Is mediadiscovery.com Safe?

Spam-advertised business. Unsolicited messages from this business invite site owners to put paid content on their site. The 'content' provided by Media Discovery contains links to other websites that they have been paid to advertise. In essence, this is simply a paid-link SEO scheme, and Media Discovery is inviting site owners to host a permanent advertisement for their client in exchange for a one-time payment. Recently, Media Discovery appear to have begun using a second domain in their emails, possibly because their original domain has begun to be blacklisted.

Emailed me this unsolicited asking for me to host advertising space which they would pay me for: "I was wondering whether you'd be interested in selling advertising space on **************.com? The advertisement would be unobtrusive and we can pay you an annual upfront payment for the advertising space. We can also provide guest blog posts from industry experts in many cases. I am from Media Discovery, a new media agency headquartered in the UK. We plan out and acquire advertising space on major websites and portals, as well as smaller niche sites. I personally deal with our smaller publishers, increasing brand awareness and share of voice for the major brands that our group works with. We'd love to work with your site. If you have any questions or would like further information, please do not hesitate to email me directly. Kind Regards, Carol Parsons carol.parsons@mediadiscovery.com" And then exactly a week later a follow up unsolicited email: "I recently sent you an email about hosting an advertisement on your site. I hope you received it, if not it may have ended up in your junk folder. I believe we offer a very attractive system of advertising. You would be paid a yearly-renewable fee for placing a text-based advertisement that is appropriate to the topic of your site. Please get back to me if you are interested in placing an advertisement on **********************.com? Kind Regards, Carol Parsons carol.parsons@mediadiscovery.com" Also doing some research I found this informative feedback comment on ***** "@1_earth · 6 weeks ago I also came here because of an email from the good people at Media Discovery and the resulting search. It's not new though. Back in June 2008 I wrote a blog post about what was called Grass Roots Advertising then. It was before Google started cracking down on paid links, which I dabbled in. The "post a link and get money" part is not a scam. Not THE scam at least. It works like this. Blog posts link to Website A that has a link to Website B that has a link to Client's Website. The client is told by the SEO/SEM company that, in exchange for thousands of dollars (it was allegedly $6k back in 2008), they can do quick miracles with search engine results, but then do it through this method, which is considered black-hat SEO and Google dislikes it very much. Why does Google hate it? Because when the search results are littered with "unnaturally" popular results, searchers don't find what they're searching for and will start shunning the search engine. Not good for search engine's reputation and revenue. Meanwhile, shady Search Engine Marketing (SEM) Company doesn't care, because when Google spots your blog and penalises it with a de-listing because of your association with shady paid-links, they just move on to one of millions of other bloggers who earn a pittance from legitimate advertising and will jump at an offer of $120 to post a simple link. When posts like this one exposes Media Discovery too much, they will simply drop their disposable brand and respawn under another to continue working from the shadowy underbelly of the internet. As a blogger, if you value your blog / website traffic, resist the urge to make a quick buck in this way - I've had to work on de-listed websites before. It's a long, hard road and not nice to see businesses suffer because of it."