Succeeds in Removing Millions of Dollars of Advertising from Yahoo and Excite .com
Dear Ms. Weaver:
I read your MS-NBC article about Yahoo! having trouble finding advertisers at <http://www.msnbc.com/news/574178.asp>.
Do you want to know what really happened to them and what is continuing to happen to them?
If so, read on and read the information that we have posted
about what we have done to Yahoo's advertisers and Excite.com's advertisers on
our Internet child advocacy organization Better A Millstone's main page:
<http://www.shadow-net.com>.
In short, last year we found that Excite.com was hosting many hundreds of child porn web pages in their Excite.com Groups and Clubs. We contacted them repeatedly by email, telephone, and snail mail to notify them of this, but they just allowed the clubs to multiply and the individuals who managed them to continue to post more and more and more child pornography on them...including that of children as young as one and two being brutally raped. Then on June 2, 2000, I traveled to their main campus in Redwood City, California, and tried to speak with an Excite.com executive about this, but I was rebuffed.
Then, over the next three weeks, the members of Better A Millstone successfully contacted every single one of Excite.com's 37 different banner advertisers (i.e., such as General Motors, Fox TV, Rolling Stone Magazine, Reebok Shoes, etc.) and notified them that their banner ads were running at the top of these tens of thousands of Excite.com web pages with child pornography. And within three weeks Excite.com had lost all of its outside advertisers. Last August they announced that they were closing all "adult content" clubs and groups, and then in late December Excite.com announced that they were closing all of their remaining clubs and groups. And three months ago Excite.com announced that they were laying off 220 employees "because of a drop in our advertising revenue." No joke!
Then late last fall Better A Millstone started the same approach with Yahoo! and to date they have steadfastly refused to respond to any of our emails, telephone voice mail messages, or snail mail. And, in response to that, we began contacting Yahoo!'s banner advertisers several months ago and to date they have lost approximately 90% of their outside banner advertisers. And in the meantime Yahoo! tried to start selling "adult products" online (i.e., sex aids and beyond-the-pale adult pornography), an idea that you will recall from last month bombed in just three days with a negative public response of over 95%!
But Yahoo! blunders on, thinking, perhaps, that because they are sponsoring St. Louis Cardinals first baseman Mark McGwire's charitable "The Mark McGwire Foundation for Children" (see http://promotions.yahoo.com/promotions/mcgwire/) that they can continue to allow child porn to be posted on their tens of thousands of web pages being supported and hosted by Yahoo! Clubs, E-Groups (which they bought last year), and Geocities Clubs, Groups, and Neighborhoods (which they also bought last year).
Indeed, in March I was interviewed by Fox News at KTVU-TV in Oakland, California, about Yahoo! and their child porn problem, and Fox then interviewed a Yahoo! vice president about it (he denied that a problem existed). But I can tell you that today Yahoo!'s hosting of child pornography continues and we at Better A Millstone are working closely with the Assistant Director of the U.S. Customs' Cyber Smuggling Center, Monty Price, whose position is that "Yahoo! is presenting us with one of the largest child porn problems that we have tackled to date."
And recently we notified Yahoo!'s computer and advertising partner Compaq in Houston, Texas, for the third time in as many weeks about their banner logo appearing on Yahoo!-hosted child porn web pages and Compaq's response was to totally pull the plug on advertising on Yahoo! with no if's, and's, or but's about it.
In short, we at Better A Millstone do not care about ANY company's bottom line! All we care about is protecting children and we will pursue any legal means possible to see that that happens.
Questions? Please feel free to contact me at the numbers below.
Sincerely yours,
Mike Echols, Founder & Executive Director of Better A Millstone, Inc.
The Internet Eyes & Ears for Law Enforcement
484-B Washington St., #220, Monterey, California 93940 USA
BAM is an I.R.S. Tax Exempt Organization - #77-0504772
Toll Free Voice Mail in the U.S.: 1-800-971-7818
Voice Mail from Other Countries: area code 831, 887-3362
BAM's Main Index Page: <http://www.shadow-net.com>
BAM's "For Kids" Page: <http://www.shadow-net.com/forkids.htm>
