To make a long story short. NO!

A couple of months ago, I received an email from Natalie Pickford (natalie.pickford (at) adwire.us) with an offer to buy ad space on one of my sites. I explained to her our policy (no comission based ads, no casinos, porn or warez ads, etc, and in order to be on the safe side, pre-pay for the ad). She said she agrees on all the above, that their clients are Yahoo, Levi’s, Gucci, etc, and the pre-pay will only happen for the first month.. So we proceed..

I had to sign up in a page at adwire.us to get the relative code, to put in a site-wide ad. I inform her that we are good to go (and to proceed with the payment as agreed). It took about a week for a reply (the ads were running already). She found through some spider software some deep down pages that the ad wasn’t displayling and she asked the ads to be included there also, in order to proceed with the payment. Immedietly we fixed that and notified her again. After another week Natalie Pickford told us, everything is looking great, next week you should receive your paypal payment. Two weeks passed (I was already in vacation, no money arrived at all), and Natalie Pickford sents another email, saying that the available customers / ads are not available anymore and asked to remove the code / ads. There would be (she wrote) several new opportunities early next month, and she would contact us then to start again..

I notified both her and her company (adwire.us) and explained that since they order ad space for a month and aggreed to pay for it, the have to pay anyway, no matter if they use it or not. Also, another option would be to pay for what they asked for (and given) and use the rest of the month they purchased later, when the new customers would appear (if there were any days left, as until Natalie’s final ok, the ads were on all pages including home page for almost a month anyhow)..

No answer, at all.. Not from her, not from adwire.us. Keep in mind that there is no email address available at the official site (adwire.us) but just an online form (I guess no one is looking at it, at all).. Of course, the new opportunities with new customers at the start of the next month never appeared.

Conclusion
So, if you ever get an email like the one that follows, JUST SAY NO… Or, don’t put any kind of code in your site, until you get your money..

Dear owner of yoursite.com

I noticed that your site on yoursite.com has advertising spaces available
that can add an extra revenue stream for you. I would like to buy the
advertising spaces from you.

I assume that these ad spaces are for sale.

I can buy the ad spaces to place banners for a monthly fee of $150 (extra
small size banner), or $180 (small size banner), or $200 (medium size
banner). What do you think?

Natalie Pickford,
www.adwire.us
natalie.pickford@adwire.us

Adwire.us – probably a scam for web publishers.. Too bad for Yahoo, Amazon, Avon, Firefox, Roots, Sony, Hostmaster, Expedia, British Airways that are using a company (as adwire.us claims they do) that steals effort, time and ad space from web publishers and then charge their clients for something they never actually paid.

Update Oct, 5th: The next day of this post (strangely) I got an email from this adwire agent asking the dates the ad was on.. Today I received a paypal payment for the 25% of the price that was arranged when started. Sure, it’s better than nothing, but still a lot of trouble to get in (adding / removing code, arguing and sending tens of emails to get paid, and finally get less than 1/4 of the money they promised). Just stay with Google Adsense, or Text-Link-Ads!

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