Last year, the Russell Simmons-owned website Globalgrind.com took steps to cease scraping websites and blogs for their content. But not before building his prominent Internet brand off the backs of hard working bloggers without our permission.
It took many complaints and numerous negative write ups on blogs before Simmons and Global Grind stopped stealing our content.
In a post titled Global Grind Copies Content, Patrick O’Keefe detailed how Simmons and Global Grind rose to the top of the blog rankings by scraping content from established blogs (such as mine) as if the content originated on Global Grind.
This strategy helped Global Grind position its brand in the global marketplace which enabled Simmons to secure lucrative sponsorships from large corporations.
Simmon’s seedy reputation was further tarnished by the RUSH pre-paid debit card controversy, which has been well-documented. It seemed Rush had no qualms about stealing from his own people. Now an urban blogger has come forward to expose yet another one of Global Grind’s questionable business strategies.
According to Michelle Brown, who is enrolled in Global Grind’s ad network, she has not been paid for advertising on her blog since January, 2011. According to brown, owner of Straightfromthea.com, she was told by GG’s accountant, Deepa Shah, that another ad network, Adify, is tasked with paying bloggers their Global Grind revenue for advertising.
Brown was given the runaround by Shah in a series of confusing email exchanges, in which Ms. Shah explains that Global Grind paid out ad revenue to Adify, and now Adify was responsible for disbursing the money to bloggers in its ad network. You can read those emails below.
Brown says she wasn’t aware of GG’s business relationship with Adify when she initially signed up with Global Grind’s ad network. So why should she, and other bloggers, be forced to wait over 4 months for their money?
Brown’s attempts to reach out to Simmons via email and on Twitter.com have failed. Brown told Sandrarose.com that Global Grind’s ad network owes her close to $10,000 in ad revenue.
For the record, Sandrarose.com is not in the Global Grind ad network. We have no issues with our advertising partners with regards to revenue disbursement.
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