Adfero.....Direct News

[revoilhairandbeauty]

Hi All,

has anybody had a demonstration from these people DirectNews?

The service they offer seems almost too good to be true!

Has anyone had any experience as i'd love to know if there service really is as effective as they say and in all honisty as it seems to be

Thanks

[Gmorgan]

I had a meeting with them and was quite interested. The services they offer seem like a good idea but I don't know whether I'd class £800 a month as 'too good to be true'.

They work with a national competitor of mine who ranks highly for a lot of keywords so they certainly got my interest. This competitor does a lot of other SEO though so I can't tell exactly the impact Direct News has had.

[jim_gold]

Not that good. We have used them.

One of our divisions used Adfero for some time. However we terminated the contract (6 months is their usual notice period) after performing an audit of their stories over the final quarter of last year.

Turned out they had 'short-changed' our contracted story total by about 30% - we demanded and received a refund.

Over the period of engagement, which to be fair started off OK, we had to complain about instances of Adfero providing us news items that were very, very similar to other news items they had supplied to our competitors. You had to read it three times to see the subtly changed adjectives.

But what always riled us was that some of the stories we had paid Adfero to write for our personal finance site also appeared (derivations therof) on Adfero's own finance portal, myfinances.co.uk. So that whenever the story appeared on the web, i.e. in Google News, their item took precedence. Bit of a cheek to compete with your clients in this fashion.

This competitor does a lot of other SEO though so I can't tell exactly the impact Direct News has had.

Adfero weren't particularly adept at SEO in my view. Sure, they understood one basic fact - that is if you add relevant content to your site, you are going to get treated better by the search engines.

The general concept of adding regular, relevant news and articles to a website in order
[1] to make it more interesting for readers and encourage revisits; and
[2] to improve search engine positioning
actually works very well. It's about how well it is done.

A couple of years ago Adfero were the only company we could find that provided custom news feeds. Now there is decent competition. After we discovered we had been short-changed by Adfero, or DirectNews as they call themselves now, we got referred to another news supplier by a customer who were also dissatisfied with the Adfero service.

We have now been running news and articles from Newsvend on three web sites since the end of last year, and I have to say the quality and relevance of the news stories are excellent. In our estimation (and we are running them both side by side until the end of this month when the Adfero contract finally dies), Adfero are lagging behind the competition, guess they just got too fat and complacent.

Having met with the Newsvend team, we were impressed that their writers (as well as being highly educated) actually have previous experience as journalists.

[westend]

We also use Newsvend now, and are pleased with the service. Unlike adfero, you don't have to contract in for £800 a month or whatever.

[Darren Falkingham]

Guys, Adfero are not very happy about this discussion, and to be honest I'm a bit suspicious about motives here too.

Lots of new members with no posts suddenly joining in and jumping on the bandwagon isn't what UKBF is here for. Neither do we allow multiple accounts for the same user (hint).

Please don't post unless you've got something valid to contribute, and keep it honest.

I've removed posts as a result of the takedown notice from Adfero.

Cheers,
Darren

[ex employee]

Originally Posted by Darren Falkingham

Guys, Adfero are not very happy about this discussion,

I've removed posts as a result of the takedown notice from Adfero.

i think this is pretty poor from UKBF.

nothing i posted was untrue and could easily be verified.

since when do outside companies dictate what can and cant be posted on this forum?

[ex employee]

actually i just noticed your pm darren, thanks for the explanation. fair enough i suppose. Did not intend any mither for UKBF. However i do of course stand by my now-deleted comments.

[Mattonella Tile Studio]

Ex employee, I can understand why UKBF had to take the comments down but I thank you for what was a brilliant read. The way you had written things seemed so genuine and it's always in the back of my mind if I can make it in business and write a book then there will be similar stories going in it about certain companies.

You don't fancy writing a book do you?

[SEOWizard]

Hi All
I saw this thread and take into consideration about just posting bad feedback. But I felt compelled to add our story to the post.

We first came across Adfero (Direct News) at one of the trade fairs and it did seem like a great service. The sales guys were very pushy and demanded to use our printers to print out the contract there in an initial meeting to get the contract signed.
Our CEO signed the papers last year and it is my job to analyse our SEO results from the news service quite closely compared to other sources of news etc.

I have found that for the cost there are better news services out there and also the terms of the contract were quite inflexible so now I cant swap out the news for other sources.

I am trying to convince our CEO that he should leave DN and go elsewhere and I expect that we will soon.
My advice is to try other free services, or more importantly get a service that does not tie you in to the service.

I hope this seems like a balanced post. I thought I would write as this post resonates with my experience over the last few months.

[greenwood]

No experience with Adfero, but Newsvend write ours, we're pretty happy. We used to use a free feed, but the problem with that was that users left our site to view the whole news article and also there was no SEO benefit.