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]

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.

 

[UKSBD]

I considered using Adfero but were put of by fact that when the contract
ends they can make you remove all content they supplied to you.
There is a particular section in the contract that addresses this, and there
may be a way of retaining the right to use it after the contract ends, but
it is something anyone considering using their service should be aware of.

 

[jabird]

I had a nightmare with Adfero going back a couple of years, endless customer service issues, and they then tried to chase for payment. Despite me repeatedly pointing out that the contract didn't exist as they were in multiple breach of it, they kept sending out reminders and were on the point of taking us to court.

I see that this isn't the only place they have tried to censor. I kept my mouth shut at the time - normally I like a good rant, but sometimes I'm kept on my lead, but when people started discussing Adfero on affiliate marketing forum A4U, I chipped in. I now see my comments have been deleted, and can only assume that this was due to threats from Adfero's legal dept.

I can't link out yet, but hopefully you can see the threads if you search for them (A4U - Adfero / DirectNews / bullied; my personal blog is just my name .co.uk) - my only agenda here is to warn people about this terrible company who are supposed to be the 'bringer of news' (Adfero's meaning in Latin), but who instead want to go round and stamp on anyone who has a bad word to say about them.

So much for internet freedom in the 21st Century - I don't have any other service to promote, and can only suggest that the best way to manage content is to write it yourself.

James Avery
PS - the fact that Adfero is an anagram for Do Fear is a nice irony!

 

[Chris Slay]

We have just parted company.

Poor quality articles - cut and paste
Wouldn't follow our instructions
We couldn't prove short changing on articles but suspected as much.

In theory a great resource in reality a pain in the butt.

 

[greenwood]

Direct news are also going by the name Newsreach now as well as Adfero.

News works very well for us, having gotten us up the search engines and produces alot of traffic to our site. We have been running it a couple of years. You might try one of the other online news producers (as we do) if this company isn't producing the goods.

 

[mattsaw]

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

Wow, someone needs to read up a bit on social media management!

Personally my experieneces with them have been pretty meh, I think most sites would be better off trying to find a freelancer who has a good understanding of their subject area that they can work closely with.

 

[mattsaw]

It also looks like the could use some reputation management as well now that this thread is showing for searches for both Adfero and Adfero Direct News

http://www.google.co.uk/#hl=en&sour...&aqi=g1&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=&fp=ce9e554755e39e95

 

[Darren Falkingham]

Wow, someone needs to read up a bit on social media management!

...just for clarity, are you referring to Adfero's actions, or my response to them?

It would change significantly the way I reply...!

Cheers,
Darren

 

[mattsaw]

...just for clarity, are you referring to Adfero's actions, or my response to them?

It would change significantly the way I reply...!

Cheers,
Darren

Their actions. Sending demands to sites to take down genuine customer comments always comes across as being heavy handed and never improves the situation.

Having someone come here, answer queries, give their side of the arguement and address the points that have been raised would have shown them in a far better light and may even have won them a few converts.

 

[Darren Falkingham]

Their actions. Sending demands to sites to take down genuine customer comments always comes across as being heavy handed and never improves the situation.

Having someone come here, answer queries, give their side of the arguement and address the points that have been raised would have shown them in a far better light and may even have won them a few converts.

Thanks for that - in which case I wholeheartedly agree.

This is exactly what we suggest to companies when they contact us to take down content - that they get involved in the discussion and address the issues directly.

Precious few actually do, however, which is a real shame ...

... but I must add the caveat that when companies have got openly involved in the discussion, some UKBF members haven't been particularly receptive in return, which really doesn't help the situation (ranters, flamers, trolls - that's you... )