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Saturday, Jul 11, 2009
When Internet marketing goes sour: A sordid tale of spyware, "junk traffic," bodybuilding and a half-baked plan for Hollywood glory.
Jul 1, 2002 | The men who ran Website Results, an Internet marketing company, had a unique test for gauging the moral fiber of their employees. According to former colleagues, Ronald J. Penna, Michael K. Osborn and Kevin Smith used to pose this question: Imagine there's a peasant somewhere halfway across the world. If you could push a button and kill the person without getting caught, would you do it for a million dollars?
"For them, it was yes, in a heartbeat. They just wanted to know whether we felt the same way. Who even thinks that way?" said Steve Simkovitch, a salesman who worked for Website Results for most of 1999.
Website Results specialized in the quintessentially dot-com boom service of "search engine optimization" -- the business of making sure a client's Web site ranks high on the listings returned by search engines such as Google or AltaVista. For a time, the company performed so effectively that in August 2000, Penna and his partners sold Website Results to the online ad giant 24/7 Real Media for $95 million in stock.
But less than a year later, in May 2001, the three men were fired from their positions in top management. 24/7 Real Media officials won't disclose why Penna, Osborn and Smith were sacked. But according to sources close to the company, the trio had built Website Results largely on fast talk and intimidation -- a foundation that crumbled once the e-business boom went bust. None of the men, who are said to be in their early 30s, has responded to repeated interview requests.
But their story didn't end with their firing by Real Media. Shortly afterwards, the three men founded a new company, called Intellitech. In May, Salon reported the strange tale of Intellitech and its "popup ad campaign from hell." The story detailed how a particularly malevolent form of "spyware" came to be secretly installed on the computers of tens of thousands of Internet users.
The closer one looks, the more bizarre the story of Website Results and Intellitech becomes. Like all previous upheavals in commerce, the digital revolution has produced its share of opportunists and hucksters. But the saga of Website Results' founders provides a rare insight into the dark side of the Internet boom. Three college buddies moved out to California in the late-1990s with dreams of becoming millionaires -- and maybe even movie stars -- off the Internet gold rush. Their tools of the trade: software programs that performed sleight-of-hand tricks on search engines, and a host of management tactics seemingly ripped from the pages of a Navy SEALs handbook. Call it dot-com noir -- their tale cries out for a 21st century Raymond Chandler.
