OpinionOutpost comment spam
Internet 06/28/2005 |Note: On 10/27/2005, I received an apology e-mail from the person who left the comment that originally prompted this post. I’ve accepted his apology, and have removed his name and contact information from this post. Mistakes happen, but Opinion Outpost does appear to be on the level.
[redacted] —
Today I received the following comment on my weblog. The comment was posted to an old entry (a technique often used to “hide” information, as it is less likely to be noticed by site owners), had nothing to do with the subject of the entry, and was nothing more than an unsolicited advertisement — in short, it was spam.
On Jun 28, 2005, at 11:56 AM, [redacted] [at] opinionoutpost [dot] com wrote:
> IP Address: [redacted]
> Name: [redacted]
> Email Address: [redacted] [at] opinionoutpost [dot] com
> URL: http://www [dot] opinionoutpost [dot] com
>
> Comment:
>
> We are offering you a simple way to generate revenue from people visiting your website. Join our affiliate program and promote www [dot] opinionoutpost [dot] com on your website and we will pay you $1.00 for each new person you link from your web site, who registers and confirms their registration. Payments will be sent monthly.
>
> We are Opinion Outpost, an online market research panel. We offer our members a chance to voice their opinions through online surveys about many Fortune 500 companies’ products and services. For each survey our members complete we pay them a monetary incentive. We don’t sell anything and joining Opinion Outpost is free. We invite you to take a look at our web site www [dot] opinionoutpost [dot] com to learn more about us. You may also take the opportunity to register yourself.
>
> To join our affiliate program please call me at (801) 379-4064 or reply to this e-mail address and please include your contact information. We will be in touch shortly.
>
> Thank you for your time!
>
> [redacted]
> Opinion Outpost
> e-mail: [redacted] [at] opinionoutpost [dot] com
> Direct: [redacted]
> Main: [redacted]
> www [dot] opinionoutpost [dot] com
This type of unsolicited advertising is intrusive, annoying, and abusive. If you actually had any interest in convincing me to join your program, you would have e-mailed me directly instead of employing a technique generally recognized as an attempt to get your company’s information into search engines. I still wouldn’t have joined, but I would have been less annoyed.
Not only do I have no interest in your company or its services, but I am posting a copy of this e-mail on my weblog so that my readers will be aware of the underhanded techniques you are using to promote your business.
Sincerely,
Michael Hanscom
[See also: OpinionOutpost Apology | I’m an iTunes Affilliate | New e-mail addy redux | Breakin’ the law! Breakin’ the law! | Counter-Googling ]
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16 Responses to “OpinionOutpost comment spam”
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Cheryl
Bertamum
Michael Hanscom
Snail_5
Bob
June 28th, 2005 at 2:36 pm
Damn, that first line made me jump a little bit… like “what did I do???”
June 28th, 2005 at 5:24 pm
Oops! Sorry…didn’t mean to startle you!
July 8th, 2005 at 11:38 am
I got pretty much the same e-mail today and found this in doing a search on them. We do list many survey and focus group companies on our site, but something about this one made me want to do some research. Anyone know anything about them?
July 8th, 2005 at 12:27 pm
I’m afraid I don’t know anymore than what’s in this post, Ray. I haven’t yet received a reply to the e-mail I sent them — big surprise there, huh?
July 11th, 2005 at 7:30 am
I am a member of Opinion Outpost and love it. They are one of the most honest internet survey companies out there and they actually pay unlike some of the companies. Before you go and start talking trash on something you have no knowledge about why don’t you do a little research and find out the truth.
Sean
July 11th, 2005 at 7:50 am
Sean — if you’re on the level, great. However, I have to admit that I’m more than a little skeptical, given that the IP address that your comment came from (216.20.254.254) is the exact same IP address that the comment spam from Opinion Outpost came from.
Looks mighty fishy to me.
August 16th, 2005 at 11:31 am
They do pay their people, and a lot of things can sound like spam if there is enthusiasm given.
I am an affiliate of theirs, they pay me 1.00 per signup.
They also pay those who have signed up with the program.
I for one don’t promote programs I know to not pay. It’s not in my best interest as it makes me less credible.
September 12th, 2005 at 9:15 am
I am not sure who posted this on your blog, but Opinion Outpost is a legitimate company with a legitmate affiliate program. We are trying to build a community of websites yes. Not for traffic, but to possibly gain panel members of http://www.OpinionOutpost.com and we will pay $1.00 for each new member referred by a member site. I am concerned that someone posted this. We do try and contact webmasters directly and someone posting this to your blog is inappropriate. Please forgive the method, but don’t hold it against OpinionOutpost. Feel free to contact me.
September 27th, 2005 at 4:12 pm
I was just running a search on opinion outpost to see what else was out there about them. I came across this worthless site. I can’t believe you would say such things about a company that you don’t even know. It looks as though the person who posted about the program made an honest mistake. Then you go and blow it all out of proportion, something that only a loser with too much time on his hands would do. I have been a member of opinion outpost for about 6 months now and I love them, their surveys are great and I have actually been paid three times. I am also a member of their affiliate program. It is a solid program with superior customer service. Out of all the affiliate programs that I am a part of this is the only one that I don’t just feel like a number. They care about the success that I have. Well, it looks like this page is actually working against you and what you are tying to do. There are more comments on here promoting opinion outpost than not. I don’t think that people focus so much on the one bad comment made by you but they focus on the good comments from the rest of the people that have posted. My main purpose in writing this is to let others know how great of a company opinion outpost is, I will stand behind this company forever!
