We have great bonuses! But don't ask what we do.
Juliana Reyes
')
The company seems like the perfect place for Tyler. Having worked in various agencies, Tyler (the name, of course, fictitious) wanted to try himself in a startup. He wanted to find a place where he would not communicate with clients, where people would appreciate his knowledge of a specialist. When he was interviewed at 50onRed, an information technology company in Philadelphia, his enthusiasm only grew. Everything here seemed very cool.
“Look, man, they have a really nice office,” he mused. - Open plan, lots of attractive bonuses, food. Here you feel quite modern. Looks like this is exactly the startup I was looking for. ”
He entered 50onRed, and the company additionally provided not only free weekly lunches, but also quarterly parties in trendy restaurants, paying for them in full. He could set his own pace of work. His teammates were talented.
But there was one thing he did not know about the company. A month after admission, he was shocked to find out how 50onRed was making its money.
At first glance, the company looked like just another digital advertising agency. She created a platform for advertisers buying advertising space. Simply. But non-standard was how 50onRed put those advertisements on websites. She used a dubious practice called “advertising substitution,” placing ads on websites without the permission of their owners.
50onRed did this through downloadable programs (usually browser extensions), known as adware ("adware"). “Advising companies are tricking them into pushing their software to the user,” explains Ben Edelman, a professor at the Harvard Business School and an advertising insertion expert . Download, for example, a free Flash-player, and it can come in conjunction with the adver. Then all of a sudden you will start advertising on sites like Wikipedia or Target.com - ads that these websites have never agreed to show and on which they do not earn.
The substitution of advertising seems treacherous and unethical, and Edelman confirms this. And this is still a soft wording: “Some people consider this behavior to be robbery on high roads,” he says. The substitution of advertising prevents many players in the advertising industry and, above all, publishers who do not receive advertising revenue, while advertising companies make money on their content. “This industry is harvesting where it hasn’t hit a finger to sow something,” says Edelman. At the same time, advertisers feel cheated when they pay big money for what they consider to be “genuine, legitimate, honest advertising”, and in return receive a fraudulent substitution of advertising, Edelman continues.
Information technology companies in the field of advertising, such as OpenX and AppNexus, view this phenomenon as a quality control problem and promise not to allow those involved in the substitution of advertising on their platforms (an OpenX representative told AdAge advertising magazine in May 2014 that their company no longer working with 50onRed, AppNexus spokesman Josh Seitz told me the same thing in April). Google and Mozilla suffer losses as users associate a problem with their browsers. “The fraudulent substitution of advertising creates a significant problem on the Internet today,” read Google’s 2015 report . The company pledged to rid its browser and advertising platform from advertising spoilers.
And, of course, ”Edelman continues,“ users dislike such advertising because it slows down their browsers. For a person who is poorly trained in a computer, such a phenomenon can be quite painful, because the cause of the problem is not always clear.
50onRed says its methods are honest. She says: “50onRed has always been proud of its rigorous process of checking partners and adhering to recommendations from companies such as Google and Microsoft, the corresponding advertising labeling, and the ease with which users can refuse to view ads.”
However, Tyler was not happy when a colleague finally explained to him the business model implemented by the company.
"Can not be? So what are we doing? - he thought then. “We are the very dumb company that has crammed its toolbars that my grandmother installs and which she cannot get rid of - are there already seven panels and her computer just doesn’t work?”
Cool!
Tyler was not the only one who was unpleasantly surprised to find out what 50onRed was actually doing. I talked about this with more than a dozen former employees of both the 50onRed company itself and its affiliated structures, and most of them said that they did not know when entering the company that the company was engaged in advertising substitution. (Almost all of them asked for anonymity, for fear of legal prosecution by 50onRed). Tyler said that the understanding of a new employee comes gradually. One realized what was happening while working on the browser extensions themselves, while the other began to try to figure out when it turned out that he did not understand the professional vocabulary used in the company.
One intern, Steve Fox, did not know anything about this until the company turned his browser extension, called “I Want It!”, Into adware in 2012. He thought that all this was pretty funny - the very first development of a young programmer was among the ten most malicious programs , well, you must! - and did not mind that no one bothered to explain to him how the company made money.
