I thought things had gone quite well for Bolt (which would ultimately be good for me). Today I see this on Valleywag: bolt.com is now a member of the advertising hall of shame. And they have some (not-so-good/related) company.
Bolt (gofish too?) has taken the path of least resistance and has chosen to buy uniques in a most shady way. There were many schemes to acquire traffic that were offered up when I was there. Some were straightforward (widgets, new tools, viral programs, site acquisitions, etc.), others involved some less desirable techniques (things that involved email, traffic attribution), and others were just totally disagreeable (site popups via ads/spyware). This final category simply drove me insane. This trickery was meant to present an aura of success to initially unsavvy potential advertising partners (and ultimately investors). By initially, I simply mean until Bolt stuck its head out as a destination, no one was really looking at the details.
I guess the sale to gofish hasn’t changed much at Bolt. I clicked over to the research Nick refers to, and Bolt (with others) has settled nicely into using spyware products to inflate traffic. I remember having numerous arguments about this method of getting credit for eyes — It is the kind of last ditch effort a company makes when it lacks what is necessary to build a product or brand. What other reason would lead someone to adopt the logic that popping under a site window is the same as advertising? They knowingly partnered with a spyware company that uses deceptive practices to get their software installed on the computers of less-than-savvy users. Just ads indeed!
What were the arguments for this practice? We had them too many times to count. Ultimately they boil down to this one argument: “It is just advertising.” Given a need for unique eyes (to get more advertising $), it is an easy way to get eyeballs.
Bollox.
See it in action: this is a link to the bolt specific screenshots. And another site, Roo.TV, which has connections to Bolt.
This bullshit sucked in ‘99. It sucks more now.
Marie_Mockett@hotmai, 
LonelyBloggers 5:08 pm on May 9, 2007 Permalink
Great article and shouldn’t be a huge surprise to anyone working in the industry.
.com companies have always used devious ways of sending traffic to boost their traffic rankings. It was sad then and it’s even sadder now.
I remember working for a .com company that bought up over $2 million in ‘questionable traffic’ and then bragged about their multi-fold growth in talking to the press. No questions were ever asked about where the traffic came from and they ultimately partnered with several large companies as a result.
As a small startup it’s easy to be lured into such tactics to tell a better story, but it again demonstrates how shady things are still in the internet circles.
At some point you are going to get found out, so I guess companies out there are still more than willing to assume the risks associated with such devious advertising practices.
100% right – Sucked then, sucks now. Speaks volumes about the industry in general.
Geoff Gresh 1:31 pm on May 12, 2007 Permalink
Yeah I basically left Bolt because of stuff like this – it became pretty clear that the “Cult of Creativity” pitch was a sham. I think Aaron believed it (at times), but Jay was always Mr. Numbers. Too bad, really. There was some real promise there at times. But it was a little too easy for the Dynamic Duo to fire very very smart creative people, just for not agreeing with them. From what I hear, the office now has ONE creative. The rest of the people are sales/tech. What a shame.
Marie_Mockett@hotmai 7:20 pm on July 12, 2007 Permalink
Well, you know it’s a bummer, because I felt at one point that Bolt did have a clear brand. Perhaps it wasn’t going to be enough to make big $$$ in the end (well, obviously it wasn’t). But it was a creative place. I’m sad the way that things have ended up.