Bought Web Traffic and A Fake YouTube Executive: the Spectacular Failure of Ozy (go.com) 49
The American media company Ozy "boasted of a large audience for its general interest website, its newsletters and its videos," remembers the New York Times, calling it "a Gen X dream of what millennial media ought to be: earnest, policy-focused, inclusive, slickly sans-serif." Ozy was founded in 2013 with seed funding from Laurene Powell Jobs, followed by further investments that by 2020 were over $83 million (according to the data service PitchBook).
But the Times reports that something strange happened last winter while Ozy was pursuing a $40 million investment from Goldman Sachs: Ozy said it had a great relationship with YouTube, where many of its videos attracted more than a million views... That's what the Zoom videoconference on February 2 that Ozy arranged between the Goldman Sachs asset management division and YouTube was supposed to be about. The scheduled participants included Alex Piper, the head of unscripted programming for YouTube Originals.
He was running late and apologized to the Goldman Sachs team, saying he'd had trouble logging onto Zoom, and he suggested that the meeting be moved to a conference call, according to four people who were briefed on the meeting, all of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to reveal details of a private discussion. Once everyone had made the switch to an old-fashioned conference call, the guest told the bankers what they had been wanting to hear: that Ozy was a great success on YouTube, racking up significant views and ad dollars, and that [CEO/co-founder Carlos] Watson was as good a leader as he seemed to be. As he spoke, however, the man's voice began to sound strange to the Goldman Sachs team, as though it might have been digitally altered, the four people said.
After the meeting, someone on the Goldman Sachs side reached out to Mr. Piper, not through the Gmail address that Mr. Watson had provided before the meeting, but through Mr. Piper's assistant at YouTube. That's when things got weird. A confused Mr. Piper told the Goldman Sachs investor that he had never spoken with her before. Someone else, it seemed, had been playing the part of Mr. Piper on the call with Ozy.
Four people told the Times that CEO Watson later said the voice on the call belonged to Ozy co-founder/chief operating officer Samir Rao and attributed the incident to a temporary mental health crisis. Ozy's chairman of the board called it "an unfortunate one-time event." But in addition the site's editor-at-large — who was fired earlier this year — says Ozy's claims of 50 million unique users a month "seemed high," according to the Times: In 2017, BuzzFeed News reported that Ozy had been among the publishers buying web traffic from "low-quality sources," companies using systems that caused articles to pop open under a reader's browser without the reader's knowledge. Ozy said it had been buying the traffic to build its email lists and had not billed advertisers for those views... Ozy doesn't rely on standard measurements of traffic, but the best known service, Comscore, shows nothing close to the company's public claims. According to Comscore, Ozy reached nearly 2.5 million people during some months in 2018, but only 230,000 people in June 2021 and 479,000 in July.
Mr. Watson called the Comscore numbers "incomplete," noting they don't include impressions on platforms ranging from social media to television and podcasts.
The Times' story "triggered canceled shows, an internal investigation, investor concern and high-level departures at the company," ABC News reported Friday. And the same day the Times delivered one more update — that Ozy was shutting down: In an article in The Times on Thursday, Brad Bessey, an Emmy-winning executive producer, and Heidi Clements, a longtime TV writer, said Ozy executives had misled them while they were working on "The Carlos Watson Show," Mr. Watson's talk show, for the company. Specifically, they said, executives told them that the show would appear on the cable network A&E. Mr. Bessey resigned when he learned there was no such deal in place, and the show ended up appearing on YouTube and the Ozy website.
Also this week: Advertisers including Chevrolet, Walmart, Facebook, Target and Goldman Sachs itself — many of which had been paying for placement on "The Carlos Watson Show" — hit the brakes on their spending with Ozy. By Friday afternoon, Mr. Watson and the other remaining board member, Michael Moe (another high-profile investment figure, who had published a book called "Finding the Next Starbucks"), concluded that the company could not recover and issued the farewell statement through a spokeswoman....
The Ozy staff received the news that the company was no more on Friday afternoon.
But the Times reports that something strange happened last winter while Ozy was pursuing a $40 million investment from Goldman Sachs: Ozy said it had a great relationship with YouTube, where many of its videos attracted more than a million views... That's what the Zoom videoconference on February 2 that Ozy arranged between the Goldman Sachs asset management division and YouTube was supposed to be about. The scheduled participants included Alex Piper, the head of unscripted programming for YouTube Originals.