“It was not a secret,” he says, “I just didn’t care so much to ask.”
But others felt cheated. It is unclear whether the lack of transparency was intentional or caused by negligence, but five former employees said that company executives were sufficiently professional when it came to starting a business to make it seem harmless. “They are masterfully hiding how they make money,” says a former engineer from RightAction, another information technology advertising company, launched by 50onRed founders and located in the same office.
And yet, when the employees finally understood the situation, they did not rush away from the company. Even though many of them thought that this business model was unworthy. Even though many of them felt cheated.
In general, everything is not easy, right?
Steven Gill prefers not to talk about adware. When I interview a low-key and serious30-year-old co-founder and CEO of 50onRed in his office, he seems to feel uncomfortable, sometimes looking at a piece of paper answering my questions. (I, too, probably seemed uncomfortable, partly because right before the interview, a company spokeswoman, Lia Kaufman, insisted that I take a picture of myself in front of a luxurious wall decoration in the form of the number “50” with lights along the contour.)
Jill says that he does not believe that he works in the adware business. Instead, he prefers to position 50onRed as a company that provides free content to users. “The simplest analogy is Facebook, which you use for free in exchange for viewing ads,” he said. “Or, for example, a radio.”
Jill has been providing users with free content for almost ten years. In 2008, while still a college at Rowan University, New Jersey, he founded a company that became 50onRed. Then there was the popular Facebook advertising network, named Socialreach, which he created along with technical director Gabriel (“Gab”) Malka, who lives in Montreal. Socialreach helped Facebook developers like Zynga monetize their work through advertising, just at the time when Facebook was flooded with applications like Farmville and Mafia Wars. In a report for 2009, Venturebeat named Socialreach one of the largest networks on this platform.
Jill, after graduating from university, Rowan moved his business to a technical university incubator (Southern Technopark of the State of New Jersey) 20 miles south of Philadelphia. Since Socialreach hired employees and filled the incubator, Jill became the darling of the school's business community.
“He is a living example of what we are trying to do in a technology park,” said incubator director Sara Piddington in the central news program of Rowan University in 2009, commented on the company's growth. As the strong company grew and gathered to move to Philadelphia, Rowan University even planned a “graduation ceremony” to celebrate the company's relocation.
But before the move was completed, Socialreach ran into a problem. The company was banned by Facebook for "fraudulent content." According to the Venturebeat report (a former employee of Graham Smith confirmed it to me) Socialreach placed an advertisement with inaccurate information. For example, some advertisements prompted users to take an IQ test, giving the impression that their friends have already done so. “Are you smarter than Tony? Click to find out! ”Called up an advertisement. These ads were associated with a mobile scam, when the user was asked to enter his phone number, then suddenly a monthly fee was collected from the user's account.
Jill questions that Facebook has banned Socialreach for "fraudulent content"; He says that Facebook decided to work with one ad network and therefore closed the others.
Anyway, Socialreach changed course and broke up with Facebook (and New Jersey). He moved to the Cira Center - a futuristic-looking skyscraper located in the city of Philadelphia near the30th Street station - and focused on monetizing browser extensions instead of Facebook apps.
23-year-old Jill and in this city immediately got a luxury housing. He settled in the apartment for 8 thousand dollars a month in a luxurious skyscraper Ritz-Carlton opposite the city hall - with a valet, parking and indoor pool, according to the lease agreement in the archive of the city court. Perhaps he shared a three-bedroom apartment, as the lease shows that he was paying for two places in the garage.
The departure from the monetization of Facebook applications caused the company to change its name to 50onRed, says its spokeswoman Kaufman. But Smith, an engineer who joined the company when she was still in Rowan, said it was also because the company was concerned about the news of her Facebook ban. Whatever the reason, Socialreach disappeared and 50onRed appeared. It was the first time when the technology giant Facebook forced the company to change course, but, as it turned out, not the last.
What do you do if you suddenly discover that your company is not what you thought of it? Gymnastics for the mind.
