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The Folly of Faking Fan Sites 91

Posted by CmdrTaco from the "new"-media-and-"new"-marketing dept.
GFD writes "Salon has an article on what the media moguls call "internet marketing" where the film makers or the studio creates a bunch of fake amature fan sites, etc. to create buzz. " Wierd, huh? I'm equally annoyed by websites with fake personalities that run them. Like Hemos- he's really written by a team of marketroids ;) I'd like to state for the record that Rob is not Bill Gates. Honest.
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The Folly of Faking Fan Sites More

The Folly of Faking Fan Sites

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  • best fake fan site (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The best fake 'fan' site was the crap fest that was the DIVX fan site that those losers at Circuit Shity put up. Some articles were posted online about the fact that there was no name or email for the web master and it was registered in the same city as Circuit Shity's HQ. The site was taken down a week after that because the webmaster suddenly became too busy. Now DIVX is dead, hallelujah!

  • This weekend's reviews (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Mr. Showbiz [go.com] gives TBWP 91 out of 100 "might be the scariest movie ever made", and gives Eyes Wide Shut 34 out of 100 "The movie's funniest moment comes when you realize the Warner Bros. team has digitally pasted in the same naked blonde three times to cover up background nookie."

    But then tvguide.com gave each of them 4 stars! (out of five, high for them)

    What was my point again?

  • Re:102 comments or more on imdb (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    It was shown at the sundance film festival. That's where Artisan saw it and bought it.

  • Re:Same here but not from MS (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I have a friend who ran a warez site and noticed robots.txt comming from the same server twice a day at the same time. He traced the IP adress back to a internet backbone in Maryland. He contacted several other warez sites webmasters and they noticed the same pattern. One of the guys figured out that the IP was registered to the CIA/NSA. Don't know haw true this is, but my friend has the records.

  • Manufacturing "Grassroots" Hype (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    This is a bit off-topic, but when Windows 98 was released, a lot of stores opened at Midnight so that people could buy the software.

    Here in Columbus OH, the day of the release they had people lined up waiting for the software by 3pm in the afternoon at the local CompUSA.

    The only strange thing, aside from the enigmatic question of why bother, is that this line of people arrived in a chartered bus! (I'm not kidding).

  • Scooter is Altavista - What robots.txt is (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    which would explain why it's resolving to DEC as well. Architext is excite. I assume mozilla is for netscape's search. The bots check for instructions in robots.txt first, then look at the head tags.

    check out the robots exclusion protocol. [webcrawler.com]
  • Did we see the same movie? Or are you just forgetting the scene where the first Machine rips itself apart?

    ----

  • DIVX (Score:1)

    by Special J ( 641 )
    Circuit City was accused of doing this to promote DIVX right here on Slashdot:

    http://slashdot.org/articles/98/12/21/090206.sht ml

    So its not the first time it happened. Personally, it annoys the crap out of me. Another case of marketing dudes screwing around with the net. The bastards. I'm glad its getting a little more attention.
  • There is a company that specializes in this. Yes,
    a company that charges people to hype on Usenet.

    A quote from one of their pages:

    > Using our proprietary database as a starting
    > point, we constantly monitor the public access
    > areas of the Internet (newsgroups, listservs,
    > and forums) looking for discussion or comments
    > about your competitors. Wherever we find such
    > mentions, we use an extremely subtle approach to
    > incorporate positive information about your
    > business into the discussion. We never
    > denigrate or criticize the competition; instead
    > we add to the discussion by "whispering" useful
    > reminders about your company or product.

    http://www.newgate.com/online_pr/whisper.html
  • So this was an "art movie" produced by "a bunch of students." Fine, I'll take that at face value. But does that change the ethics of the promotional tactics? I think not. Friends of the filmakers who put up falsified fan sites are no better than paid advertising flacks who fake fan sites for the studios.

