Webwindows: Spammers and Rip-off Merchants
I’ve just been spammed by a company called Webwindows. It isn’t the first time – I get spam from them regularly, despite asking them not to. Other people suffer in much the same way, and Webwindows have been kicked off at least one ISP for breaking their terms of service. Spam, or Unsolicited Bulk Email to give it its formal title, is a breach of UK advertising regulations under all circumstances and can be illegal in some cases.
In this case, they are trying to sell me space in the Sunday Telegraph magazine for £355. They say that’s a 66% discount on their rate card value of £1,050. If anyone is tempted by that, it might be worth looking at the facts. For a start, although their spam is worded to make it sound as though Webwindows are selling space on behalf of the Sunday Telegraph (or the Sunday Times, or various other newspapers), that’s not really the case. What they do is buy a page themselves, usually in a not particularly prominent location (near the back, usually), and then re-sell spots on it to their punters. You can see an example page here.
If they sold all of those slots (24 spaces on a page) at the full ratecard value, they’d rake in £25,250 a go. Obviously, they’re not going to get that all the time – or even probably any of the time, as it’s a deliberately inflated price to make the discount sound better. But what you’re effectively buying, whatever you spend on it, is a small display classified ad. An advert that you could, if you wanted, place directly with the newspaper. In the Sunday Telegraph magazine, for example, it would cost you around £265 according to their ratecard (based on a classified display advert that’s about the same size as a Webwindows box). Compare that to the Webwindows ratecard price, and it’s immediately clear how much of a rip-off it is. Even with the Webwindows “discount” it’s still more than going direct. And, of course, you could probably get a discount from the newspaper ratecard if you place the ad at the right time.
But there’s another thing, too. Adverts for websites in print magazines are pretty rare. In fact, the only ones I can remember seeing are these Webwindows boxes. And these wouldn’t be there if Webwindows didn’t aggressively market them to small businesses who aren’t sufficiently advertising-savvy to understand print advertising in general. Which tends to suggest that maybe advertising your website in print isn’t really cost-effective anyway – if it were, then more people would be doing it through the usual ad agencies and we’d be seeing lots of competitors to Webwindows. So Webwindows are selling a product of dubious value, at an inflated price, by unethical and borderline illegal means. I think that’s a good enough reason to avoid them like the plague.
July 31st, 2008 at 11:41
Thanks for this info – stopped us making a huge mistake!
October 1st, 2008 at 22:20
Me too!
January 12th, 2009 at 13:35
Me too! Mind you, it did then make me look at the Guardian prices, an advertising slot we had never considered!
January 19th, 2009 at 22:59
As en ex-employee of web windows i can tell you what a rip off it is and the ads very very rarely work.
January 29th, 2009 at 15:27
Thank’s for that, i was interested enough to google thier website and came across your page via a few forums on the topic. A Bargepole, touch,with, don’t!
February 10th, 2009 at 11:19
We paid them for a small advert last year and promptly supplied them the artwork. They ignored our artwork and made up their own advert for us, with the wrong telephone number, and printed this ad instead of the artwork we had designed.
I won’t give details of the battle that followed, but suffice it to say that I’d never deal with them again.
July 6th, 2009 at 12:56
I tried an ad with them after receiving one of their emails (I wasn’t sure if it was spam or not at that time as was not written like the general rubbish) and got very little, if anything, from it.
March 9th, 2010 at 09:48
The spam still comes. This is their latest scam mail as at 09/03/10
Hi there
“Desperate” is the only way of describing the situation I’m in at the moment. The presses roll at 4pm today and there are a couple ads still to sell in the next issue of The Sunday Times Magazine . The rates have fallen through the floor and I can’t stress enough how unusual this is for such a market leading paper.
Here’s the deal:
• Readership: 3.1 million
• Size (Single Panel): 45mm x 50mm
• Publication date: 21st March
• Rate card: £1250
• Offer: £398
The Sunday Times is by far the best response puller of all the weekend papers and this comes down to the massive readership of over 3 million readers. This is the first offer below £400 we’ve been able to offer for nearly a year so I very much hope Xxxxxxxx.Co.Uk will be tempted enough to give it a try.
I look forward to hearing back from you soon.
Regards
Charlotte
020 7649 9712
http://www.webwindows.co.uk