Tyler struggled to stay motivated every day. Over time, he separated himself from the idea that his company was engaged in advanced business, and instead began to focus on the current task. Another former employee of the company describes the situation as follows: "It's like living in a constant state of internal conflict." Poor Tyler constantly reminded himself: "There are decent people who use our platform for legitimate purposes."
(These decent people usually advertised gambling sites, dating sites and various insurance. Many advertisers in 50onRed are sales representatives who earn when someone subscribes to their product. 50onRed attracts with its small minimum deposit, user-friendly design and easy available customer service, said Luke Kling, who is involved in marketing for the PeerFly partner network and recommended 50onRed to more than 70,000 market participants operating on PeerFly.)
One engineer who had worked for a company for a long time said that he had heard (and tried himself) all the excuses: If we don’t do this, others will. Or - we do not force people to download Adware, we just sell advertising space. “Over time,” he says, “such an excuse stops acting.”
Jill himself represents his company as giving priority to "user choice". “The thing is how users are able to manage their browsers,” he said, adding that 50onRed is making sure that they get consent from those who download its ad-supported software.
As for the disgruntled former employees of the company 50onRed, Jill said that not everyone is suitable for advertising. “If there is a desire to work here,” he continued, “then enthusiasm for advertising is needed.”
The engineer who worked at the firm for a long time did not “get into” the 50onRed advertising brand. He wanted to leave, but naturally he was nervous. Say what you want about this company, but it gave a steady income. He was afraid that he would not be able to find at least such a job, because only a few years had passed since the recession, and the information technology market in Philadelphia still remained at the initial stage of development. “There were several times when I almost left, but at the last moment I went back down,” he said. And yet he left in 2012.
For several other employees, the decision was not so straightforward. Technical challenges, bonuses and benefits, companionship in the office outweighed the moral dilemma. “From the morning of the working day I thought that what they were doing was disgusting, but at the end of the day I was in such a state that I didn’t care about that,” said one former employee. “I went into technical problems with which I was burdened by the work.”
50onRed, he continued, was an “incredible launch pad.” It led to the fact that his salary is now expressed in six figures. At 50onRed, he was forced to work with terabytes of data and gained experience that many of the other startups of that time in Philadelphia would not have given.
Start your work day with green juice to support the health of your mind and body.
50onRed Instagram account promotes your culture
The procedures in force in the company did not affect; rather the opposite. Whiskey club, gym, quarterly bonuses at the expense of participation in profits. “What kind of guy in Philadelphia, in his twenties, would not like to have a six-figure or close to that salary, free parties and beer at work?” Continued our familiar engineer. “It was very easy to get involved in all of this and not worry about the fact that you are engaged in advertising substitution.” (He mentions twenty-year-old guys for a simple reason: until the last year, 50onRed company’s management and staff were mostly white men from twenty to thirty years. Currently there are women in three high positions.)
Several former employees pointed out another reason: it was easy for them to stay there because they liked their colleagues. Many still maintain contacts in the Slack group for former 50onRed employees. (The employee who left the company in 2012 laughed when I told him about it. “We were always joking about the launch of the support group,” he said.) The relationship of the employees appeared to me most striking when I interviewed one former employee: he seemed harsh and angry because he was embroiled in work for an adware company, but suddenly softened when we started talking about his former comrades. Not about Gill or Malke, who appeared rarely, but about ordinary employees. "They are all just normal techies who want to move in their own direction," he said.
He asked me not to use his name, because he was afraid of legal prosecution, and also because he was afraid of the reaction of colleagues if they find out that he spoke to me. “I don’t want them to think that I’d betrayed them,” he said.
So why did he agree to talk?
“I want people to know that getting a job here is not the best way to make a career,” he said. - That's how I feel about this conversation. Such information should be available about any company. ”
But, he said, the truth is that “work here is not the worst thing in this world.” And he added, after a pause: “It's amazing. It is better than most other works. "
When the company 50onRed moved to Philadelphia and took up the substitution of advertising, everything seemed to go fine. 50onRed for two years in a row was listed in the “Best Jobs” list on Philly.com.The company organized nightly entertainment for representatives of the Philadelphia information technology community and meetings where it proudly presented parallel projects of its employees. In the summer of 2014, the first president was hired - the experienced head of the information technology company Sandy Dondichi. Jill, who every year went to Miami to the Art Basel, a high-society exhibit and hit the imagination at parties in the infotechnology world, such as the Summit Series, bought himself a second luxurious condominium apartment in Philadelphia in the fashionable Rittenhouse Square area for $ 2 million (according to city ​​property reports).
