The Facebook Scamville controversy has roiled on this week. It made enough noise to get covered by Newsweek and Time magazine. A video tape surfaced on which the CEO of Zynga, Mark Pincus, admitting he had “done every horrible thing in the book” to get revenues. And Facebook announced that since July they had, “disabled two entire ad networks and suspended or brought into compliance over 100 applications for ad-related violations.”

On the brighter side of things though, the entire sequence of events has provoked some serious and thoughtful contributions about the role of the offer management companies and the quality of social media generated customer acquisitions.

As a result of the debate generated and the traction it has received with mainstream media, this may turn out to be an industry-changing sequence of events:

  • If Facebook and other social networks were not fully aware of the nature of the offers being pushed on their platforms, they are now.
  • If the advertisers were uncertain as to the nature of the leads they’re buying, they should be now.
  • And if CPA networks and affiliates have any doubt that the FTC is going to be investigating the whole space, then they need doubt no longer.

Read on for an overview of the most important links that relate to the sage, and in our third section we look at some of the key take-aways for the industry.