Following those two events, in May 2017, Mittal published a blog post addressing the concerns. That information came to light the same week as a data breach that exposed the information of 77 million Edmodo users. Some of the company’s tactics began to backfire just three months later, when privacy expert Bill Fitzgerald revealed that Edmodo had been using ad trackers on students and teachers. “Advertising is sensitive,” Carter acknowledges. The company is committed to not charging users for its tools, and advertising revenue, officials thought, was a way to make that possible. “It was just the medium that was inappropriate.” Risky BusinessĮdmodo, which is based in San Mateo, Calif., began in February 2017 to experiment with adding advertisements to its communications platform, after struggling to find a sustainable business model and generate revenue. They’re starting to learn about all these things going on in the world,” she says. “We’re at the age where he comes home and that’s all we talk about-drinking, vaping, what kids are doing. To her, it was about the ad’s placement on a trusted education app. She didn’t see the ad again.īut she emphasized in an interview that the ad didn’t bother her because it acknowledged the existence of beer-Freeman lets her son watch ESPN, where commercials for beer are common. Edmodo responded the same day and said it would “investigate as to why this appeared to a student user when it clearly shouldn’t have.” Freeman was satisfied with that response. When Freeman saw the beer-blazoned ad, she decided to take up the issue on Twitter. But the idea of figuring it out as one goes along perhaps seems more excusable for an early-stage startup than it does for Edmodo, which has been around for 10 years, boasts more than 90 million registered users across 400,000 schools and was acquired earlier this year for $137.5 million.
During EdSurge’s conversation with the two executives, there was a lot of talk about “learning as we go” and ads being a “work in progress” as the company fine-tunes its approach. Mittal, along with Mollie Carter, Edmodo’s vice president of marketing, explained these recent blunders as part of the company’s “evolving” advertising strategy. “I want to hang my head in shame,” Mittal tells EdSurge of the vaping ad incident. BwTcLf2WRJ- Heather Boggess September 7, 2018 This ad popped up twice during homework tonight. This ad popped up twice during homework tonight,” wrote Heather Boggess on you need to rethink the way you do business. Over the course of the day, before the error was discovered, someone snapped a screenshot of the ad and posted it to you need to rethink the way you do business. The company was working on an anti-vaping campaign for the FDA, and at one point, an Edmodo marketing executive accidentally published an internal test poll to public user accounts. That incident was also an accident, according to Edmodo CEO Vibhu Mittal. In September, between 1,000 and 2,000 Edmodo users opened the app to see an ad that asked, “What is the first time you tried an e-cig?” The two possible answers-“8th grade and above” and “8th grade and below”-overlay a stock image of a young person exhaling a billowing cloud of smoke from his mouth.
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What’s more, these incidents underscore a troubling problem that is not unique to Edmodo: As edtech companies that once offered their services for free search for revenue models, the stops and stumbles that can follow often come at students’ expense. They acted quickly to take it down-but it’s not the only advertising misstep the company has made in recent months. That the ad ever showed up on a student’s account was a mistake, Edmodo officials say. You can do better, right? /zcofhwh06M- Beth Freeman August 16, 2018 “I thought, ‘I’m not gonna freak out.’ … But it was so usually things don’t bother me but this is the ad that popped up in my 8th grade son’s social studies feed today. “I was like, ‘Clearly there’s a glitch,’” says Freeman, whose son attends school in Cobb County School District in Atlanta. On it was the unmistakable image of a glass of beer. The advertisement appeared on Edmodo’s mobile app, which Freeman’s son uses daily for updates about homework, quizzes and other school assignments. She usually looks right past them.īut then, in August, she saw something that unsettled her. Most of the ads seem innocuous-a virtual charter school or a set of digital worksheets, for example-and don’t bother her much. Over the last year, she’s noticed ads peppered throughout the communications app, which is used by most students, parents and teachers at her 13-year-old’s middle school. Beth Freeman logs in to her son’s Edmodo account from time to time to check on his homework assignments.