Undoubtedly, there were some threats to bad reviews in the press, when the company's browser extensions surfaced in stories with AdAge ,DigiDay and the Wikimedia Commons blog . “If an advertisement appears on Wikipedia, then it is clear that malicious software most likely got onto your computer,” we read in one of the posts that called the product 50onRed by name. But 50onRed was hiding from undue attention behind the corporate structures associated with it: 215 Apps, Amazing Apps, Engaging Apps. The name 50onRed was synonymous with the rapidly growing information technology startup Philadelphia, but not the substitution of advertising.
But at the end of 2014, something went wrong.
Managers began to leave the company several months after the start of the year. Rich Sayer, the operating director of 50onRed, who, according to former employees, actually ran the company, quietly left in August 2014. Seven fairly senior staff followed suit; some of them got a job in google, facebook and amazon.
“All of our top managers fled the ship,” said one former employee about that period. Dondichi, president of 50onRed, left in less than six months of work and does not list this company on his LinkedIn page. He now works on Facebook. At the beginning of 2015, sharp reviews began to appear on the Glassdoor service , displaying the adware business on public display.
I was forced out of the 50onRed lack of purpose. The company acts as an intermediary in the sales of pop-up and in-text advertising. It does not improve the lives of people, does not contribute to a more pleasant use of the Internet and, in general, does not do anything that the company proclaims. The company exists only to make the founder and CEO 50 times richer by exploiting people stupid enough to install browser toolbars. I decided that I didn’t want to give 10+ hours of my work day to this business.
Screenshot of an anonymous article on the service Glassdoor.
www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/50onRed-Reviews-E935808.htm
The company has also been involved in many lawsuits. Chicago man suedInternational Web Services - one of those related to 50onRed - for the damage caused by the adver from 50onRed. The process was eventually terminated in 2015, although International Web Services initially offered the claimant $ 10,000 to settle the case. In 2014, 50onRed itself sued an Israeli partner called Revizer for allegedly reversing engineering of its technology and withdrawing the company's customers. The case is still pending. 50onRed declined to say anything about the lawsuit, Revizer does not respond to requests for comment.
The biggest threat came from Google, who explainedThat will not support advertising spoilers. Advertising substitution was Chrome's # 1 user complaint in the first five months of 2015. In the past few years, Google has been making the job of advertising substitutes increasingly difficult, trying to suppress this activity altogether.
Microsoft, according to its representative, has also released a new set of software rules to protect consumers, and said it plans to block programs that violate these rules starting this month. "We are working with several of the biggest developers who are breaking the new policy, so they have an acceptable way to comply," a Microsoft spokesman wrote in an email, although he declined to name these developers.
Adware industry, the main part of which is based in Tel Aviv (Israel) in an area known as Download Valley, has responded to these steps in the past few years. Some have moved away from advanced and launched new product lines. 50onRed is now doing the same, but a new direction may not be as effective.
Company executives created a new firm in early 2016: an analytical platform for recommended content or natural advertising (essentially, hidden advertising or “jeans”), called Tiller. At the exhibition of startups in Philadelphia in April, 50onRed employees prepared a booth that had no reference to 50onRed - only Tiller. Jill himself put on a dark blue T-shirt with a Tiller logo.
One former employee, one who did not want to betray his colleagues, said that Tiller seems to be the right fit for 50onRed. A solid, legitimate business. But, he said, it's a shame that 50onRed didn't do this before. The founders missed their opportunity when the company had a star team and a lot of money.
“Now they have lost a lot of people,” he said. - The income from advanced has decreased. Thus, the company not only leaves the company, but also its income decreases, which makes it more difficult to hire really worthwhile specialists. ”(Two other former employees also reported that the income was lower.)
