Word of the Week: Controversy (sometimes creates cash)

This week seemed to yell "controversy" to me. All over the place, there was controversy. PPP vs. Calacanis, Wired vs. Digg, Arrington vs. Wired, Best Buy vs. The Consumer, reasons to unsubscribe from a feed and Seeking Alpha vs. Yahoo's Semel. There are a lot more, please add other controversy in the comments.

PPP vs. Calacanis

Will this feud end already? Geez. I am frankly bored with it. It's kind of like when you see the same 2 wrestlers fight for 3 years, move on already dammit. The latest bit is Ted (Payperpost CEO) stating that Jason should win the "donkinator" award and even went so far to show his picture on a donkey's behind. Ted states, "Time and time again Jason has climbed upon his stacks of money and jumped upon his high horse, declaring PayPerPost and the other companies that have followed our lead "evil"." And then he goes on to discuss how Jason uses a company he is on the board of to promote their service on his blog without disclosing. I think this constant bantering and name-calling does not help anyone. In fact, I think it hurts PPP even more than it hurts Jason. Jason is a "name" in the business and will continue to get the speaking engagements and so forth. PPP is trying to show that they are a legitimate organization and silly name calling on their home page is just plain stupid. I can just see the PPP booth at the next event riding donkeys. You want to build up a reputation, you don't do this Ted. Take the high road. You have the posties (which appear to all be stay at home moms) behind you, but that won't get you to the promised land.

On a side note, I am not against the idea of paid advertorials and will cover this whole debate (hopefully using my diverse background for leverage) in the next few days.

Another side note, Jason, I am still waiting for the results of your gaming Alexa post last year.

Wired vs. Digg

Wowzers! Wired comes out with an article about how to game Digg and the blogo' goes off like a tea kettle boiling over. And guess what? This controversy got Wired 342 links to that article (courtesy Technorati). Did Wired do the right thing in showing that you can game Digg? I am on the fence on this one frankly. Wired is owned by Conde Nast, who also owns Reddit (a main Digg competitor) so that makes the article a bit harder to swallow. However, from what I can tell, the article is factual based on the events that took place. Should a mag which has a dotted line up and then a dotted line down, not write about the lead dog from a journalistic pov?

Reddit is not in the same league as a traffic magnet as Digg is. I think Reddit remains because it is cheap to run. The site generates no (basically) revenue for Conde. I am sure you can game Reddit and every other system out there. This would probably be considered cheap link bait. She probably paid User/Submitter $100 and got major press and 450 links in the process.

Side note… the latest issue of Wired has 186 pages and 85 of those pages are advertisements. Thats a 46% ad rate, meaning that basically one out of two pages is an ad. Yes, I am that lame to count this after attempting to read this mag last evening. Shame.

Arrington vs. Wired

When the above story came out, TechCrunch's Arrington wrote a post about it that became a massive discussion board. As of now, there are over 230 comments on that post! Mike titled the post, "Digg should sue Wired" and notes that, "But my bigger problem is that Wired isn’t simply reporting news about Digg. They’re making the news. And they’re going negative. In the first example, no news was reported – it was just an out of the blue roundhouse punch at Digg. In the second example the reporter actually creates the story she writes about, and willfully violated the Digg terms of use in the process. And this was done for commercial gain – the Wired story describing this has received a ton of traffic (and is actually the number 1 story on Digg right now)."

What I would like to read from Mike is a semi-indepth to what grounds Digg has against Wired. Many of the commenters on the story asked for the same thing. Investigative journalism is hot all over, how many TV news reports don't have at least a bit of it every night? I think that Mike's point is that a service by Wired's owner is a direct competitor to Digg and this hit to Digg could help Reddit grow it's userbase. In a later comment last evening, Mike notes a quick reasoning for his title, "It’s not the disclaimer that’s the issue, and most readers get that. It’s the fact that they targeted and then trashed a competitor with an investigative journalism piece. They violated the Digg T&Cs and engaged in fraud to make their point. That’s what the problem is."

Mike did note this in the comments, "we don’t care that much about digg traffic actually. it’s far less than 10% of our total traffic, and when we aren’t on digg the comments are much more intelligent. digg is good for a quick traffic spike, but it isn’t a useful way to build an audience. I like digg as a business, but don’t really care about the links. most of our revenue comes from our sponsors, who pay a flat fee per month regardless of traffic. they want quality readers, not quantity. And digg basically sends a never ending stream of angry 16 year olds. not something the sponsors are that interested." I have to say I agree and disagree with him. I agree that a lot of the traffic is usually "mad" for some reason, but I disagree about the links. Everyone will agree that links are gold, and his post has about 100 links. These links remain forever, even when the Digg goes into the sunset.

Best Buy vs. The Consumer

This one reminds me of the days when Amazon charged different pricing based on purchase patterns in the early-2000s. It appears that Best Buy has a secret intranet site designed to make sure they get the top price for their items. Best Buy admitted to having this intranet site after pressure from the 'sphere took off.

State Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, "Their responses seem to raise as many questions as they answer, their answers are less than crystal clear."

ProBlogger's reasons to unsubscibe to a feed

Ok, now I must admit this is not as controversial as the above, but I believe there is one reason in there which I disagree with. Not that Darren is wrong, he is right. He surveyed 103 people (is that a statistically relevant sample? sorry could't resist using my mba education lol) and 25 of them said they unsubscribed from a feed because the feed was a Partial Excerpts Feed. Well duh. Everyone wants a full feed. Everyone wants a shiny mercedes. I have been in so many debates over this. Had blogs only offered partial feeds, no one would care. I am willing to bet that at some point this year, blogs will want to start to monetize the full feed. I love to debate this so if you see me at an event yell out "full feeds rock" and let's go 10 rounds. But just know, I am like Rocky and you will be Drago. :)

Seeking Alpha vs. Yahoo's Semel

It's not bad enough that Yahoo is not the front runner anymore, now the CEO is getting beaten up like a bumfight video. Oh wait, most are saying he has caused a lot of this trouble. Aah. Whether you agree or disagree with the writer, this is an excellent piece of writing. It is very detailed which it must be to call for a CEO axe. This comment basically describes the entire column, "Google’s stock price is up 336% versus Yahoo!’s stock price being up only 16%. Google has grown its shareholder value 21 times more efficiently than Yahoo! over this time period, when the Internet ad market has been booming."

I wonder if Semel gets a Home Depot package if he goes. Oh wait, he already has made $550 million in 4 years. And that's for a company who is running a horse race on 3 legs. Where is that Sarbanes-Oxley when you need it!? I still believe that Microsoft and Yahoo will merge at some point in the next 12-18 months.