He was running late and apologized to the Goldman Sachs team, saying he'd had trouble logging onto Zoom, and he suggested that the meeting be moved to a conference call, according to four people who were briefed on the meeting, all of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to reveal details of a private discussion. Once everyone had made the switch to an old-fashioned conference call, the guest told the bankers what they had been wanting to hear: that Ozy was a great success on YouTube, racking up significant views and ad dollars, and that [CEO/co-founder Carlos] Watson was as good a leader as he seemed to be. As he spoke, however, the man's voice began to sound strange to the Goldman Sachs team, as though it might have been digitally altered, the four people said.
After the meeting, someone on the Goldman Sachs side reached out to Mr. Piper, not through the Gmail address that Mr. Watson had provided before the meeting, but through Mr. Piper's assistant at YouTube. That's when things got weird. A confused Mr. Piper told the Goldman Sachs investor that he had never spoken with her before. Someone else, it seemed, had been playing the part of Mr. Piper on the call with Ozy.
Four people told the Times that CEO Watson later said the voice on the call belonged to Ozy co-founder/chief operating officer Samir Rao and attributed the incident to a temporary mental health crisis. Ozy's chairman of the board called it "an unfortunate one-time event." But in addition the site's editor-at-large — who was fired earlier this year — says Ozy's claims of 50 million unique users a month "seemed high," according to the Times: In 2017, BuzzFeed News reported that Ozy had been among the publishers buying web traffic from "low-quality sources," companies using systems that caused articles to pop open under a reader's browser without the reader's knowledge. Ozy said it had been buying the traffic to build its email lists and had not billed advertisers for those views... Ozy doesn't rely on standard measurements of traffic, but the best known service, Comscore, shows nothing close to the company's public claims. According to Comscore, Ozy reached nearly 2.5 million people during some months in 2018, but only 230,000 people in June 2021 and 479,000 in July.
Mr. Watson called the Comscore numbers "incomplete," noting they don't include impressions on platforms ranging from social media to television and podcasts.
The Times' story "triggered canceled shows, an internal investigation, investor concern and high-level departures at the company," ABC News reported Friday. And the same day the Times delivered one more update — that Ozy was shutting down: In an article in The Times on Thursday, Brad Bessey, an Emmy-winning executive producer, and Heidi Clements, a longtime TV writer, said Ozy executives had misled them while they were working on "The Carlos Watson Show," Mr. Watson's talk show, for the company. Specifically, they said, executives told them that the show would appear on the cable network A&E. Mr. Bessey resigned when he learned there was no such deal in place, and the show ended up appearing on YouTube and the Ozy website.
Also this week: Advertisers including Chevrolet, Walmart, Facebook, Target and Goldman Sachs itself — many of which had been paying for placement on "The Carlos Watson Show" — hit the brakes on their spending with Ozy. By Friday afternoon, Mr. Watson and the other remaining board member, Michael Moe (another high-profile investment figure, who had published a book called "Finding the Next Starbucks"), concluded that the company could not recover and issued the farewell statement through a spokeswoman....
The Ozy staff received the news that the company was no more on Friday afternoon.
You can lie to investors. (Score:2)
You just can say anything to them that's *untrue*.
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You don't call that "mental health crisis", that's ableist to those honesty challenged. It's also not an illness, it's just an alternate approach to truth -- something widely appreciated in a C?O.
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Without consequence? [cnet.com]
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Not to worry, when you get busted being a fraudster, just claim mental health issues.
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And you see how well that worked out for them.
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Senator Al Gore:
Deepfakes can put words in peoples' mouths. You know, make people say things like 'vagina'. And 'poop'. And then you've got Senators going around saying 'vagina poop' but they didn't say 'vagina poop'. Deep fakes are everywhere. I'm cereal.
You cannot lie to Goldman Sachs (Score:2)
Now, you can lie to *small* investors. Feel free to scam as many old ladies as you want. But big investors? They demanded and got laws to protect themselves. Sure wish I could get Joe Blow to do the same, but when I suggest it I get people going on about Venezuela or something equally nonsensical...
Definition (Score:2)
"a Gen X dream of what millennial media ought to be: earnest, policy-focused, inclusive, slickly sans-serif."
So fraudulent, then?
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Yeah, that line really grated on me too. It's like a bus-load of demographic incites crashed in to a buzzword factory.
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"a Gen X dream of what millennial media ought to be: earnest, policy-focused, inclusive, slickly sans-serif."