At the end of my interview with this former employee, I ask him if he regrets about working at 50onRed. He hesitates. “I don’t think I’m sorry,” he says. He starts to speak again and stops, as if trying to say something: “I don’t know whether I’m sorry.” Then he continues.
“It could have been much better than now,” he says. - I would still be happy to work with many of my former colleagues. I would be happy to help the company grow further. ”
Advertising company 50onRed is one of many in the information technology market in Philadelphia. But there is something that the management does not even inform its own employees.
')
The company seems like the perfect place for Tyler. Having worked in various agencies, Tyler (the name, of course, fictitious) wanted to try himself in a startup. He wanted to find a place where he would not communicate with clients, where people would appreciate his knowledge of a specialist. When he was interviewed at 50onRed, an information technology company in Philadelphia, his enthusiasm only grew. Everything here seemed very cool.
“Look, man, they have a really nice office,” he mused. - Open plan, lots of attractive bonuses, food. Here you feel quite modern. Looks like this is exactly the startup I was looking for. ”
He entered 50onRed, and the company additionally provided not only free weekly lunches, but also quarterly parties in trendy restaurants, paying for them in full. He could set his own pace of work. His teammates were talented.
But there was one thing he did not know about the company. A month after admission, he was shocked to find out how 50onRed was making its money.
At first glance, the company looked like just another digital advertising agency. She created a platform for advertisers buying advertising space. Simply. But non-standard was how 50onRed put those advertisements on websites. She used a dubious practice called “advertising substitution,” placing ads on websites without the permission of their owners.
50onRed did this through downloadable programs (usually browser extensions), known as adware ("adware"). “Advising companies are tricking them into pushing their software to the user,” explains Ben Edelman, a professor at the Harvard Business School and an advertising insertion expert . Download, for example, a free Flash-player, and it can come in conjunction with the adver. Then all of a sudden you will start advertising on sites like Wikipedia or Target.com - ads that these websites have never agreed to show and on which they do not earn.
The substitution of advertising seems treacherous and unethical, and Edelman confirms this. And this is still a soft wording: “Some people consider this behavior to be robbery on high roads,” he says. The substitution of advertising prevents many players in the advertising industry and, above all, publishers who do not receive advertising revenue, while advertising companies make money on their content. “This industry is harvesting where it hasn’t hit a finger to sow something,” says Edelman. At the same time, advertisers feel cheated when they pay big money for what they consider to be “genuine, legitimate, honest advertising”, and in return receive a fraudulent substitution of advertising, Edelman continues.
Information technology companies in the field of advertising, such as OpenX and AppNexus, view this phenomenon as a quality control problem and promise not to allow those involved in the substitution of advertising on their platforms (an OpenX representative told AdAge advertising magazine in May 2014 that their company no longer working with 50onRed, AppNexus spokesman Josh Seitz told me the same thing in April). Google and Mozilla suffer losses as users associate a problem with their browsers. “The fraudulent substitution of advertising creates a significant problem on the Internet today,” read Google’s 2015 report . The company pledged to rid its browser and advertising platform from advertising spoilers.
And, of course, ”Edelman continues,“ users dislike such advertising because it slows down their browsers. For a person who is poorly trained in a computer, such a phenomenon can be quite painful, because the cause of the problem is not always clear.
50onRed says its methods are honest. She says: “50onRed has always been proud of its rigorous process of checking partners and adhering to recommendations from companies such as Google and Microsoft, the corresponding advertising labeling, and the ease with which users can refuse to view ads.”
However, Tyler was not happy when a colleague finally explained to him the business model implemented by the company.
"Can not be? So what are we doing? - he thought then. “We are the very dumb company that has crammed its toolbars that my grandmother installs and which she cannot get rid of - are there already seven panels and her computer just doesn’t work?”
Cool!
Tyler was not the only one who was unpleasantly surprised to find out what 50onRed was actually doing. I talked about this with more than a dozen former employees of both the 50onRed company itself and its affiliated structures, and most of them said that they did not know when entering the company that the company was engaged in advertising substitution. (Almost all of them asked for anonymity, for fear of legal prosecution by 50onRed). Tyler said that the understanding of a new employee comes gradually. One realized what was happening while working on the browser extensions themselves, while the other began to try to figure out when it turned out that he did not understand the professional vocabulary used in the company.
