The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) filed a complaint against HomeAdvisor, saying that since 2014, the company overcharged small and medium- sized businesses, and misrepresented the likelihood leads at much higher rates than HomeAdvisor’s own data supported.
IAC Interactive -- a media company that is home to many major brands and products including HomeAdvisor, Vimeo, The Daily Beast, Investopedia, and Match Group's online dating portfolio, which includes Match, OkCupid and Tinder -- is a majority shareholder in ANGI Homeservices, which is the parent company of HomeAdvisor.
In 2017, IAC entered into an agreement to acquire Angie's List and merge the company with its services business HomeAdvisor. The two brands continued to operate as a new publicly traded company called ANGI Homeservices Inc.
“I had heard stories about HomeAdvisor providing low quality leads but apparently their sales tactics went beyond the over-selling of questionable leads into outright deception,” Mike Blumenthal wrote in a post. “That's according to the U.S. Federal Trade Commission.”
Blumenthal explains how the action illustrates some of the problems of using marketing qualified leads (MQLs) from third parties and affiliates, mostly because it’s difficult to determine lead provenance and quality. He said that without adequate scale, lead-generation companies like HomeAdvisor do not really,work in local at a national scale, and companies that are looking to succeed in this arena need to sell...
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