TrafficClub is a domain parking service operated by Moniker (which is part of Seevast) that alternates domains between different parking services. DomainSponsor was one of these services. On Friday their largest upstream ad provider (Google) terminated their ability to syndicate the advertising feed to TrafficClub.
DomainSponsor contacted Moniker’s customers via email (through addresses apparently harvested from whois) TrafficClub on Wednesday, offering them to park the domains directly with DomainSponsor.

Here are posts (from DNForum, but they were also posted on other boards) from Monte Cahn of Moniker and Ron Sheridan of DomainSponsor that add details to the situation:

As some of you may know, Google decided to make some sweeping changes with their partners regarding 3rd and 4th party feeds. TrafficClub.com was unique as it allowed multiple feeds to compete on a domain by domain basis and select not only the feed but the landing pages that monetized the best for each domain.

DomainSponsor/Oversee was one of 3 Google feed in TrafficClub and WAS considered a partner until yesterday when they decided to do whois look ups and aggregate all contact information they had on TC customers on every domain name and directly solicit our customers. In my opinion and after a direct conversation with their management (after I was even solicited), their intent was to take advantage of the situation and steal our customers. They were actually planning this for days.

Sometimes it takes a while to discover the true colors of companies and their management.

The great news is that they flushed themselves out of the system and revenue and performance will increase as a result. TrafficClub will only get better when we learn from experiences such as these.

My advice is to choose your partners carefully and work with people/companies you can really trust and who are aligned with with you. If you never learn from your mistakes, you will never grow. We just learned from ours.

Things always happen for a reason!

Monte Cahn, Founder / CEO, Moniker.com & TrafficClub.com

And here the response from DomainSponsor:

Yesterday we sent out an e-mail inviting TrafficClub customers to deal directly with DomainSponsor.

We would like to apologize if our email notification appeared as “spam”. We were attempting to reach out to customers who were enjoying our DomainSponsor program via TrafficClub. We felt we had good reason and justification to do so but the email did not speak to the reason we were forced to send it. The email was created and sent in haste and failed to give the larger context.

Background: On mid day Friday we were notified by our largest upstream PPC provider that we were to immediately terminate our participation in TrafficClub. We quickly notified TC and apprised them of the situation. TC asked for more time which seemed reasonable. While we were not given more time on our end, we decided to extend the deadline to Wednesday (yesterday) midnight and absorb any financial and legal risks ourselves.

We were expecting an announcement by TC to those customers affected. As of 5:00pm pst on Wednesday no announcement seemed forthcoming, and we saw that as a direct reflection on us. We decided it was necessary to send an announcement on our own. We have been very happy with our relationship with TC and it is with great sadness that we had to terminate it. This was not a DS decision or a TC decision…it was something forced upon us.

We think this development which precipitated our email, is part of a larger effort from the large upstream providers to exert more control over their distribution. In that context, our main concern is to ensure we abide by our terms of service thus ensuring our clients the most sustainable and highest performing experience. That said we could have and should have handled the specific communication better, and we apologize to those directly impacted especially the TrafficClub team. We welcome anyone who has concerns to contact us directly and discuss with us.

In the words of the great Paul Harvey, “Now you know the rest of the story”.

Ron Sheridan – DomainSponsor.com

[via DNForum]