One intern, Steve Fox, did not know anything about this until the company turned his browser extension, called “I Want It!”, Into adware in 2012. He thought that all this was pretty funny - the very first development of a young programmer was among the ten most malicious programs , well, you must! - and did not mind that no one bothered to explain to him how the company made money.
“It was not a secret,” he says, “I just didn’t care so much to ask.”
But others felt cheated. It is unclear whether the lack of transparency was intentional or caused by negligence, but five former employees said that company executives were sufficiently professional when it came to starting a business to make it seem harmless. “They are masterfully hiding how they make money,” says a former engineer from RightAction, another information technology advertising company, launched by 50onRed founders and located in the same office.
And yet, when the employees finally understood the situation, they did not rush away from the company. Even though many of them thought that this business model was unworthy. Even though many of them felt cheated.
In general, everything is not easy, right?
Steven Gill prefers not to talk about adware. When I interview a low-key and serious
Jill says that he does not believe that he works in the adware business. Instead, he prefers to position 50onRed as a company that provides free content to users. “The simplest analogy is Facebook, which you use for free in exchange for viewing ads,” he said. “Or, for example, a radio.”
Jill has been providing users with free content for almost ten years. In 2008, while still a college at Rowan University, New Jersey, he founded a company that became 50onRed. Then there was the popular Facebook advertising network, named Socialreach, which he created along with technical director Gabriel (“Gab”) Malka, who lives in Montreal. Socialreach helped Facebook developers like Zynga monetize their work through advertising, just at the time when Facebook was flooded with applications like Farmville and Mafia Wars. In a report for 2009, Venturebeat named Socialreach one of the largest networks on this platform.
Jill, after graduating from university, Rowan moved his business to a technical university incubator (Southern Technopark of the State of New Jersey) 20 miles south of Philadelphia. Since Socialreach hired employees and filled the incubator, Jill became the darling of the school's business community.
“He is a living example of what we are trying to do in a technology park,” said incubator director Sara Piddington in the central news program of Rowan University in 2009, commented on the company's growth. As the strong company grew and gathered to move to Philadelphia, Rowan University even planned a “graduation ceremony” to celebrate the company's relocation.
But before the move was completed, Socialreach ran into a problem. The company was banned by Facebook for "fraudulent content." According to the Venturebeat report (a former employee of Graham Smith confirmed it to me) Socialreach placed an advertisement with inaccurate information. For example, some advertisements prompted users to take an IQ test, giving the impression that their friends have already done so. “Are you smarter than Tony? Click to find out! ”Called up an advertisement. These ads were associated with a mobile scam, when the user was asked to enter his phone number, then suddenly a monthly fee was collected from the user's account.
Jill questions that Facebook has banned Socialreach for "fraudulent content"; He says that Facebook decided to work with one ad network and therefore closed the others.
Anyway, Socialreach changed course and broke up with Facebook (and New Jersey). He moved to the Cira Center - a futuristic-looking skyscraper located in the city of Philadelphia near the
The departure from the monetization of Facebook applications caused the company to change its name to 50onRed, says its spokeswoman Kaufman. But Smith, an engineer who joined the company when she was still in Rowan, said it was also because the company was concerned about the news of her Facebook ban. Whatever the reason, Socialreach disappeared and 50onRed appeared. It was the first time when the technology giant Facebook forced the company to change course, but, as it turned out, not the last.
What do you do if you suddenly discover that your company is not what you thought of it? Gymnastics for the mind.
Tyler struggled to stay motivated every day. Over time, he separated himself from the idea that his company was engaged in advanced business, and instead began to focus on the current task. Another former employee of the company describes the situation as follows: "It's like living in a constant state of internal conflict." Poor Tyler constantly reminded himself: "There are decent people who use our platform for legitimate purposes."
