Complaint Review: Adswizz - Internet

On March 5th of 2015 I received an unsolicited email from a man by the name Henry Embleton asking who was in charge of our audio advertising. The email was from a company by the name of ADSWIZZ.

I responded to his email at which point we engaged in talks to get adswizz audio ad inventory inserted into our music/audio player. I was weary about running their ad inventory as they did not provide a "true" interface specifically for publishers to review reports on ad requests sent, filled and the price point they were being paid at. They basically told me at the end of the month we will send you a number on how much you made. This "magical" number they were going to create every month I was weary about.

Needless I moved forward with it as their lead programmer at the time gave me access somewhat accidently that showed stats on how many ad requests we were sending them and how many were filled.

So after working out all the details from a financial and technical standpoint we began running their ads on our website in May of 2015.

The first month we sent them roughly 1.8 million pre and post roll ad requests from our users who play music and audio on our website. Of those they served 822,718 ads and we earned $1,438.26. No bad for our first month.

After that is when things went downhill fast. I begin asking for June totals and communication with Henry was nil. He would give me the around week in and week out. I was constantly being told that his team would have numbers and that they were getting to the bottom of what they claimed was a "technical issue".

Another month went by of run around  by the end of July I let them know if we cannot be provided with totals on what we earned in June that we would have to pull their audio ad inventory from our site. At that point a man by the name of Tom Yeung their "Vice President of Partner Solutions" began communication with me.

They begin claiming their was missing data (ad impressions) that they are trying to find and they were trying to figure out where the disconnect was. They provided me emails stating ad requests were being sent and played but their reporting is not tracking it correctly.

After trying to work with them for most of August and get to the bottom of the issue and nothing happening I decided to remove their ad units from our site.

We were now in the start of October and I was still waiting on the first payment from May. After finally receiving that I continued to wait on numbers from them for June, July and August.

They finally sent me numbers and tried paying us $86 for June’s ad totals $0 for July and $389 for August. These were laughable numbers.

Not only their reporting that the accidently gave me access to but our reporting and google analytics showed drastically different numbers.

For the month of June their own reporting showed we sent them 1.6 million requests 

For the month of July their reporting showed we sent them 1.4 million requests

For the month of August their reporting showed we sent them 3.5 million requests

Our in house reporting and analytics actually showed more but we were fine with those numbers. So you can see the why those numbers they sent us were laughable.

 To try to be fair we then asked that they just pay us on the same percentage of filled vs. the ad requests  we sent them in May (the only month they paid) and the same ecpm.

After going back and forth and trying to settle with them they stuck to just paying us $475 for all three months a laughable number. Even after that we kept trying to work with them in order to avoid any legal issues and proposed settling on half of the numbers all of our reporting showed. This did nothing and they insisted on paying us $475 for all three months.

So at that point we decided to send them to collections and collect on the money through that means. After dealing with their Kevin Chen they still would not budge.

So we are now taking them to small claims court to collect on the money due to us.

For all future website owners if you own a website and adswizz approaches you to run their ads DO NOT do it. They will not pay you.