So fraudulent, then?
These were Goldman Sachs alumni. They're all about fraud.
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'slickly sans-serif'
Sans-serif, or typically Hellvetica/Arial, is the typeface of the white male establishment. Government. Fortune 500. Dictators. It carries authority. It makes clear what's important.
Any serif typeface is for lesser people: writers, artists, creatives... It is soft and wimpy with cute little swirls and girly flourishes.
Your bills, tax papers, and court documents will be sans-serif. Your love letters, wedding invitations and funeral notices will be more personal. Anything in your mailbox p
Re: Definition (Score:2)
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Schools teach certain fonts necessary in business. (Score:1)
Sans-serif, or typically Hellvetica/Arial, is the typeface of the white male establishment.
I just completed a technical writing course (which actually covered constructing most internal and external business documents). They taught that simple sans-serif fonts, particularly Times New Roman and Arial, were not just preferred, but specifically one of those two was practically mandatory, in business writing.
Business writing is all about clarity, getting to the point efficiently and getting it across effective
And you're invited to "culturally appropriate" it. (Score:2)
By the way: The conservative side of "the white male establishment" invites you to "culturally appropriate" this, along with other aspects of becoming self-supporting and/or rich. Making you rich helps us get richer.
"The only mechanism by which 'diversity makes us stronger' is
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A serif is a decorative stroke that finishes off the end of a letters stem. Consequently a serif font is a font that has serifs, while a sans serif is a font that does not (hence the âoesansâ).
As such Times New Roman is a serif font where Arial/Helvetica noting that Arial is a poor imitation of Helvetica is a sans-serif font.
There is a a body of research that shows serif fonts are easier to read, which is why most professional produced document uses serif fonts.
I have no idea what you think a sans
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hence the âoesansâ
There is a a body of research that shows serif fonts are easier to read, which is why most professional produced document uses serif fonts.
I have no idea what you think a sans-serif font is but it is not a definition that matches up with reality.
Some of that is what you were told. In the 1980s.
And most of it has changed. Though some people try to distinguish themselves with their elitist âoesansâ. Spend less money on your jeejah, Jarjar, you'll be more readable.
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Citation please.
wikipedia.org is where you get say that and somebody cares.
There are reasonable ways to ask questions, and that isn't one of them.
Maybe try google?
Fake it, til you make it. (Score:2)
Make it, don't fake it. [leadershipnow.com]
Re:Fake it, til you make it. (Score:4, Interesting)
The real irony is that many of the people who would "fake it" are making their pitch to people who have been in their shoes before, and are looking for the tell-tale signs of deception. The deception is a "hedge" which allows an investor to sue the executives personally when a business doesn't work out - whereas otherwise, if the executive had been honest, the investor could legally lose everything with no recourse at all.
It was the same phenomenon with "yes men" in the 80's and 90's - upper management was more interested in having someone to blame for the inevitable failure than taking the time to do it right the first time and set up the company for long term success.
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It is amazing that people would even try that.
Business people in industries or circumstances, or merely old-fashioned enough to expect to need to protect themselves against fraud are not going to use any email address they're provided at a meeting. They have a whole system that is designed to protect themselves from that nonsense. None of their communications are to emails, addresses, or phone numbers they were provided at a meeting. An executive assistant contacts the desired party through known, published
Well, bye. (Score:1)
I have never heard of this company. From what i can tell from the wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] , they rode the woke wave all the way to the bank and crashed on the beach. Good riddance.
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Forgot to take your pills today? "Minorities" don't even see they're being used for financial gain by companies like this who feign that it's about anything but money.
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Yes, how dare those minority groups expect to be treated like human beings, let alone the same as white people?
The perpetrator's name?
Samir Rao.
There's your explanation.
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Never argue with the dainty right wingnuts, for they are quick to anger and perceive the merest hint of a slight to whine incessantly about the other side.
Ozy? (Score:3)
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I hadn't, and like you, I at least like to think I'm reasonably well informed. Obviously I now have to reevaluate that assumption.
Got a lot of spam from them. (Score:2)
Slashdot poll idea: Prior to this story have you heard of Ozy? I am curious because I consider my self relatively informed as to things tech, and I had never heard of this company.
They also apparently marketed their shows with targeted spam.