(These decent people usually advertised gambling sites, dating sites and various insurance. Many advertisers in 50onRed are sales representatives who earn when someone subscribes to their product. 50onRed attracts with its small minimum deposit, user-friendly design and easy available customer service, said Luke Kling, who is involved in marketing for the PeerFly partner network and recommended 50onRed to more than 70,000 market participants operating on PeerFly.)
One engineer who had worked for a company for a long time said that he had heard (and tried himself) all the excuses: If we don’t do this, others will. Or - we do not force people to download Adware, we just sell advertising space. “Over time,” he says, “such an excuse stops acting.”
Jill himself represents his company as giving priority to "user choice". “The thing is how users are able to manage their browsers,” he said, adding that 50onRed is making sure that they get consent from those who download its ad-supported software.
As for the disgruntled former employees of the company 50onRed, Jill said that not everyone is suitable for advertising. “If there is a desire to work here,” he continued, “then enthusiasm for advertising is needed.”
The engineer who worked at the firm for a long time did not “get into” the 50onRed advertising brand. He wanted to leave, but naturally he was nervous. Say what you want about this company, but it gave a steady income. He was afraid that he would not be able to find at least such a job, because only a few years had passed since the recession, and the information technology market in Philadelphia still remained at the initial stage of development. “There were several times when I almost left, but at the last moment I went back down,” he said. And yet he left in 2012.
For several other employees, the decision was not so straightforward. Technical challenges, bonuses and benefits, companionship in the office outweighed the moral dilemma. “From the morning of the working day I thought that what they were doing was disgusting, but at the end of the day I was in such a state that I didn’t care about that,” said one former employee. “I went into technical problems with which I was burdened by the work.”
50onRed, he continued, was an “incredible launch pad.” It led to the fact that his salary is now expressed in six figures. At 50onRed, he was forced to work with terabytes of data and gained experience that many of the other startups of that time in Philadelphia would not have given.
Start your work day with green juice to support the health of your mind and body.
50onRed Instagram account promotes your culture
The procedures in force in the company did not affect; rather the opposite. Whiskey club, gym, quarterly bonuses at the expense of participation in profits. “What kind of guy in Philadelphia, in his twenties, would not like to have a six-figure or close to that salary, free parties and beer at work?” Continued our familiar engineer. “It was very easy to get involved in all of this and not worry about the fact that you are engaged in advertising substitution.” (He mentions twenty-year-old guys for a simple reason: until the last year, 50onRed company’s management and staff were mostly white men from twenty to thirty years. Currently there are women in three high positions.)
Several former employees pointed out another reason: it was easy for them to stay there because they liked their colleagues. Many still maintain contacts in the Slack group for former 50onRed employees. (The employee who left the company in 2012 laughed when I told him about it. “We were always joking about the launch of the support group,” he said.) The relationship of the employees appeared to me most striking when I interviewed one former employee: he seemed harsh and angry because he was embroiled in work for an adware company, but suddenly softened when we started talking about his former comrades. Not about Gill or Malke, who appeared rarely, but about ordinary employees. "They are all just normal techies who want to move in their own direction," he said.
He asked me not to use his name, because he was afraid of legal prosecution, and also because he was afraid of the reaction of colleagues if they find out that he spoke to me. “I don’t want them to think that I’d betrayed them,” he said.
So why did he agree to talk?
“I want people to know that getting a job here is not the best way to make a career,” he said. - That's how I feel about this conversation. Such information should be available about any company. ”
But, he said, the truth is that “work here is not the worst thing in this world.” And he added, after a pause: “It's amazing. It is better than most other works. "
When the company 50onRed moved to Philadelphia and took up the substitution of advertising, everything seemed to go fine. 50onRed for two years in a row was listed in the “Best Jobs” list on Philly.com.The company organized nightly entertainment for representatives of the Philadelphia information technology community and meetings where it proudly presented parallel projects of its employees. In the summer of 2014, the first president was hired - the experienced head of the information technology company Sandy Dondichi. Jill, who every year went to Miami to the Art Basel, a high-society exhibit and hit the imagination at parties in the infotechnology world, such as the Summit Series, bought himself a second luxurious condominium apartment in Philadelphia in the fashionable Rittenhouse Square area for $ 2 million (according to city ​​property reports).