    I'm also glad to see someone calling bullshit on Harry Knowles-- early on, he seemed simply naive and easily decieved by manipulative studio flacks, but now it's obvious that he's willfully participating in the Hollywood "backscratching" economy, and profiting from it.
  • There's something like one hundred and two comments on us.imdb.com about this movie... and it is *just* now being released into theatres today. I find it very hard to believe that those reviews are solid and honest... they've probably got a whole huge MegaMovieHype Perl script or something that sits around and bangs out positive reviews with fake names. Or something.

    -- adr
  • One more round in the endless battle - time to beef up the mental/social immune systems once again - sigh.
    --
  • They've been playing "Blair Witch" in ten theaters in major markets for the last few weeks. It's also been at a number of film festivals over the last few months.

  • Here's [latimes.com] a legendary astroturf campain...

  • Re:Slashdot (Score:4)

    by dattaway ( 3088 ) on Friday July 16, 1999 @02:21PM (#1798461) Homepage Journal
    The clues might be who's surfing your home web pages. Are they just employees of the company? I have seen many HTTP GETs for robots.txt from microsoft.com. I'm not sure if they watch me or have their own search site (I am a boring person and have nothing:)

    tide76.microsoft.com - - [20/Jun/1999:05:26:59 -0500] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.0" 200 317
    tide73.microsoft.com - - [21/Jun/1999:20:56:10 -0500] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.0" 200 317
    tide77.microsoft.com - - [21/Jun/1999:23:59:47 -0500] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.0" 304 -
    tide72.microsoft.com - - [23/Jun/1999:14:56:47 -0500] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.0" 200 317
    tide76.microsoft.com - - [23/Jun/1999:20:50:39 -0500] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.0" 304 -
    tide77.microsoft.com - - [24/Jun/1999:04:00:11 -0500] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.0" 200 317
  • Does this mean that the metric unit for marketdroids is the Hemo?

  • Good Point, bad example. (Score:4)

    by iago ( 4917 ) on Friday July 16, 1999 @03:03PM (#1798463)
    The Blair Witch Project was produced by a bunch of film students at the University of Central Florida on virtually no budget. The film has been showing around for a couple of months. For example, the film was shown at the Florida Film Festival [enzian.org] a few months ago (Where I was fortunate enough to see it.) And it lives almost up to expectations. The official release of this film was today. What you people have to realize is that this film was an art movie and the kids who made it never really expected it go this far.

    I know several people who have made websites about this movie. They are all UCF students who have also seen the movie. They are not iflm studios or the makers of the film. If you want an example of 'astroturfing' look at DIVX, Microsoft, or Disney.

    I believe in this case, the author of the article at Salon was waiting to use this particular topic in context. Unfortunately, he picked a very, very poor example.

    iago,

  • Anyone have an open source copy of the MegaMovieHype Perl script?

  • I've had several friends and co-workers approach me with "Oh, man this movie is so cool" and talk to me about how three students "really disapeared" and that there is really a cult and all this crap. None of them ever take the time to realize that it's just a movie/hoax. I mean, c'mon people, think before you let yourself be so gullible!
    ---
    seumas.com
  • not extremely new - Beetles promoters used to hire girls to go crazy in the audience.

    Kinda like Hundu theology - %everything% is an illusion.

    Chuck

    The key so success is honesty. If you can fake that you got it made.

  • There was always that clue... the S on the end of Hemo s . Plural. Many.
    Hemos is a team of marketdroids bent on world domination? No wait... isn't that some other company?
  • Yep, DIVX sucks the left nut... even if it was still alive, if it ever hit mass market, there would be people who would 'circumvent' whatever security it had.. trust me.. there are very few ways to protect something these days..
  • Sure, there was a "no tapes" policy (page 3 of article above)... but I can confirm through reliable sources that there was at least one version floating around the 'Net in MPEG format. Not to mention that said version has been around for several -weeks-.

    I don't doubt that a percentage of "Fan Sites" are professionally produced, with dollar-backed agendas, etc.... What makes me wonder about Salon's reporting is that there appeared to be -several- articles about "TBWP" referenced at the end of the one about "studio paid hype".

