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Tuesday November 2, 2004 6:57 am
Interview with Steven Holmes, OfferCentric Co-Owner
Ever wonder what goes on in the minds of those who run companies that just give free electronics away? How do they do it? Where is the industry going in the future? What free stuff can you get next? Recently, OfferCentric burst on the scene with three websites offering expensive electronic gadgets for free. Unlike Gratis Networks, OfferCentric didn't leave members waiting for their gear for months after they have earned it. We were able to chat with Steven Holmes, Co-Owner of OfferCentric. Steve talks to us about what goes on behind the scenes at OfferCentric, new offers coming up, and a few new ideas they have up their sleeve.Steven, thank you for taking the time to answer a few questions. For the readers who are unfamiliar with you, could you tell us a bit about yourself and your position within OfferCentric?
Sure, I'm one of the owners of OfferCentric and handle most of the customer support and less technical aspects of the company. I've played various roles in the affiliate marketing industry for over 4 years and have some experience with basic web development.
When did the company start, and what was the motivation behind it?
We started about 6 months ago, planning, doing research and coming up with our business plan. The actual company formed only a little over a month ago and our sites went live on the 16th of October so we're very new in that respect.
Our motivation was mainly that it's a great business model if done properly. Also we saw plenty of room for innovation and evolution. We've got a lot of ideas for new forms of incentive site and new twists to add. We plan on doing much more than throwing up a hundred cookie cutter sites with different gifts, this is only the beginning.
Q. What do you say to those who think you are running a scam, or who just think you are a "Gratis Ripoff"?
As far as being a scam, I think the fact that we've only been in business for several weeks and with our next order, have shipped out over 70 items, proves we are not a scam. There are many forums and guide sites providing user testimonials and photos of the gifts they have received. We want to run a legit business with long term potential, not scam a few people and be on the run, there's just no sense to that.
Being called a "Gratis Ripoff" doesn't bother us, we know quite well that Gratis was far from the first to do incentive sites, point based or referral based. This business model has been widely used for quite some time and isn't for any one company to claim as their own. While we do many things in a similar fashion we also do many things differently. We didn't just throw a copy cat site up in a weekend, we refined the process and will continue to add new features.
We're sure others will copy our ideas and we have no problem with that. You can't succeed by coming up with a couple of ideas and betting all your chips on them. You have to stay dynamic and come up with new ways to evolve your business or someone else will.
How has your company been doing so far? Have the profits been decent enough to this time that you will be able to stay in good business?
It's still very early but we expect that we'll be doing quite well as things pick up. So far we're still running off our startup capital but we expect to be profitable very soon. We don't see any reason why we won't be in business for a long time.
What kind of growth did you expect, and how is that number in comparison to the reality?
We were surprised at how fast it grew that first weekend we launched. We weren't exactly sure what to expect, we thought it would probably ramp up slowly and grow faster and faster. What actually happened was it grew very fast, then smoothed out to a nice steady growth which worked out great for us. We didn't want to grow to fast and be in the position where we have users on back order for months or go a week without replying to their emails. We're working hard on streamlining the sites and our customer service tools to keep orders shipping and email turnaround times at a minimum.
Approximately how many items have you shipped to your members thus far?
With the next order going out tomorrow we'll be up over 60 orders and about 70 items total.
You seem to have differentiated yourselves from other sites by offering different brands of products and giving your members a choice, as well as offering "bonus" items. Have you seen a large margin of members who qualify for the bonus?
We wanted to offer users a choice and plan to offer more choices. We
listen to what users suggest very carefully, we know that our sites are nothing without users and with the growing number of other incentive sites, it's important to offer what the users want. The bonus items have been successful to different degrees across the three sites we currently have up. So far many of the people who have gotten their free primary gift and went for the bonus gift got them both.
OfferCentric currently has three successful websites running. We are coming up on another holiday season, and product releases are the norm this time of year. With the iPod Photo, Nintendo DS, the myriad of digital cameras, and the soon to come PSP, does OfferCentric plan on offering any of these items in the near future?
We will be doing the Nintendo DS as soon as we can be sure that we won't have people on back order for too long as recent articles suggest that it will be a hard item to come by for a while. The iPod Photo we'll also be doing very soon on the PVPs4Free site as was suggested by a user of ours [Editors Note - The iPod Photo has been added to PVPs4Free.com as of press time]. We'll also do the PSP just as soon as it comes out.
We've got a good range of sites planned which we hope will appeal to gadget lovers and more mainstream users. We want to mix it up a bit, we've been reading various forums and have been keeping tabs on what users ask for the most and I think they'll be happy with our choices.