Undoubtedly, there were some threats to bad reviews in the press, when the company's browser extensions surfaced in stories with AdAge ,DigiDay and the Wikimedia Commons blog . “If an advertisement appears on Wikipedia, then it is clear that malicious software most likely got onto your computer,” we read in one of the posts that called the product 50onRed by name. But 50onRed was hiding from undue attention behind the corporate structures associated with it: 215 Apps, Amazing Apps, Engaging Apps. The name 50onRed was synonymous with the rapidly growing information technology startup Philadelphia, but not the substitution of advertising.
But at the end of 2014, something went wrong.
Managers began to leave the company several months after the start of the year. Rich Sayer, the operating director of 50onRed, who, according to former employees, actually ran the company, quietly left in August 2014. Seven fairly senior staff followed suit; some of them got a job in google, facebook and amazon.
“All of our top managers fled the ship,” said one former employee about that period. Dondichi, president of 50onRed, left in less than six months of work and does not list this company on his LinkedIn page. He now works on Facebook. At the beginning of 2015, sharp reviews began to appear on the Glassdoor service , displaying the adware business on public display.
I was forced out of the 50onRed lack of purpose. The company acts as an intermediary in the sales of pop-up and in-text advertising. It does not improve the lives of people, does not contribute to a more pleasant use of the Internet and, in general, does not do anything that the company proclaims. The company exists only to make the founder and CEO 50 times richer by exploiting people stupid enough to install browser toolbars. I decided that I didn’t want to give 10+ hours of my work day to this business.
Screenshot of an anonymous article on the service Glassdoor.
www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/50onRed-Reviews-E935808.htm
The company has also been involved in many lawsuits. Chicago man suedInternational Web Services - one of those related to 50onRed - for the damage caused by the adver from 50onRed. The process was eventually terminated in 2015, although International Web Services initially offered the claimant $ 10,000 to settle the case. In 2014, 50onRed itself sued an Israeli partner called Revizer for allegedly reversing engineering of its technology and withdrawing the company's customers. The case is still pending. 50onRed declined to say anything about the lawsuit, Revizer does not respond to requests for comment.
The biggest threat came from Google, who explainedThat will not support advertising spoilers. Advertising substitution was Chrome's # 1 user complaint in the first five months of 2015. In the past few years, Google has been making the job of advertising substitutes increasingly difficult, trying to suppress this activity altogether.
Microsoft, according to its representative, has also released a new set of software rules to protect consumers, and said it plans to block programs that violate these rules starting this month. "We are working with several of the biggest developers who are breaking the new policy, so they have an acceptable way to comply," a Microsoft spokesman wrote in an email, although he declined to name these developers.
Adware industry, the main part of which is based in Tel Aviv (Israel) in an area known as Download Valley, has responded to these steps in the past few years. Some have moved away from advanced and launched new product lines. 50onRed is now doing the same, but a new direction may not be as effective.
Company executives created a new firm in early 2016: an analytical platform for recommended content or natural advertising (essentially, hidden advertising or “jeans”), called Tiller. At the exhibition of startups in Philadelphia in April, 50onRed employees prepared a booth that had no reference to 50onRed - only Tiller. Jill himself put on a dark blue T-shirt with a Tiller logo.
One former employee, one who did not want to betray his colleagues, said that Tiller seems to be the right fit for 50onRed. A solid, legitimate business. But, he said, it's a shame that 50onRed didn't do this before. The founders missed their opportunity when the company had a star team and a lot of money.
“Now they have lost a lot of people,” he said. - The income from advanced has decreased. Thus, the company not only leaves the company, but also its income decreases, which makes it more difficult to hire really worthwhile specialists. ”(Two other former employees also reported that the income was lower.)
At the end of my interview with this former employee, I ask him if he regrets about working at 50onRed. He hesitates. “I don’t think I’m sorry,” he says. He starts to speak again and stops, as if trying to say something: “I don’t know whether I’m sorry.” Then he continues.
“It could have been much better than now,” he says. - I would still be happy to work with many of my former colleagues. I would be happy to help the company grow further. ”
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/302690/
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