|
Fake Case Study About FakeHospital.com
As a friend of mine once said: "You can't stop stupid people from saying stupid things." That should be the byline of XMediatrends and its staff. I was approached by the people behind this sham via email today, 5 days before this they intended to publish a Fake Case Study about my company. They told me that I could either rush to provide them with real information that might be useful or that they would publish this fake study on their own without my involvement. Their draft article is full of factual errors, had the name of my company wrong, makes broad conclusions based on a border-line retarded view of too few facts and worse. In fact, they should have used FakeCaseStudy.xxx as the domain for this mess of an article.
In my emailed replies I explained to them repeatedly that they do not have my consent to use my company name, any data I have posted or any other information about my business in their article. I also pointed out that their conclusions are baseless and that they would be presenting their readers with a bunch of nonsense that has no value. As I told their editor via email "You along with Paywit will be laughed out of the industry if you print what you have written. Your assumptions in the case study astound me." These are not journalists or industry insiders, they are a clueless couple of parasites who provide nothing.
For those who are not yet aware, Xmediatrends is run by a guy who uses the name 'Paywit' on XBIZ.net and GFY.com. If you go to either and read the many threads where he attempted to participate, you will quickly see that he is someone who should be reading articles and not writing them. On countless occasions he has posted nonsense, been called out by people who are actually in this business and yet he continues to argue with everyone for no apparent reason. Unfortunately he is not a board troll, he is worse than that. He is a parasite who hopes to profit by launching a newsletter that preys upon the openness of XBIZ, GFY, YNOT and adult industry site owners. Honestly, I doubt anyone would really mind all that much if he were qualified to do it well... but as you can see from his attempts, he is not qualified for much of anything.
All they have done is poorly scrape industry message boards like XBIZ.net and GFY for data points that were shared by business owners intending to help other business owners and webmasters. Then they attempted to cobble together some kind of "bogus analysis" like a five year old might attempt to build an article with some duct tape and a few drawings in crayon.
Why does this bother me, and why should it bother you?
When I reply to industry webmasters on message boards, sit on panels or do interviews with real media outlets, I provide a lot of information. So do many other business owners in the adult industry. That free exchange of information is part of what makes this industry fun and profitable. Implicit in that arrangement is a level of trust that the information will be used for the purpose of discussion in the threads, or by actual webmasters to improve their own sites. Having Paywit and Xmediatrends running around scraping things out of context, adding a layer of pure nonsense on top of it and trying to sell it to advertisers as a real news source is dangerous. It will make people like me post less often and with much less candor. It makes it harder for XBIZ or GFY or YNOT and other serious news outlets to get access to real information. It disconnects webmasters from each other... and it benefits nobody.
Please consider the source if you do choose to read this Fake Case Study. Better yet, consider the source and choose not to bother reading it. When I asked a friend how to handle this threat, he suggested I could probably pay them off as a sponsor and tell them to keep my name out of their grip entirely. That may have been a wise move, but it would not have been best move for my company or the industry I do care about. So, I've decided instead to lay everything out in the open as I usually do, and I hope the industry will do the right things to allow me (and many others) to continue laying things out in the open in the future.
|