Several companies have pinned Ben down in legal agreements which prohibit him from mentioning their name in his blogs and reporting. Claria, Google, Yahoo’s Right Media, ContexWeb and a bunch of other companies large and small have been targets of Ben’s wild, self proclaiming internet police guy acconts–who then turns around and attempts to sell his “Monitoring” back to brand advertisers. Ben is a conflicted guy, who hides behind a Harvard education and affiliation–but is careful not to directly associate himself with Harvard to draw a deep pocket lawsuit target.

Hula Direct never supported spyware–and apparently several other companies have had to tangle with Ben to neutralize his slander and libel. I have been asked to join in lawsuits against Ben and have declined–as he has already cost enough people their jobs and security by his false and misleading reporting.

In the case of Hula Direct, we had a strict policy with the media buyers we placed our traffic through which prohibited spyware. When we found any breech to that policy, we acted quickly and responsibly to cure the situation. Ben knows this too, as I acted quickly to contact him to explain our innovative, Free Standing Insert distribution model on the internet which generated millions of quality clicks for advertisers over several years of operation. We enabled content websites with advertising revenue by carrying our innovative advertising units and maintained a strict policy against spyware and any rebrokering of our media to shady players.

My background as an early online media sales executive, who launched advertising sales for IMDB.com, Andover.net, ClickZ.com, eMarketer.com, Iconocast and dozens of other internet brands far exceeds the slander and libel behavior Ben claims in his sloppy posts.

It is time to clean up the internet–and I suggest Ben focus on the actual bad actors in the sector–like his friend Pesach Lattin, formerly of Vizi Media now working for Scott Richter. Pesach owed hundreds of thousands of dollars in unpaid media to dozens of media suppliers. To avoid paying, Pesach recruited Ben to attack media providers who Pesach owed money to. Hula Direct was one, but there were several others.

Guess who founded Adotas–Pesach Lattin, Ben’s source for a lot of his fiction.

I have more such packet logs on file. In short: Hula can be shown to have received traffic directly from spyware vendors, not just via “brokers.” Hula ought to take responsibility for these placements, not try to blame others.

Also, it is striking that Hula does not defend its practices of automatically reloading ads (as often as every nine seconds) and of stacking and covering ads with other ads.