    -Phyxis
  • /robots.txt contains instructions that spiders ought to heed about what to index and what not to. it's polite of them to check it before they index you. if you don't want anyone spidering your site, try

    User-agent: *
    Disallow: /
  • Its been going around on the hotline servers and IRC for over 2 months now, that I know of. Lots of people have seen it a while ago, in its precut form. Of course, I don't promote pirating movies, but its something to be aware of.

  • Hemos is a team of marketdroids? (Score:4)

    by kijiki ( 16916 ) on Friday July 16, 1999 @12:59PM (#1798473) Homepage
    I always thought he was an AI, running on a old C64 in rob's basement, bent on world domination!
  • Yeah, I've got those too, and a pretty few of them from tide??.microsoft.com. Aren't those supposed to be company ISP lines? Kinda makes you wonder what Microsoft employees are doing playing around with crawler bots . . .

    Anyway, what you might want to do is disallow by user-agent-- e.g. my site has MSIECrawler locked out, because it is brain-dead and it pounded my machine with 57,000+ hits in a single hour due to some error URL funkiness. (How's that to throw off yer Webalizer stats?)

    P.S.: Use logresolve! IP numbers no pretty :-)
  • Microsoft has been known to fake positive 'letters to the editor' and other P.R. from pseudo-public sources for some time now... Looks like somebody else figured it out.
  • Given that movies can cost over $100m to make, the only surprise should be that this wasn't on /. years ago. I don't think anyone can have any doubt that the marketing department of the Sirius Cinema corporation are spoofing fan sites for all they're worth.
    For all the net's wonderfulness, spam has proved that it's just another advertising medium. And, like spam, I'm occasionally impressed by the ingenuity that's used to get me to read the mail/see the film/whatever the whatever.
    The only reason Harry Knowles is still influential (now that the studios all have him sussed) is that lazy journos couldn't be arsed digging deeper.
  • Yes, spam harversters might use robots.txt to prioritize the pages you don't want them to get. But you can't do anything about them, especially if they hide behind a browser's user-agent:. The honest robots will honor your /robots.txt. However, you shouldn't use it for security. If there's a page you want to keep secret, you should set up some sort of authentication for it.

    -Imperator
  • The movie sucked, come ON!

    I think the producers knew this and made the hype that they did, knowing that people wouldn't dismiss it if "someone else" thought it brought down the house.

    The camerawork is realistic. Yes. This is not an advantage. In fact, the camerawork enhances the lameness of the movie. You realize that you're not really watching reality, but some homebrew, wannabe horror film.

    Acting? Realistic. Again, not an advantage. I personally don't think watching some college students yell countless obscenities at each other and faking dramatacism by delivering stale lines is very entertaining. I can see the same thing by just walking onto a high school or college campus. These people need to take theatre. Just because you can do the camera doesn't mean you can act.

    The movie is a crock. A waste of money and time. It deserves to be stay at the publicity level of being shown at frat parties to scare ditzy girls. Of course, all the proponents of TBWP probably will tell me that the raw uncut nature of the film is the nature of it's beauty. That the movie is the best ever made because of the "realistic" level.

    Bullshit.

    Forget the hype. Form your own opinion. This is mine.

  • I was going to mention this. It was great when Wired news ran internic searches on all of the DIVX web sites and discovered that most of them were run by the same company. A company whose street address was less than a block away from Circuit City's main HQ in Richmond, VA.
  • For many years certain game companies (especiallly flight sim companies) have placed "shills" in Usent groups to talk up hype about products or to defend products in the face of bad reviews.
  • Sounds like a media version of the Astroturf campaign -- get supposedly "normal" people on the internet to hype up your product or position...

  • Actually, despite this very flammie and trollie comment, it brings up a counterpoint.. Could a company set up anti-sites? Competition sets up a large number of 'fan' sites that just slam the product in question.. FUD applied on a different level.

    So instead of plugging your own product, you slander a competitors.
    Food for thought.
  • Being a fan is one thing. Shelling out the $70 bucks for two years (and whatever an ISP adds) seems a bit much for a "fan site". I would be more inclined to not trust:
    1. anything that starts at the root of a site
    2. anything that doesn't match: s!^http://[^/]+\.edu/~!

