Zynga Credibility Evaporating - What's The Effect On Its Super Star VC Investors?
Zynga, one of the largest virtual goods and gaming companies, promised it would stop running scam ads after Mike Arrington at Techcrunch called it out, amongst others, last Sunday. Then Zynga did it again.
On Saturday Mike Arrington noticed the ads were back, but he had to use someone else's computer because the ads weren't showing on his connection.
Deliberate blocking?
Mark Pincus, CEO of Zynga says no, it was "offer provider, doubleding, told us this was the result of their failure to remove an optimization queue which was still showing these ads to 10% of pageviews. i want to be clear that zynga had no control over the pages being shown and never filtered them from michael or anyone's view. "
You would think that this week of all weeks Mr Pincus would use a belt and braces to make sure no scam ads filtered through unnoticed.
It didn't take Mike Arrington long to find the ads so how come Zynga didn't see them?
Dean Takahashi at VentureBeat noted:
Zynga's credibility is fast evaporating. It's quickly accumulating an unpleasant reputation; especially since Techcrunch posted a video of CEO Mark Pincus admitting "I Did Every Horrible Thing In The Book Just To Get Revenues".
There are 230,000 Google references to Zynga plus "scam" out of 1.44m just for Zynga. That's 1 in 6 references .
How will this effect Zynga's A-list investors? There must be considerable concern about being in the public eye.
It's a top tier A-list take a look:
Bing Gordon
Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers
Fred Wilson
Union Square Ventures
Reid Hoffman
Chairman, LinkedIn
Peter Thiel
Managing Partner Clarium Capital
Bob Pittman and Andy Russell
The Pilot Group
Brad Feld
Foundry Group
Sandy Miller
Institutional Venture Partners
Rich Levandov
Avalon Ventures
Maybe we can hear from some of them this week.
For example, New York city's top VC, Fred Wilson has a very popular blog A VC - Musings of a VC in NYC.
But like the New York Times' recent failure to notice the scandal in the world of virtual goods, Mr Wilson's blog hasn't noticed it yet either.
It's a great story. You'd think the East Coast media would be all over this story of a Silicon Valley bubble fueled by scams...
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Please see: NYTimes Article On Virtual Goods Misses Huge Controversy