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April 05, 2006
The bad publicity growth plan
We can't help wondering if the analysts might have overlooked an interesting angle on new Internet usage figures that indicate massive traffic growth at social networking, blogging, and local information sites. The big winners seem to be blogger.com, Wikipedia, MySpace and Citysearch. Rupert Murdoch is no doubt grinning from ear to ear, given that he paid what now looks like a bargain price for MySpace.
What we found fascinating was the fact that MySpace's rapid growth seems to have been influenced by the fact that it "made headlines when some men were arrested and charged with assaulting girls they had identified on the site". And at Wikipedia "traffic soared 275 percent last year following widespread media play over the posting of fake biographical material and similar controversies regarding the site's accuracy". If anything, Brendan Behan's observation that there's no such thing as bad publicity may apply even more powerfully than it used to.
Posted by cw at April 5, 2006 08:50 AM