    -Jeff
  • Wow. I've never heard of her. I pay little or no attention who plays in the movies I watch. It is still a good movie though.

    --

  • This kind of thing doesn't surpise me. It is all about marketing. It doesn't matter if it is a good movie or not, as long as it generates the hype. I do not need Star Wars on my chip bags, my Pepsi, my delivered Pizza. I cringe when the local News starts out with "The hottest thing this summer...".

    Celebrities? We are suppose to worship people because they make a lot of money??!! I truly think my Dad is a more dedicated and hard working man than Arnold Swartzenager, Will Smith, or any other "Stars" (I quote "Stars" because it is a really dumb word in this context.) But my dad, unfortunately, is a little person compared to these people because they generate all the hype.

    And why are these actors inspirational to so many people, anyway. I like movies for their story, the plot, and how good was the directing. Actors are like puppets, I a good movie depends mostly on who pulls the strings. I guess acting is a talent I should dismiss so easily, but talk about makeing a mountain out of an ant hill!

    Story and script writers make very little money for what they do. Yet they are what can define the difference between a movie worth watching, and one I have better use of my time.

    Heck, one of the best movies I have seen is Contact. Nobody seems to have a very good opinion of it though. I hear a lot of "I didn't understand it." Bah! No big name actors. No explosions. I wouldn't be suprised if a movie with just explosions, big name actors and *no* content would make lots of money in the box office.

    It is about marketing and is the reason so many people go to see bad movies. It is also the reason so many people use bad software.

    --

  • It seems to me that, with current Internet culture, if you took an astroturf campaign and simply acknowledged that you had a financial interest in whay you're hyping instead of trying to keep it a secret, you'd still generate positive buzz. (Assuming that there are any redeeming qualities in what you're hyping. In the end, all the commercials and astroturf in the world would never have helped something as poorly conceived as DIVX.)

    Look at how people still get excited whenever whoever currently owns the ashes of the Amiga announces this year's flavor of vaporware. (Hmm. I think my opinion on that issue is showing.) Or the following that Babylon 5 got before it was ever in production because J. Michael Strwhatshisname (the producer) took the time to post to Usenet.

    On the net, there's the illusion that everyone is on equal footing, and just the fact that an insider dealing with a movie or new computer is participating in the same forums as you generates positive buzz in itself. That is, as long as people don't feel like they're being talked down to, and that's exactly what fake hype does by being deceptive about its origins, so it's actually riskier than being honest.

  • I didn't know that Jodie Foster counted as unknown actor....considering she is a household name and has been around for a long time...
  • "Astroturf" is a great term. It means artificial grassroots.
  • I challenge you to name one form of hype(beyond the commercial, which I've seen only twice) that cost LucasFilms money on TPM. 'Bill Gates' nothin'! All hail Master Lucas, Dark Lord of Marketing!
  • Huh? I saw it last night. I could have seen it two weeks ago, if I'd known what it was. I hadn't even heard of it until a few days ago, and I didn't read any reviews, just heard the basic premise from a friend. And, were I to write a review, I'm sure it would be inanely glowing and positive.

    People who see it before everyone else are always eager to point that fact out by saying how great it was. (And it was damn good).

    Point is, whether or not any of the fan sites are fake, I didn't see them, I saw the movie, and I liked it. And I'm not fake (I hope).
  • No screeners!? Not what my two cd's say... :O

    Anyway, the movie is amazing from a producing point of view, if these guys want to make websites to promote their site, that's fine by me. People should go out and see movies without being influenced by fan sites, reviewers, etc. See the film for yourself, then make a judgement. Now if you happen to care what people think about movies, here is my review.

    The movie is clearly a marketing gem, they built a mythology around a self-created legend. It's a faux-documentary, though by knowing it is not a real documentary one loses magnitudes of this film's worth. If I imagine seeing it at Sundance when no one knew it to be fiction, this film would have so much more power. The filmmakers should have kept the mythology going for as long as they could have, rather than revealing the facts, but I digress.

