Information Madness

Cricket is a religion of India and the ICC Worldcup 2011 proved the fact that Indians can eat, drink and sleep cricket. Obviously, there are so many ways to monetize this cricket religion of India. There are so many games, sites and widgets for cricket. Watching Live cricket even when you are away from the television sets is a dream for everyone.

Two years back a company called CricFeeds.com approached me with the subject "White Label Live Cricket Syndication Service Enquiry". The deal was that, they provide you a service where your visitors can watch the live cricket match simulation with scorecards, news, statistics and cricket player profiles etc. The experiece with CricFeeds was not that white label after all. It looks like a Black Label service with no customer support what-so-ever and now my subdomain is hijacked by CricFeeds servers.

So what actually happened with CrickFeeds?

Two years back, I started using this service under my sub-domain (cricket.informationmadness.com). The emails from Mr. Kota (CEO of Cricfeeds) mentioned tha they will split the Adsense revenue with me (60/40) (they will have 60% of the profit and I will get 40% of the profit) and they will customize their widgets to make it look like its part of my site. So my subdomain cricket.informationmadness.com will be masked and redirected to informationmadness.cricfeeds.com. The initial setup was really good and I was happy with the service.

After few months, I went into the Admin dashboard of the cricfeeds and noticed that the revenue split was changed from what it was promised to 95/5 (So cricfeeds will get 95% of the adsense revenue and I will be getting only 5%). That's not what I signed up for. So I kindly reminded their support staff to look into this difference. Instead, I got an email saying that they can not afford this and would like me to buy their premium services. I don't have a budget to spend 100,000 Rs./year to provide such premium services to the site and asked CricFeeds to not upgrade my account to premium services.

Two weeks back, I noticed that my subdomain (cricket.informationmadness.com) is now hijacked and redirects to live.cricfeeds.com with the message "Site is being redirected to http://live.cricfeeds.com, admin for this site please contact admin@cricfeeds.com to fix this issue". This happened without them sending me any emails/reminders/updates.

I send them emails (sent about three emails since March 29th 2011) asking them to un-hook my subdomain so that I can gain back the control of my subdomain. So far they haven't replied to my emails. I looked at their other customers (who used their services like I did) and their subdomains are also hijacked.

I had no choice but write this article in a lieu to get their management's attention so that they can get this straight. Have you used CricFeeds service? How was your experience?