I would like to share my negative experience with Appnext network with detailed explanation. I found that network is heavily discussed here and therefor I created an account here to share my experience. Also @jonathan, Official AppNext Representative, who seems to be trustworthy person is active here. Unfortunately I was not so lucky during communication with him
So first of all, Appnext is certainly not scam ad network, they certainly have many satisfied publishers, but what I can say for sure Appnext is not really serious and decent network. They did not follow polite steps they on some places emphasize that they always do. Steps that decent network would definitely follow regardless of possible breaching rules or cheating of publishers.
I would like to introduce my case:
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I started to use standard HTML5 banners provided by Appnext (Trending apps videos and rollover banner), no interstitial or full-display formats. I placed them in supplementary placements in my webpage (not app from app store), not in most frequent places where I have CPC banners that have enough high CTR and works better for me than CPI banners. But for bottom, less visited parts of mobile site, Appnext CPI banners with catchy apps from Appnext seemed to be ideal choice.
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Results were good. Having around 10000 mobile visitors per day I earned something above 45 dollars in August and something above 25 dollars until mid-September. CTR was of course quite low, but it was expected. Actually because banners were not so visible and not aggresive as full-display interstitial ads that I believe generate many unwanted clicks made by users unintentionally or in effort to close ads I am quite sure that vast majority of clicks on Appnext ads made by users on my site were produced because of their genuine interest. Therefor conversion rate from clicks was great - around 40%. I think I made a good job here. Unfortunately, this fact (this very good conversion rate) later turned out to be a problem.
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So everything seemed to be fine. But then… Appnext has net10 payment terms, but on several occasions they promoted that usually pay even much earlier, between 5th and 9th day of month. It was September 12th and nothing happened, no payment received. I contacted them. One day later Luciana from Appnext answered she would inquiry their finance team. Nothing happened for another two days, so I contacted Luciana that noone from finance team got in touch with me and hopefully they could contact me soon. On the next day I was simply not able to login to my Appnext account anymore, with no message from them.
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In a meantime I searched in forums and found Skype contact on Johnatan. It was yesterday morning I contacted him. He started to communicate.
I also wrote to Appnext support shortly before contacting Jonathan that I was not able to login to my account. During conversation with Jonathan I received e-mail with
Hi there,
I am sorry about that but your account might have posed a risk to Appnext advertisers, therefore we have disabled it to protect our advertisers' interests.
As outlined in our Terms & Conditions, Appnext will use its sole discretion when determining instances of invalid activity.
Sincerely,
Antrea from Appnext Team
Jonathan replied me
Jonathan Raveh: Finance team doesn't always know what the support team is doing. We have over 45,000 clients using Appnext, so there is a lot to deal with
as for your account - I see a 40% conversion rate
usually this CR suggests fraud/incent.
I don't want to get into the specifics, because I don't know who checked it in depth. But this raises a red flag
Then he simply stopped communicating on the Skype chat - I was trying to get deeper and I wanted to discuss the issue, but there were no more answers.
So what are my thoughts about it:
- Even if I were doing frauds/incents (I really weren’t) in my account I should have been warned. Accoring Jonathan post in this forum
http://forums.makingmoneywithandroid.com/advertising-networks/25261-appnext-banned-my-account-without-notification-3.html#post156209 - “Usually when an account is flagged as a suspicious account we DO send a questionnaire about your traffic.”
But nothing happened, no questionnaire was sent to me.
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Any red flags should have been raised earlier and not immediately after asking for payout. This really make things look scammy.
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I wonder if they charge advertisers for my installs if they won’t pay me. I also wonder why it actually really happened in this way. More than 95% of my traffic was from Slovakia and Czech Republic. These are not top tier countries. Were advertisers not happy for installs from these countries, or to be more precise that logically vast majority of installs on my page were from these countries? But advertisers are those who determine price for each geolocation after all. Or was it just “mechanical” step caused by high conversion rate red flag and I believe some kind of incompetence that automatically put me in a group of cheaters not worthy to communicate with? They should not have same red flag rate for intrusive interstitial ad and for unintrusive banners ads which are usually clicked because of real interest. But it seems they have. I actually planned to also include more visible placements with their native ads, which would lead probably to lower conversion rate… But too late.
To conclude, this is my negative experience. It is possible that they really were acting in a good faith (ignoring the fact things started to happen after asking for payout) and thought it was me who was trying to scam them. I don’t know. But I am sharing my experience for anyone to beware.
Good news for anyone who may experience troubles that after some effort support of Appnext is willing to look deeply into it and reevaluate your case. Thumbs up for Appnext.