Could you let us in on what the next OfferCentric site scheduled to go live will be?
On the record is fine. We've got two new sites coming out this week and another possibly next week. We've got a new type of incentive site planned which is a unique business model and we hope will prove to be as popular as the traditional referral based sites.
Where do you see the future of the incentive web sites going forward? It seems that all of the sites have the same offers on them. Do you have different offers you plan to make available, or will your members soon be out of options?
We're always looking for new offers and add them as soon as we find them, we already offer about twice what other sites do and plan to offer as many as we can.
I think that there will always be incentive sites in some form. They've been around for quite some time and they constantly evolve. As I mentioned before we're doing our best to keep thing fresh and interesting. As long as there are advertisers who allow incentive sites to run their offers, I don't see sites like ours going away. This is an issue though, as more and more incentive sites pop up, advertisers will see more and more false leads due to users
trying to defraud the sites. This will lead to more and more advertisers disallowing their offers on incentive sites and could create problems for the industry as a whole.
We do want to look out for the advertisers as well as our own business to keep a balance and allow sites like ours to stay for the long term. This is one reason why we are strict on fraud and don't offer instant offer credits.
Do you have anything else you wish to address with the readers?
I'd like to address some of the questions that we saw in the forums on Gear Live that didn't get asked to clear up some issues that we get a lot of emails about:
1) Instant credit offers:
We get asked about why we don't do this like Gratis does. There are two reasons...
First, not all offers support this feature so to keep thing simple we treat all of them the same.
Second and most importantly, some of these offers can take a week or more to report to us, by this time we might have to either approve and ship the item(s) and hope that we get credit or make the user wait on hold until all of the offers report which seemed like more of a hassle for everyone involved. Also, this can lead to more users defrauding the advertiser as well since they can turn right around and cancel their accounts, etc. This not only creates issues for us but
for incentive sites in general as the advertisers will stop allowing their offers on incentive sites if they get too many false leads, this hurts everyone.
2) Canadian user support:
This is still in the works and there is no solid date for this to go live. Shipping items is not an issue but finding enough good offers that allow Canadian users is but we are sticking with it.
3) Why does it take so long to get offer credit:
Since we don't do instant credits, we have to wait for the advertiser to report to us. Some have a 1-3 business day turnaround and some like Netflix take 2 weeks. Some advertisers do overlook user credits and we have put in place a form that users can fill out for this. We take the info from this form and consolidate it into a file which is sent to the advertisers to review.
4) Do we really not spam people?:
As it states on our sites, we don't sell or share any personal info with anyone except to ship your gift(s). We don't believe squeezing a few extra dollars out of our users is worth betraying their trust and causing them grief. We don't like getting spam and have no intention of contributing to this problem. We've seen other sites like PrizeCube taking up this approach as well, hopefully this will become the standard as other sites stop selling user info as this gives incentive
sites in general a bad rep.
Thanks to Gear Live and all of our users who participated in contributing questions. We really do appreciate the opportunity to get in and answer your questions and hopefully our users are happy with the job we're doing so far. We're always open to new suggestions, ideas or criticism and we'll be putting user polls in place soon to
make it easy to gather that information. We do want to be the best incentive site network there is and we need lots of user feedback to make that happen.
Gear Live thanks Steven Holmes of OfferCentric for his time.
- Andru Edwards
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Comments:
Awesome interview Andru. Thanks to Steven Holmes for his time and most importantly for the free stuff. I actually had a question that I forgot to post off, maybe Andru can answer it. I am among those that have already recieved my free gift and took pictures. I wanted to know if they have a website where I can post them as proof. My proof pictures are temporarily located at www.geocities.com/omaniakc/proof.html I would like to help them out by proving that they are not a scam.
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Great interview. Thanks to Andru and Steven (along with the rest of OfferCentric)!. It’s good to get some info from someone who knows. So many of these companies hide behind their sites and never make real contact with the “customers”. Offer Centric has taken the opposite approach and it is awesom.
omcantu, I can host your proof pics. email me and I will get them up for you
. scilynt@gmail.com
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I joined http://www.mp3players4free.com to get a FREE 20 Gig Apple iPod and I signed up, joined AOL then got 5 other people to join and complete their offer.
I finished the offer on Feb 7 and they email me Feb 10 said I will NOT get my FREE iPod, they said that I’m not a US Resident.
What the ####, I was born in NJ, live in NJ, went to college in NJ, and having the item shipped in NJ. They wont answer my email and dont have a number to call.