One of my email addresses ended up on their list(s) (only single copies so only once, but with repeated announcements of several of their periodic shows) and, just searching for "OZY" (which appears in the sender name, almost always as the first word followed by the show
Re:Got a lot of spam from them. I seem misled (Score:2)
[my impression of possible right-wing pandering from their spam]
Then, after reading other posters and the Wikipedia article that characterizes them as primarily a left-wing operation, I wonder if they were preying on both sides (with a few right wing oriented feeds) or if the apparent conservative bias in their spam was an attempt to hook in conservatives - or a flat-out misinterpretation on my part.
Since they shut down Oct 1 (yay! no more spam!), it's probably too late to actually WATCH one of their feeds
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I was also a target of their spam...kept flagging their emails as such until one day they stopped appearing even in my spam folder. I had no idea who they were, didn't bother to read the emails, and just assumed there was malware hiding in the links.
Light bulb turned on after NYT's reporting. No wonder they reported having millions of email "subscribers."
Light bulbs all around, (Score:2)
I was also a target of their spam...kept flagging their emails as such until one day they stopped appearing even in my spam folder. I had no idea who they were, didn't bother to read the emails, and just assumed there was malware hiding in the links.
Light bulb turned on after NYT's reporting. No wonder they reported having millions of email "subscribers."
Light bulbs all around. If those spams were not promotions but the actual "email issues", it's quite a dishonest business model:
1: Buy a bunch of
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Having never heard of it either, I have to admit that I sometimes wonder whether these sorts of pieces are invented as a “emperor’s new clothes” psychological test, just to see if anyone will admit that they have no idea what’s being talked about.
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Same here, when I first saw the headline, I thought they nailed Dr. Oz for being a sleaze. Damn, it weren't so.
But then I'll bet few have heard of Sinclair Communications, which has been buying up local TV stations and turning them into Mouthpieces Agin the Woke and Critical Race Theory and Other Conservative Things to Whine About. The right wing butts are so easily played and the best part for Sinclair is they will never learn.
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They went off the rails on a crazy train.
You forgot the toxic workplace (Score:3)
Apparently the whole thing was about Carlos, not the company. It was him promoting himself [businessinsider.com] and he ran the people ragged.
Ozy attributed Rao's behavior on the Goldman Sachs call to a mental health episode, but some current and former staffers found the explanation ironic given the work culture at Ozy, which three described as "toxic." Burnout, numerous staffers said, was common, and employees often didn't stay at the company for much longer than a year.
"It's the worst place I ever worked," one of the former employees said. "My mental health was never as bad as when I worked at Ozy."
This employee described quotas of four to five stories per week, including feature stories that required extensive interviews. In one meeting, Watson said that if staffers couldn't sustain the high level of output, it would be better to use freelancers. "It was a veiled threat to fire us, in a way," this person thought.
The employee added that the drive for employees to stay in the office and work constantly came from Watson and Rao. "They're Goldman alums. They don't care if it's impossible — just make it happen," the former employee said.
John Barron says Ozy is doing amazing! (Score:1)
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Using one of the former alleged president's invented personas isn't going to give you any credibility. Being duped is not the same as lying, surely you understand the difference, yes?
This is seems to be where we are now (Score:3)
There as been essentially a three decade long push against the concept that anyone is responsible for their actions. It seems to be only accelerating too.
We are now at the point where CEOs of companies that have attracted major sums of investor dollars think - not only that they should be excused for but might actually get away with 'mental health issues' as a defense for committing, sophisticated and deliberate frauds.
This the outcome all of thinking along the lines of 'systemic this', 'its all relative that', 'equity there'
The moment you tell a 'someone' that a 'they' are not responsible for their condition as result primarily of their own ability coupled with their moral failings or virtues - than that 'someone' is also going think they can't be responsible for bad they do. After all 'privilege' can make a victim of you as sure as anything else - 'things were not going my way, which stressed me out because I am used to getting my way, I am also used to being given a pass so its only natural I thought to do ... , it isn't really my fault, don't you see'.
Its good Ozy has gone down in flames - it deserved to as an organization for not holding its own people to higher account, Rao deserves to go down in flames.
Bailouts are precisely the same thinking - oh its not our fault we did manage our assets correctly - systemic risk!
Great societies are build on the shoulders of individuals who have agency, accountability, and personal stake. Take that away and its just going to be all failure excused until the rot destroys all. It might not always be fair but it will always be necessary, hopeful we collectively remember that before its to late.
Pied Piper (Score:2)
Truth informs fiction informs truth.
Hmmm (Score:3)
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Who the fuck cares?