Jeanette
September 27th, 2005 at 5:57 pm
Jeanette —
Heh. First rule of effective communication: don’t start out by insulting your recipient. From my standpoint, I have 3,499 posts over ten years and around 2,500 hits a day saying that my site as a whole is far from worthless, however questionable any single post might be. But aside from that…
I’m quite glad that you and others have had such good results with an association with OpinionOutpost. However, everything I stated in my original post remains quite true: prior to receiving the comment on my site, I had never heard of OpinionOutpost; I did not receive the message as a personalized e-mail directly to me, but rather as a generic comment on an entirely unrelated post; and that type of unsolicited advertising is seen by many people in the weblogging community as spam, just like any other sort of unsolicited ad. Because of this, I’m quite comfortable in standing by my original post.
Now, it may very well be that whoever ‘[redacted]’ is, they did make an “honest mistake” when they left the original comment on my site. If he had responded to my e-mail and apologized, then I’d quite gladly have updated this post to reflect that. However, not only did I never receive a response from him, but the first person to leave a comment defending OpinionOutpost appears to either be [redacted] under a different name or someone else using his computer, as I pointed out when their IP addresses matched.
If that ends up being the case, then that’s fine with me — satisfied customers of OpinionOutpost are more than welcome to speak up and leave their testimonies here if they like. However, at the moment, you’re exaggerating just a touch: of the four comments defending OpinionOutpost, one (Sean Babcock’s) I discount entirely because it appears to come from the same person who first left me the spam message, and one (Troy’s) is an apology from someone who appears to be an OpinionOutpost employee (which is certainly appreciated, and I probably should have responded to his comment earlier).
In the end, if OpinionOutpost is a good, legitimate company doing good things for their affiliates, then more power to them — I’ve certainly got nothing against that. However, as my sole experience with them or their clients is comment spam and having one of their customers describe my site as “worthless” and myself as “a loser with too much time on his hands,” I don’t think I’ll be rushing right over there to sign up.
September 27th, 2005 at 6:09 pm
As a followup:
As a few people appear to have found this post through a Google search for ‘Opinion Outpost’, I figured I’d do the same to see where my post is showing up in the results.
As it turns out, this post is the fourth result. Opinion Outpost’s page, though, is only the third result. The very first result that comes up is a post to a mailing list — a mailing list, incidentally, which is intended to be about Debian, a free operating system for computers — that is exactly the same text as the comment I received, down to the ‘[redacted]’ signature block. This just helps confirm my initial impression that the comment left on my site was nothing more than spam.
September 27th, 2005 at 6:12 pm
Heh…one last followup: the e-mail address that Jeanette provided was bogus, and my response to her just bounced back. Of course, this doesn’t prove anything one way or another, but…neither does it _dis_prove anything.
May 17th, 2006 at 12:06 pm
I realize this is an old topic, but I found it today while searching for a way to stop the SPAM I receive from Opinion Outpost. This website has been continually spamming my inbox over and over and over for weeks on end. I have tried replying to their emails, contacting them through their website, to no avail. SPAMMING someone over and over is not a good way to get them to join your website. It has only served to anger me to the point I want to let others know about this disreputable company.
January 26th, 2007 at 12:07 pm
Add another person to the list of “people performing a Google search on Opinion Outpost”. My take is a little different from others that I’ve read. I joined Opinion Outpost as a survey/panel member over a year ago. I knew little about them, but I’ve joined several other survery sites and never had any problems, so I figured I’d give them a try. I submitted my first point redemption for a cash/check payment back in October of 2006. Well, it’s now late January 2007, and still no check. I’ve sent them several emails asking for an update, NO response. I also called their phone number, 1-877-254-1234, and talked to an individual who stated he “would contact the accounting department and get back to me.” That was over a month ago…I knew he would never call back as he never asked me my name, email address, account info, or contact info. I sent them another email today just for grins to see I might get a reply. Instead, I received 3 emails from them to fill out surveys. So, based on my experience with Opinion Outpost, they are far from legitimate. If they can live with themselves knowingly deceiving people, then more power to them…but eventually, karma always has a way of biting off the hand that feeds it. If I should happen to hear back from Opinion Outost from the email I sent today, I will hapily redact my comments about them being dishonest, but at this point, I have peg them for what they are…a farce.
May 24th, 2007 at 8:53 am
I, too, found this blog by Googling for Opinion Outpost. Most of the references to them I’ve found so far have been (not surprisingly) links to their own sites and testimonials.
I found some of the replies to this blog entry disturbingly rude. If these people wanted to defend the company, all they had to do was provide positive input. All they actually did was insult the blogger. How was he supposed to research their wonderful company? There’s not much to go on besides propaganda. The person who originally commented with Opinion Outpost info was indeed spamming his blog, setting the company up for criticism.
I’m adding this company and their email to my block list. Until I see evidence that they can or will be beneficial to my business (as they tell me I will), I don’t care to receive any more communication from them.
September 19th, 2007 at 9:24 am
I have contact Opinion Output about their users spamming Youtube in the past. They refused point blank to take any action against their users - action such as revoking any earnings. In fact they told me “spam is only in the form of email, there is no other type of spam”. Idiots.