THEY DONT HAVE ANY IPODS! They want to make money off you by getting the $50 per referral for joining AOL, NetZero, etc.
BEWARE!!!
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I recently completed all my offers and referrals at cameras4free and was waiting for them to check out.
I then get a reply from OfferCentric saying that I will not receive my product because of referral fraud. I sent an email to ask why and I just keep getting the same automated response with no information as to why there was fraud.
The only thing I can think of is that when I created my account I was at my home where my parents live, and my father did a referral for me, which is the same IP address from where I signed up, and then I got my roommates to complete referrals, and there are 8 of us on a wireless network, so we all have the same IP address, but different emails and different locations as to where the gifts would be sent.
So now OfferCentric has over $500 because of me and they refuse to answer emails or send out the camera to me.
Is there anything I can do about this, or are they allowed to just keep collecting money and not giving anything in return?
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I too was ripped off in the same manner as Adam. I am organizing a class-action law suit. We are also in the process of contacting 60 minutes and other news media.
john
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John
Please email me at
adam.zell@gmail.com
let me know about the situation
thanks
~Adam
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Dammit, i wish these got shipped to australia…
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I have the same problems as adam and john. One referral was considered to be fraudulent even though it is a legit referral. I actually have 6 referrals and I only need 5 but they will not provide a reason as to why that referral is fraudulent.
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I emailed Gratis at the freeipodshuffle site to see how they feel about the multiple people on the same IP and they wondered why it would be a problem and said that as long as they are all unique people from a valid referral and all use legit credit cards, everything will be fine.
I did all this with OfferCentric, unique people, their own credit cards, legit referrals, and an extra referral, yet they won’t send me anything because of a duplicate IP address. It is just a way for them to collect money and not send out gifts.
Feel free to email me about any of this, my email is on the above post.
Take care,
~Adam
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I Read all of the rules.
Just because you sign up at a location doesn’t mean you live there.
My roommates used their permanent home address where they are from and live most of the year, and so did my brother when he signed up at my permanent address, he used his school address since no at that adress has done it.
Trust me, I did it all right.
They are just scam artists with no one to check in on them, so they get away with all this and collect millions of dollars.
Not until Dateline or 60 minutes does a story on them will they be caught.
The technicalities they use are extraordinary, and I still don’t understand how IP address means anything. These companies you sign up for give them money regardless, and most of them won’t allow duplicate addresses in their account anyway for products like Blockbuster. However, more than half the products wouldn’t even matter if more than one person per household was receiving the item, like PetChews, SerenityPill, GreatFun, etc.
I do not want to hear from anyone sticking up from this company. I didn’t do anything wrong, and they get to sit behind their computer screens denying everything, by having no one to speak to and no customer service line.
~Adam
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Scam Scam Scam… The same story happened to me. I had co-workers sign up from work. Because the IP address is globally NAT’ed, it was the same IP for 4 people I had sign up. Even though everyone got their merchandise and/or trial periods, they said I was fraudulent. After emailing for months back and forth about the situation, I was “obsolved of my sins” and allowed to keep my good status, but with 2 of my referrals disqualified. I figured it was better than nothing so had two more people sign up from complete different locations. Guess What?!?! I was expecting my iPod notification soon after, but I received another “You are fraudulent” thing again. These guys are nothing but scammers and need to be stopped. Please let me know if you need any assistance in organizing the class action law suit.
dvdastor@yahoo.com
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OfferCentric is just a scam. I have gone through the whole process, along with my friends. And they refuse to send out ipods. BEWARE! This site does not work!!!!! If anyone wants to file a lawsuit against them, please count me in!
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I would recommend that you all get together with John in the class action suit. And you should also file a complaint with the Better Business Bureau (BBB).
When a complaint is done, it is reported to the company, so the company at fault knows that the BBB is watching, or aware. But if several complaints come in during a single year period, then an investigation is done by the BBB. The attorney in the class action suit might be able to do what is called “discovery” if there is enough money paid to the attorney, and you could get info such as the number of BBB complaints. Here is the URL to file a complaint with the BBB:
http://complaints.bbb.org/
Good luck
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“I had co-workers sign up from work. Because the IP address is globally NAT’ed, it was the same IP for 4 people I had sign up”
The site Terms and FAQ clearly state that one of the ways they check for fraud is by IP, and that you may be put on hold for fraud if your referrals are from the same IP. Its ridiculous to think they have the time and resource to investigate each case individually - when they have hundreds of thousands of members?!?
If you are so retarded you can’t even adhere to a sites Term fo Service, then you deserve to have your account put on hold for being just plain stupid.
