I really don’t like companies which go round with a big wooden stick and try to clear up what others say about them on the internet. There has been a thread running on the A4U forum for quite a while about a certain Adfero - “bringer of news”. I could go on and on about the troubles I had with them, but it is feeding time, so I will keep this brief, make sure people know it is out there, and publish any more that is needed later.
The key discussion boils down to Adfero’s claim that:
“DirectNews does provide unique content – we are very aware of the dangers of providing duplicate content to a website and ensure everything we do is unique.”
In our case, this was about 50% right - when the story was unique, it was because the incompetence was on such a grand scale that no-one else could match it. I repeat again (well, as said on A4U about 3 weeks ago, but since mysteriously disappeared), according to Adfero, the Costa Del Sol was in Morocco, and Granada was a spice island walled city in the Caribbean - these are the facts of the so-called news they provided to us.
The rest of the time, the stories were often directly taken from other press releases - any news company will do this to some extent, but there should always be some editing involved, but not in the case of Adfero - again, specifically, I refer to the story they gave us about new BA flights to Algiers, which matched the BA press release we got verbatim.
Adfero then say that they got other blog posters to take down their comments because stories were “unsubstantiated” - I can certainly feel the fresh blow of their censor’s axe coming down tough on anyone who doesn’t like them.
Well, this will not do - an internet company providing news in the 21st century should be able to take a bit of negative commentary on the chin, and should not have to threaten other blogs and forums which say things they don’t like.
Adfero, when you read this tomorrow, please take note that this blog is the personal opinion of James Avery, and relates to the former contract between yourselves and Flightmapping Ltd. The opinions are my own, but if you take issue, you can email ja @ jamesavery .co.uk.
Note - I should point out that the above comments refer to Adfero Ltd, and the Adfero DirectNews product. It does not relate to Adfero Group, a Washington DC based media agency.
