphere
posted by Dave Van de Walle at
7:10 PM
2 Comments:
Dave - Thanks for getting this post up so quickly to explain what happened. One thing remains unclear, however. In your Twitter post, you mentioned that you had pulled "all ads." Were you referring to all ads from the offending service, or all ads, period? (i.e., the Google and Commission Junction ads?) Your blog post never states that specifically.
Having said that, I congratulate you for taking quick action on this.
Andrew -
Thanks for the note, and good question:
We immediately pulled down the code from the ad service that caused the problem.
We're in the process of pulling down ALL ads from places like Google and Commission Junction.
We will continue to provide sponsorship programs for colleges and universities that want to connect with students using our network. (You can call this "advertising" if you want to, we won't mind.) But these programs will be limited to colleges and universities -- we're not going to go down the road of "here's a student loan company" or "meet our friends from Bob's Campus Laundry Service."
We think that a college and university portal and vertical search product, such as the one we're launching at http://video.usphere.com, is going to be pretty cool and there is enough demand for it to cover our costs.
BUT the advertising programs are more trouble than they are worth.
Dave
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