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i’m so pissed! i haven’t heard from OfferCentric yet, but reading over these posts i have a feeling i’m the next victim. i had a few people in my office sign up- all from their own computer though. i’ve sent email after email wondering where my camera is, and haven’t heard back A SINGLE THING. class action lawsuit- count me in.
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Wow tab, that was sweet. If you read my entire post you would see that I did actually work with their customer service after my account was put on hold. My issue is that after I worked everything out with them and got even more people to sign up, they still denied me my prize. Once again, my account was mysteriously disqualified. Thanks for being a jerk though…
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im so glad i read this, cus i was about to sign up for stuff and get other people to sign up for stuff, for the xbox360, and idk it just smell fishy to me when they didnt have a phone number on their contact site. It sucks that you guys went thought all this trouble but at least you ve helped people like me. its just another one of lifes lessons - NOTHING IN THIS WORLD IS FREE
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Offer Centric is now a scam. They will invalidate your referrals -or- will make it impossible to get referrals. Their scam now shows all the offers and makes it look very easy when you first sign up, but when you try to get a referral to complete an offer they will only get offers that are nearly impossible to complete or not worth the trouble. Would you actually refinance your house just to get a free item? I wish they would just shut down already so that I would not feel obligated to complete my pvps4free with 6 greens. I should have more but 4 of my referrals were invalidated for random claims that were false. I and others have had the same problems with all of the OfferCentric sites.
This site is now a scam in my mind because not everybody gets an equal opportunity with the manipulation of the offers.
Boycott OfferCentric at least until they get their act together. But then again....they want you to give up - that way you will not become a liability that they have to send a gift to.
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OC is not a scam! They gave away a million $ of goods. However, they’re now active very scammish by offering “offers of doom”.
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okay...I recently had my last referral for freepvps.com (was expecting $450) completed his offer...Next day I tried to log in to see if the offer had turned green, a notification pops up stating that my account has been disqulified… I had over 100 people signed up under my referrals through my personal website and of those 10 people completed the offer. I could have gotten way more than 10 offers to be completed easily...The reason for disqulification is that one of my referral had completed his/her offer on the same computer as my account..wtf?? I asked them to explain this further, and told them that it is not possible and the ip addresses should be different between the account and mine. Then they replied by saying, “it is not matter of ip addresses. Using same computer to create more than one account is major violation of our policy” wtf again?? same computer but different ip address?? I argued, and argued that what they told me doesnt make sense, and I would not be so stupid to do something like that to jeoperdize my account…
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That sucks danny. I heard a lot of ppl getting disqualified for unknown or weird reasons. I would say stick with FreePay and other better companies.
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Reply to this: comment
mp3Players4Fre e SUCKS!!! My first 4 referrals went through within days. My last referral, however, has taken nearly 5 months to be accepted. I think it’s safe to say I’m sh!t out of luck. I was there when my friend signed up (diff IP address than mine, followed the rules). He even paid the $25 for the bingo, played a few rounds - still NOTHING. What a MAJOR scam. I will certainly be contacting the Better Business Bureau. We have sent e-mails to the customer support with the copied and pasted verifications from the Bingo website. No response. Hey Mr. Holmes - F YOU!! I want my money back.
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Is it true that the people I am referring are getting muc more difficult offers than I am? How could this be? After all, I got my referral # from a Craigslist site, and the offers I have are pretty simple and cheap…
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Which ones better in customer service freepay or offercentric?
Check out http://thegratisguide.blogspot.com/
for proof free ipod is legit.
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OfferCentric SUCKS!!! Do not even waste your time or money at any of their sites. They WILL rip you off. They DQ your account faster than you can blink. After you get your final refferal complete you’ll probably get one of these messages:
support@offercentric.com wrote:
Hello,
We’re sorry but your account has been disqualified for the following
violation:
(b). Fraudulent referrals.
This account will remain closed.
Best Regards,
OfferCentric Member Services
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here is there information...chears!!
Member Support
If you are a member of one of our sites, please log into your
account and click the “Help/FAQ” menu for support.
Email
Service Inquiries: advertising@offercentric.com
General Inquiries: inquiries@offercentric.com
Phone
(877) 572-8550
Address
13223 Black Mountain Rd
#177
San Diego, CA 92129
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Here is there information, chears!!!
Service Inquiries: advertising@offercentric.com
General Inquiries: inquiries@offercentric.com
Phone:(877) 572-8550
Address:13223 Black Mountain Rd #177
San Diego, CA 92129
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