eFront alliances under threat
eFront trumpeted the BabyNames alliance in a press release dated 3 October--one day after Media Metrix issued its revised top-50 list and bumped eFront off it. Rather than having 12 million unique visitors, eFront had fewer than 400,000 "uniques," according to the revision.
That was particularly bitter news to Moss, who said she had agreed to sell her Web site to eFront and become an affiliate partly because of its apparent success in cracking the top 20.
"The month after we signed with them, they were suddenly (removed from) the charts," lamented Moss, who also is owner of Los Angeles Web consultancy Moss Mallory Interactive. "That bothered us because that particular ranking was one of the major reasons that made our decision to go into this deal."
Former eFront Chief Technology Officer Matt Levine, who resigned after the ICQ logs became public, called the Media Metrix episode the beginning of the end for several of eFront's executives. "Media Metrix was the straw that started putting pressure on the camel's back," Levine said. "That really started to put strains on relationships."
That has become abundantly clear in the dispute between Jain and former company President Ziegler, who has filed a lawsuit in Superior Court in against eFront and Jain seeking back pay.
"Sam (Jain) would call companies all over the world, trying to get them to be our affiliates," Ziegler said. "Some of them wouldn't respond. He said, 'If they won't respond to me, they won't respond to anyone.' Sam took these and submitted them to Media Metrix and said they were affiliates."
Jain called the allegations "absolutely not true," saying in an interview that "Jerry (Ziegler) himself was in charge of our affiliates program. I had nothing to do with it."
Moss doesn't particularly care how Media Metrix got the bad information or why it wasn't discovered sooner. At this point, she has more immediate concerns.
Like other Webmasters who did business with eFront, Moss says she has not received the promised monthly payments. She wants to regain control of the BabyNames Web site, arguing that the revised Media Metrix numbers provide a legitimate reason to break the affiliation because traffic was a major motive for joining eFront.
"We can dispute whether the original contract was brought about in good faith," Moss said. "We believe it wasn't."
CIBC analyst Corcoran said eFront was hardly the only Internet company apparently obsessed with traffic numbers. It was just a "more visible example that caused a little more embarrassment," he said.
To understand companies such as eFront, Corcoran said, it is important to view them in the broader context of the Internet gold rush--and the lengths to which some people may go to strike it rich.
"There was a big temptation to pump up the numbers two years ago," Corcoran said. "These companies had business models where they knew they weren't going to show any profit for some time, so companies were judged by an unusual set of criteria: page views and eyeballs."
