CPX Interactive pays publishers late

If you’re a web publisher considering using CPX Interactive to fill advertising inventory I recommend that you do not. CPX has failed to pay me on their own terms and has stopped responding to communication.

CPX was originally quite motivated to get things going, their account reps John Rosa and James Weigel responded nearly immediately as we discussed the deal. The insertion order was sent over quickly and I returned it ASAP. Advertising started and that’s when I stopped hearing anything. We had agreed upon a CPM payment structure, but unmentioned in our discussion was a limitation to US traffic. To be fair they did include this on the IO, but it wasn’t spoken of and it turns out CPX arbitrarily decided to pay 15% of our agreed upon CPM for traffic outside of the US. The account reps that were so eager to get started never mentioned anything about the non-US traffic and the reporting tool they provided has no way to see this traffic that is not providing a return.

At the end of the day a few less bucks isn’t the end of the world, but it was a valuable lesson. However, that’s not why I wouldn’t recommend working with CPX (though it would make me think twice). The real reason I don’t recommend CPX is that I haven’t seen a dime yet despite starting to run their ads three months ago!

CPX wanted to pay on a net-45 basis which is a bit long for my taste but was not too extraordinary (everyone likes to be paid quickly and not have to pay their bills quickly). I agreed to the net-45 terms, but CPX has failed to meet their own payment terms. At the time of this writing CPX has missed their own 45 day mark by a cool 28 days. I pointed this out and since then CPX won’t respond to my emails or answer my calls. Thanks to their long net-45 terms I had run their ads for another month and a half before I knew there would be a problem receiving payment (and before I found out my payments were going to be for much less than I had anticipated because of the international traffic). The real kicker is the ads all seemed to be for digital products sold through ClickBank which is on a two week payment schedule. Net-14 must be nice.

There are more reputable firms to work with, I don’t recommend working with CPX Interactive.

Update: Like magic, the day after this post I received a payment. Supposedly covering August and September, but the payment was sent without a breakdown of how the figures arrived at and they were [significantly] different than both the CPX reporting tool and the original higher figures based straight off CPM. The kicker was getting an email from someone in accounting about how I should have received a payment for $X where $X was yet another figure. So to re-cap: I have a total of what I was expecting from a straight CPM basis, what CPX’s own reporting tool says, what the payment was for and what accounting said the payment was for. This is not encouraging. Supposedly my account rep is “looking into it” and I’ll hear back at a later date. I stand by my earlier statement–there are much more reputable firms to work with than CPX. You can’t wing it, especially when it comes down to money.

Update 2: The small discrepancy above ended up being a timezone issue, despite my using the default timezone and the account rep’s emailed figures matching what I saw in my timezone. Incredibly sloppy on CPX’s behalf.

Update 3: It’s now December 17th and yet again CPX Interactive has missed its payment window (a generous 45 days). I’m still waiting to be paid for October. This is starting to feel like not paying publishers on time is a routine business operation over at CPX Interactive. It will be interesting to see what the payment total is for this time…

Update 4: After following up with all my contacts at CPX, I got paid on December 20th, which would be Net-50. As usual, the amount paid was slightly different than what their reporting system says, but it was just a few pennies which makes it nothing more than a curiosity.