    Camera-work? Handheld, done by the actors, in the forests, while running -- I'll let you form an opinion on how this will affect your viewing. However, this fits with the mythology and I have no problem with it.

    Acting? Good performances all around pull you into the documentary nature, kudos esp. to Heather. I doubt she'll become a star, but she proved that she can act.

    The main problem is that there is basically no story, imho. It's an interesting piece both from the producing side as well as from the improvosational acting side, but this in itself can become a problem. This film wasn't directed, it was guided and nudged along its path.

    As far as being scary/spooky/creepy, I think we lose a lot knowing that it is fiction, but the sense is sort of creepy but not as much as hyped, imho. In fact, to me, the only shot that was creepy was the final one, mostly because I wanted more information than anything-else.

    I think the film should be seen (I plan on being in the theatre on opening night), but don't expect it to match the hype...
  • A while ago I was searching on www.deja.com for an online computer games dealer, when I found this [deja.com] post. When I read the post and then looked at the name of the author I nearly fell off my chair with laughter. How stupid can one man be? Needless to say, I didn't order from this company.
  • The Blair Witch project already had so much positive buzz about it, for them to pull a stunt like creating a fake fan site would be tripping themselves when they're on a good stride. If it is true, the marketing team needs a good kick in the head. Spielberg's marketing team already tried that crap (they pretended their Jurassic Park 2 website was hacked into) and everyone called them on it. Why even take chances with dampening your movie's publicity? It's definitely not worth the risk.


  • A lot, depends on what it is. Star Wars sites have domain names, and they are fan sites. Some videogame sites I go to are nothing more than fan sites (ie, they don't get paid) but they have domain names. Hell, if a domain name was $50 or less, I'd buy one just for my POS site. If you really love something, then you want to make sure you can get it out to the biggest audience.
  • Simple idea:

    If you think a movie seems interesting, look into it. If people you know (and whose judgment you trust) and/or reviewers who seem to have a clue like it, see it. Or just go see it. Or wait to catch it on video or cable.

    Before I caught THE MUMMY recently, I hadn't seen a movie in the theatres since INDEPENDENCE DAY (which was only itself worth seeing in the theatres). That didn't mean I missed any movies; I just waited a little longer to see them.

    In any case, it's no big deal.

  • Slashdot (Score:3)

    by DzugZug ( 52149 ) on Friday July 16, 1999 @01:55PM (#1798498) Journal
    I wonder how many /. postings had similar motivation. I wonder if any companies have people monitoring the coments and trying to shape the way conversation goes.

    It's probably more likely on sites like deja but just a thought
  • Hey, a while ago there were reports about very proffessional looking Divx fansites over on Geocites. I actually went to look at one of them, and I was impressed with some of the DHTML stuff that was on it.( Absolute Divx, if I remember correctly [geocities.com]. Oh, by the way, I just rechecked the Divx site, and apparently, Divx is dead! Hooray! I think I'll get up and dance a jig. ;-) Do I think it was a "real Divx fansite?" Um, no... unless the creator of the site's real name is Lucifer Beelzebub Satanus and he's just praising Divx because it is, you know, the evilest idea he heard of in a long time.
    On the other hand, I could probably create a pretty proffessional looking fansite if I had the time and motivation. Sometimes I fool around with cool Javascript or HTML effects on some of my sites, and owing to being a geeky comic book/ anime mega-fan (think about the proprietor of "The Androids Dungeon" to get an idea about what I'm like... but not what I look like ;-) I might even have obscure, hard to come by info that people with lives don't have the time to hunt out in obscure corners of the world. So.... I guess I just want to point out that some of the fansites out there are really fansites.
    Maybe even some of the Blair Witch fansites. I do get suspicious of fansites about things that haven't stood the test of time. Well, just some thoughts I was having while downloading ColdFusion Express (tm) from the good folks at Allaire (publishers of Cold Fusion(tm) and Allaire Homesite(tm) ;)
    "You fool, Beckman is dead!" --A Mysterious Voice at the End of H.P. Lovecraft's Statement of Randolph Carter

  • Who planted the Salon story? (Score:3)

    by Jim Winstead ( 55438 ) on Friday July 16, 1999 @02:57PM (#1798500) Homepage
    You have to wonder who it was from which studio that started this rumor about Blair Witch Project's marketing. (Well, okay, it was obviously Gordon Paddison at New Line Cinema, based on the quote in the second paragraph.)

