nSphere contacted me in the Fall last year offering some sort of revenue partnership. They offered to take over a subdomain on my website by building a spammy looking directory on “local.mydomain.com” where they would post regurgitated content from my original site along with ads. They promised to share a certain amount of revenue from the ads while helping to attract search traffic to my site.
It sounded like a good deal…
…WRONG!
At first I had one account manager who seemed really nice and friendly. But then my emails would go unanswered. A week later she had quit before my directory was even built. By the time the directory went up, I had already been passed through 2 more account managers.
The subdomain was running for a while but I hadn’t received any payment. I emailed my latest account manager and all she would say was “Oh I’ll check on that and see what they’re up to. Oh, you have to wait 30 days after the end of the month.” She finally sent me an email with a login so that I could see my accumulated earnings which I realized was supposed to be sent to me when I first agreed to this “partnership”. Anyway, upon logging in I realized I was at least 1-2 months overdue for a payment. I was a new account so I figured it might be good to be patient. Maybe they’re a growing company or something.
3-4 months into this, I couldn’t stand it anymore. My account showed I had earned a few hundred dollars of revenue and still I received nothing. After emailing the AM again, she promises to have a check sent out asap. Well I DID receive a check but weeks after I deposit the check I find out it BOUNCED.
What a freaken scam. On a side note, I should add that the sub-domain directory thing they put on your site isn’t effective. The latest Google update doesn’t send much traffic to those kinds of sites and I would advise against having that on your domain. If this company contacts you, well at least you know what happened to me. Avoid these guys.
Thanks for this. I got an email from nsphere the other day asking about this sort of thing.
*deletes*
All the best
Matt
I’m really glad to hear this helped you. This company left a really bad taste in my mouth.
Thanks for the info, I was recently contacted by them as well. I was skeptical given the vague nature of his email.
I signed up with them a year or so ago. Many problems, but I did get some payments from them. Then at the beginning of March I was told that instead of giving us partners payments, the CEO decided to “upgrade” systems. Since they were 2 months past due already, I read my account manager the riot act. She told me I would be paid in two months. I didn’t believe her. And, sure enough, no payment, 3 months later. I did read on their website though that they are hiring several people. Indeed, nSphere is pretty much a scam.
I gave nSphere a try on a few of my smaller sites. My story is ditto-ditto-ditto of this article. Racked up $$$, got a check that bounced, was told things are changing, … I finally wrote it off as a lesson learned. I deleted the CNAME to them for my ‘local’ subdomain, made my own local subdomain with a 404 page to catch anyone hitting their directory pages through google and plopped ads and a link home on the page. Maybe I’ll at least get a few clicks out of it until the pages fade away.
Watch out for them changing their name too.
We made good money off them back in 2011. Then they stopped paying. Their COO Jean Eric Penicaud has twice promised me payment was on its way and no check. It seems he is not a man who keeps his word.
Looks like we will now put into collections or to court.
If nsphere / directorym is still hosting your local site and you want to try and recreate that process, I have been able to successfully migrate some of that content and replace their ads. Please contact me with interest.