As long as you know a bit about Affiliate Marketing, you must have read Dennis Yu’s guest post on TechCrunch – How To Spam Facebook Like A Pro: An Insider’s Confession. Dennis Yu, as so called “affiliate industry insider”, who has a business website blitzlocal.com was called out by Jeremy Schoemaker(aka shoemoney.com) Basically, as Jeremy Schoemaker said, Dennis Yu was trying to fool the industry, many big names were involved, the top seo brand “SEOmoz”, tech mammoth “TechCrunch” and many others.
Yu, is a Chinese surname, it has different meaning by different characters (same pronunciation), one of the meaning is “Fool”. He seems to be really smart and fooled many big players in the short term, but as a long run business, he paid his reputation and he is done in this industry. Jeremy is really pissed off this time, you can feel the rage from his super lengthy post.
Let’s see what happened between Dennis Yu and Jeremy Schoemaker according to Schoemaker’s post. (I am not insider and I decided to trust Jeremy due to his reputation and many other voices)
What Jeremy Schoemaker said was
- They met up 6 months ago
- Dennis Yu had claimed to Jeremy that Blitzlocal was about to name SEOmoz founder Gillian Muessig has Chief Financial Executive and Scott Richter was involved with his projects
- Jeremy soon found out that Yu only had 5 interns working for him (though Yu claimed his company as a 50 people privately held company), the local business product created by these interns were amazing but it was just a cover for the real business and nobody was paying for it.
- Jeremy emailed Markus Frind, angel investor of blitzlocal.com, and was told that multiple return on investment was made.
- The real income for blitzlocal.com was from porn sites, though Jeremy could not understand why SEOmoz founder Gillian Muessig was about to be in charge of this kind of website, but soon was convinced by Gillian’s son Evan that Gillian did actually know all the stuff about porn sites. (I personally had talked to Gillian from Linkedin, she is a very kind woman, well, I guess it has nothing to do with this post lol)
- Jeremy was totally confident about Yu due to the connection with these big brands and a wonderful denver club night (nugguts players were kicked out… well, I want to know their names)
- Things went weird, Yu requested to be entitled to 50% of the extra revenue and yet to do any work for Jeremy’s project – next pimp. Yu finally asked his interns to show some work as Jeremy demanded quite a few times, but it was not what Jeremy wanted, so Yu and Jeremy parted away.
- Yu started to do Jeremy favors for free, gained great confidence of Jeremy to introduce Yu to other people.
- Jeremy was contacted by two Facebook PPC contractors and convinced to outsource part of the budget, two PPC guy didn’t let him down. But Jeremy soon realised that these two PPC guy had some deal with Yu (Yu showed up again! I feel there must be some conspiracies), Jeremy felt awkward but still went on with them.
- All of a sudden, Yu’s interns contacted Jeremy and claimed that they didn’t work for Yu anymore. Yu was officially banned by Facebook. Meanwhile, Yu contacted Jeremy and tried to convince that the work done by two PPC guy should be rewarded to him. But unfortunately (fortunately to Jeremy) Jeremy didn’t accept the threat from Yu.
- Dennis Yu announced he would sue Jeremy, and Richter family would represent him. This really scared Jeremy because of the power of Richter in this industry. But when Jeremy had a phone call with Scott Richter, the truth was revealed, there is no way Stephen Richter would present Yu, apparently Yu was threatenning Jeremy.
- Yu had soon told Facebook that Jeremy was cloaking all the Facebook Ads, and therefore all of Jeremy’s Ads were paused awaiting fully investigation. After two days, the suspicion of cloak was eliminated.
- A lot of folks realised the true phase of Yu, apologised to Jeremy if they had ever said anything good about Yu.
- Then, the famous guest post “How To Spam Faceboook Like A Pro” was on TechCrunch, the last effort that Yu tried to bring Jeremy down. (Maybe should use “latest” rather than “last”). Yu was smart that he didn’t point out Jeremy in the post, he used “you know who you are” to disguise the truth, assuming that nobody would step out and he would be fine.
- Jeremy just got pissed off, then wrote that detailed post about what was going on between him and Dennis Yu.
End of his post
I sent an email to Gillian immediately about this issue, because I was a loyalty fanboy of SEOmoz, but unfortunately she didn’t reply me back yet. I don’t know how she will respond to this, but surely it will affect the reputation of SEOmoz.
Wickedfire forum posted this news as well,
some interesting points were:
1. Jonathan Volk claimed he was fooled by Yu. (Yu had many guest posts on Jonathan’s blog)
2. Quoted from Supernova, “I knew something was weird when a bunch of us were out to lunch and Dennis brought up a porn video on his laptop. All of us were just kind of looking at each other.” I mean, dude, how the hell could you do that? Didn’t you feel ashame? (Not to Supernova, but to Yu)
3. Bryn Youngblut was not actually got into trap by Yu as Jeremy thought he would be, smart him 
4. Jeremy’s post had already ranked 4th on search term “dennis yu”, well, Yu, you’re screwed this time
Some takeaways from this lesson
1. Fooling people seems to be smart for a while, but you are fooling yourself in the long run.
2. Business is dirty, as always.
3. You cannot trust everyone, you have to be careful, even someone looks like very trustworthy.
4. Dennis Yu is a big lier that is unveiled, but how many others (affiliate experts) are still hiding beneath the water?
5. Never ever burn the bridge in the industry, Jeremy indicated Yu had burned so many bridges that he could never back up again, and a client manager of Microsoft also told me never to burn the bridge while she is telling me her biggest advice.
