TechCrunch’s Editorial Slip

Today visiting TechCrunch I found a rather curious article titled “The Secret Strategies Behind Many ‘Viral’ Videos.” The first thing that caught my attention was the fact that it was a guest article, as these are quite rare on the popular tech blog.

When I proceeded to read the article I was even more intrigued. It was basically outlining some controversial, to say the least, techniques that you could use to make your videos viral (making it reach the “Most Viewed” page on YouTube). The tips included using beautiful women to add some sex appeal, paying people to post about your video, using misleading titles and creating conversations in the comment section between fake users that you create yourself.

Wow, what can I say? As you can imagine, the comments over TechCrunch went wild. An interesting one was coming from Mike Arrington himself, he said: “I will post a longer response to this later, but frankly I’m disgusted by this.”

We don’t know for sure yet, but apparently the post was published without his editorial approval.

Here are some other comments that followed:

So basically it’s all about using various forms of spam? Classy.

unethical, wrong, dishonorable, immoral, debauched, degenerate, degraded, dissipated, dissolute

I didn’t know Stanford had a “Spamming 101″ class (The guest author studies at Stanford)

The author of the article than posted a comment to address the questions from the readers, here is what he wrote:

What we do is grease the viral wheels. If that means commenting back and forth between fake users, who cares? It’s all about entertainment - we’re just making the whole experience entertaining, not just the video itself.

Rough Thanksgiving day for TechCrunch huh? Now you know why I wrote the article Put Honesty and Integrity Above Everything Else a couple of days ago.

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Daniel Scocco on November 22, 2007 | Filed Under Blogosphere

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14 Responses to “TechCrunch’s Editorial Slip”

Brown Baron on November 22nd, 2007 3:04 pm

That’s surprising. It’s obviously not the kind of article you would expect to see on TC. I bet the commenters are having a field day with that one.
Jay on November 22nd, 2007 4:19 pm

The real issue behind this post is how TechCrunch and Arrington positioned it. The post itself is fine - though it starts off way to commercial.

Shame on Arrington - how could this be posted without his approval, isn’t he the founder and Co-Editor?

Arrington, Ignorance is no plea…
Andy Beard on November 22nd, 2007 6:52 pm

It is not as controversial as it could be, after all they are actually logging in and making the comments themselves.
There are tools that automatically boost page views and copy comments from related videos automatically.

You should also read later in the comments when Mike was called out for making a controversial early comment.

Do you really think he has no prior knowledge of the content that is published?

If you haven’t noticed Techcrunch’s feed counter hasn’t been going up recently.
Hi-Tech-IT on November 22nd, 2007 7:15 pm

A lot of the internet is based on viral marketing and “buzzing”.
Maki on November 22nd, 2007 8:05 pm

It’s just not possible that anything is posted on such a high value property without first knowledge by Arrington.

Hendrickson confirms it here. Like another commenter said, Arrington is just playing us like a fiddle. It wasn’t an editorial slipup.
JackBook.Com on November 22nd, 2007 8:31 pm

yeah, it’s just another mike arrington trick i guess.
and one thing for sure is that the post make it on dailyblogtips.
it means the post works
Phamen on November 22nd, 2007 10:29 pm

So surprise. Thanks for your post.
Daniel on November 23rd, 2007 12:48 am

Well they have 2 editors there now.

Anyway yeah I don’t exclude that they meant to post this in the first place.
Mark on November 24th, 2007 8:30 am

I read the article. In a backhanded way it was a good smack in the head to help us get over the myth of ‘viral’ videos all being amateur-generated.

The worst part of the post, to me, was that it was a blatant piece of self-promotion by a smug punk. It surprised me that it was there for *that* reason.
Pony on November 25th, 2007 6:05 am

It seems odd to me that there would be no editorial control over something as visible as techcrunch. Add me to the they-did-it-on-purpose camp.
Reverse Funnel System Blog on November 26th, 2007 5:47 am

Thats interesting, thanks for this post
runawaybox on April 2nd, 2008 7:49 pm

We made a parody video of the Ackerman video. Check it out and let us know what you think!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-0EQ5HYPz1w