Begg-Smith wins first Aussie gold at Turin Winter Olympics

Australia’s first gold medal winner at the Turin Winter Olympics is not only an outstanding moguls skier but a hugely successful entrepreneur as well. And he’s only 21.

Dale Begg-Smith is originally from Canada, but he came to Australia seven years ago to pursue his sport.

He left Canada because his coaches weren’t happy when he started missing training camps to work on the internet business he began as a 13-year-old.

That enterprise is now worth $40-million.

Interesting. When the commentator on Channel 7 mentioned that Dale had said that his company has no name and no website, I started getting curious. Call me cynical, but I immediately suspected that he was a porn marketer or a spammer. Unfortunately, the truth is that I wasn’t actually too far off the mark. A bit of digging found that his company is called AdsCPM, and it in fact doesn’t have a website. Any more.

Google has a bunch of hits and the Google cache has some of the pages without images, but the wayback machine was more helpful, showing that the site existed until at least March 06 2005. So why didn’t he want to talk about it? Because his company is in the pop-up & pop-under business. On this geekvillage thread you can see Dale (or at least someone claiming to be Dale) discussing CPM rates and ad structures.

Their members login section seemed to use tools provided by ValueAd (news release in 2002 from ValueAd confirms this).

In this Age article Begg-Smith says about his company:

I haven’t spent much time on it, I’ve let it taper off during the ski season

And looking at the Wayback Machine stats it would seem that the sites went offline early-mid 2005, which would coincide with when he would have been gearing up training for these Olympic Games, so that may be true.

A bit more digging found this article, in it AdsCPM/CPM-Media are connected to a bunch of adware/spyware pushing sites. This page is particularly concerning, showing the AdsCPM site and the CPM-media sites being on the same IP address (or within the same block) of a number of nasty sites, most notably freescratchandwin.com and 2nd-thought.com (don’t worry, they’re both links to SpywareGuide articles, not the sites themselves).

The spyware sites seem to be linked to CPM-Media, rather than AdsCPM, which is the only company I can seem to find a direct link to Dale from. The whois information for the two domains are:

AdsCPM.COM
Steve Richards (support@adscpm.com)
+1.4166024015
Fax: +1.0000000000
19 Pembroke St.
Toronto, ONTARIO M5A2N6
CA

and

CPM Media, Inc.
Phil Binder (support@cpm-media.com)
+1.5198514015
Fax: +1.0000000000
2138 Main St.
London, ONTARIO N5V2C6
CA

which are both registered in Ontario, Canada, but they are a fair distance apart (~190km).

The archive for cpm-media.com (which, along with the other two sites, is offline) looks like a single splash screen at the last caching (Mar 19, 2005), but back in July 2003 it looked suspiciously like the AdsCPM site, so I think we can conclude that they are the same company. Even more damning is that between October 2003 and December 2003 the site looks exactly like xzoomy.com, which according to PcHell, sets your homepage to FreeScratchandWin.com.

This thread on DSLReports has some more information too.

Strange also is that the archive for cpmmedia.com looks basically like a mirror of Californian ad company Hunter Bath (who’s links sporadically redirect to a domain parking page).

The funniest thing about this whole business is that this article on the Australia Olympics site says that his company

designs search engines and pop-up window blockers for websites

Ha! Maybe indirectly, in that his company necessitates the design of pop-up blockers. Either the AOC is very poorly informed, or they’re in denial.

Update: Brian McWilliams noted that one of the domains on the AdsCPM IP address is http://kill-pop-ups.com/, which does in fact sell a pop-up blocker. Can anyone say “conflict of interest”. I guess this was the site he showed the AOC when they asked him what he did.

Just for once I’d like my cynicism to be unjustified, just once.

[tags]dale begg-smith, AdsCPM, CPM Media, Winter Olympics, Pop ups[/tags]