This is totally a mess in the industry, so many names were involved and truth is yet to be revealed completely. What will those five interns say? What will Facebook staff say? What will Gillian Muessig say? I am really looking forward to seeing what’s going to happen.
[update: Gilliam made her statement by commenting in Jeremy's post]
As I am not well acquainted with the Affiliate space, this is more than a little confusing to me all around.
I would like to clarify that I am not now and have never been employed by BlitzLocal in any capacity whatsoever. I have not been offered, nor will I accept a position as CFO or any other position. As president and co-founder of SEOmoz, I continue to focus my work as an evangelist for SEOmoz and the SEO community in general.
My sole involvement with the Affiliate marketing space is to speak at conferences and spread the word about the SEOmoz toolset which may be of value to Affiliates in their search marketing effort.
I hope this will quell any rumors now and in the future.
She always emailed me to clarify her standpoint is always with SEOmoz. I am really glad she is not involved anymore.
[update: former Blitzlocal employee also commented on Jeremy's post]
As a former Blitz employee, this was refreshing to hear. Thank you, just…….thank you.
What else you’re not hearing is that Dennis has intentionally screwed over not just his acquaintances in business deals, but his employees, the people who lived with him, and pretty much anyone he ever met out and around Denver.
I was at the affiliate convention. I was shocked as Dennis introduced me to all the big wigs (Shoemoney included) and this gave credence to Blitzlocal and how big and important he said they really were.
The problem was, Blitzlocal was not a real company, because it was helmed by Dennis. With another person in charge, like Chad King (the CFO at the time, if I’m not mistaken, he’s since left the company) maybe they would have gone somewhere. But no.
Instead, Blitzlocal was essentially Dennis Yu sitting on a couch, sending off email after email while interns and a few other underlings did all the work for the company. Solid work individually, but with no direction. The leadership was the problem, and that was Dennis. It also doesn’t help that everything he says is shrouded in lies and deceit; so much so that if/when you finally confront him about it, he’ll reverse accusations and throw lie on top of lie to make himself the victim.
But that’s Dennis Yu. Blitzlocal isn’t necessarily a bullshit business, good work was done there, but Dennis Yu is like a virus in that body of work – seeking to corrupt and contaminate it any chance he gets.
This article, along with the the PPC.bz one (http://www.ppc.bz/people-that-suck/dennis-yu-hypocrite-defined) pretty much typify the man.
I’d call him a weasel, but really I just feel sorry for him. Life must be tragic when you burn every bridge in sight.
Did you know about the story between Dennis Yu and Jeremy Schoemaker? If so, what’s your thought?
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{ 7 comments… read them below or add one }
Shoemoney is calling Yu a fraud?
Interesting.
Why don't we look into that Shoemoney AdSense check that launched him.
The word “cheque” on the check and there is no “amount” on a real AdSense check. And Google never used two different fonts on a check.
These appear to be real checks for comparison:
http://files.suranaamit.com/uploads/AdsenseChec...
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3565/3413513452_...
http://www.adsenseconnection.com/november-check...
Will someone ask Jeremy about this? I've been banned from his site after asking about this years ago.
Not exactly on topic but your comparisons are several years later and are not all normal US checks (ex: depository draft). Shoemoney's check is what was received back then before most went to electronic deposit. They did have “amount” back then. He was also at the San Jose SES back before then as his story stated about learning this and that. I first met him there briefly sitting down in an actual session back when we attended them. That's about all I can add.
“marketing” – You're an idiot. That's how AdSense checks in 05/06 looked:
http://plentyoffish.files.wordpress.com/2006/06...
http://imod.co.za/wp-content/uploads/2008/11/ad...
I don't know if his adsense cheque is fake or not, if it is, that's exactly what I put in the takeaways – business is dirty, as always. You have to become famous to earn more money.
Did anyone see that cheque personally? But It's not important now anyway and it's off-topic
What's with the idiot comment?
Anyhow, I've also accused Marcus Frind of PlentyofFish of displaying a fake AdSense check, too.
When I've asked these guys about it, my comments were always quietly removed in the middle of the night.
I asked about it at the Warrior Forum and my posts were deleted and account banned.
All Shoemoney and Frind had to do was say, “Yes, the checks were real.” End of story.
By the way, Shoemoney finally admitted this was a fake check:
http://photoshopdisasters.blogspot.com/2008/06/...
http://www.shoemoney.com/2008/06/21/azoogleads-...
This establishes the beginning of a lack-of-honesty pattern with Jeremy Shoemaker.
So back to my original question… why did Shoemoney (who lives in America) get a payment with the word “cheque” on it? Because here in America, AdSense payments have always had the word “check” on it.
I appreciate you not deleting my question here, Frank… normally this very simple question gets deleted on other blogs.
Hi Marketing,
I am not going to delete your post unless my life is threatened, so if you find out your comments are gone one day, you know what happens lol.
Yeah, since you pointed out the problem about “cheque” and “check”, seems only here in UK people uses cheque. Hmmm, strange.
Anyway, there must be so many secrets in this industry to be revealed.