There had been rumours earlier this month that Facebook was trying to clamp down on the two services Crowdrally and Ad.ly which allow their users to post sponsored status updates on their own Facebook pages. This is being seen as an important move as these companies are deriving monetary benefits from the page feeds on Facebook, something that Facebook normally likes to keep to itself. Neither of the companies responded to any of the queries. Earlier this morning, an update was posted by Ad.ly on its blog which said that the firm has accepted the request from Facebook and will no longer post celebrity endorsements on the social networking website.
However, both Facebook and Ad.ly are directly contradicting each other’s positions. Facebook too has released a statement which says that the company’s Terms of Service have repeatedly been violated by Ad.ly and that it had been asked to stop a number of times. The company says that they now feel that it is important to take action in the wake of repeated violations of the Terms and also activities which are misleading to the partners and users of Facebook. They had repeatedly told Ad.ly that the company did not allow advertising through personal profiles; however it didn’t have any effect and Ad.ly went on to try and circumvent the rules.
Sean Rad, the founder of Ad.ly, has admitted to having violated the Terms of Service of Facebook by creating a fake profile on the website. According to him, Ad.ly is used by its celebrity clients to post regular updates to their Facebook Pages; however the system of the service sometimes faces glitches due to Facebook’s API which forces the celebrity clients to re-authenticate their profiles. To overcome this issue, Ad.ly created a fake user page on Google which the celebrities can use as an alternative workaround as the administrator of their Facebook Pages for their updates.