    But it wouldn't be at all surprising if it was sparked by Artisan Entertainment (distributors of Blair Witch Project).

    It's hardly negative PR.

    Hollywood people are silly.

  • Saw TBWP about two months ago at a sneak preview in my city. Loved it; finally a horror film that actually tries to scare your ass instead of just going for the hackneyed gross-out. Still, when I first read that they're doing bogus astroturf fan sites to drum up support, my estimation of the film's creators was lowered somewhat. "Call me naive," I fumed, "but true quality shouldn't have to resort to such shite in order to gain attention." But on further reflection I can understand why they did it given their lack of marketing cash. Heh. . .after all, not everyone can afford the sort of glorious UltraHype'99(tm) campaign that, say, a LucasFilms can efford. ________________________________________________
  • Ah, but that's the *beauty* of it! Most of the hypefest came from the licensing agreements with Taco Hell, etc. I imagine that the ad camgaign would have been somewhat more restrained if Lucas had had to pay for it all out of his own pocket. _________________________
  • One of the reasons TBWP "already had so much positive buzz" was *because* of the astroturfing. Then again, I stumbled on the official website [blairwitch.com] months ago, and it made me vow to see the movie when it came out. I think I'm going tonight.
  • I prefer the term "black-holes" rather than "stars". Stars make the world brighter for everyone...


    ..................................@ @
  • No big name actors. No explosions. I wouldn't be suprised if a movie with just explosions, big name actors and *no* content would make lots of money in the box office.


    Normally, I'd agree with you. But just you wait. Wild Wild West will die a fiery, celebrity -packed, no-story death. The end is near!
  • Do you we reasonably believe that five hundreds freaks would do their own crappy fan website for each big movie comming up !







    If so there is a lot of time and devotion wasted on that and could be used to do some good man pages or help documents ;-)



    -well maybe they are too freaky....



    -let's train them



    They could also support the Open directory project at dmoz.org











    We also always knew that people with huge amount of money like floading the Internet with crappy things like these fan sites, spam, bad software



  • Hemos is the result of experiments in Artificial Stupidity. Unlike AI, it's indistinguishable from the average person :-)


    Another Fake Slashdot User

  • People can say whatever they want about this flick getting fake fan support. The fact that it is challanged as such has gotten it a lot of attention on Slashdot, hasn't it? That's gotta be worth something these days...

  • I can relate -- sort of (Score:3)

    by wub ( 69839 ) on Friday July 16, 1999 @11:03PM (#1798509)
    Back in March I started a website that hosts user reviews/linux info/general info, etc for Transmonde laptops. http://transmonde.geek.net/ [cjb.net] A small company in CA, good product, known for supporting Linux, etc. I started it so that people like me could have more independant information about their laptops instead of reading reviews in big magazines and only relying on their website. You might call it a user-group.

    Anyway, a few months ago, some people started getting suspicious of me. I would get e-mail asking if I owned stock in the company, if I worked for them, etc. Transmonde just seems too good to be true. :( There was a thread on usenet about me -- questioning my position in the whole thing. I have not received a single review from anyone ever since that happened. I don't honestly know if it's because of what was said in the thread on comp.sys.laptops or not, but have suspicions.

    Later on (in May/June), I was called a marketing ploy! I don't know what possessed me, but I put up my webcam and gave posted the URL for it, I directed them to a URL that they could look me up as a student of a university in MN (how could a company fake that?), I wrote up an "about me" page as well explaining who I was and why I bought a laptop from Transmonde. I don't know what people think of me anymore, maybe I shouldn't even care; I almost think my credability is damaged forever to the comp.sys.laptops people.

    Just sharing my not-so-similar experience.

    The moral: Your word is meaningless, get over it.

    - Jess

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