PayPerPost Are Getting Ugly, But More The Point I Love A Good Cat Fight.
Michael Arrington over at Techcrunch has post a very interesting article today about PayPerPost and how they reacted to a rejection by a potential employee and also how they are not happy with Arrington at all.
A couple of weeks ago Arrington wrote a post about how PayPerPost CEO Ted Murphy took all employees on an all-expenses-paid offside to Club Med, where they got drunk, inexplicably dressed up as Native Americans (complete with red face paint) and then posted video of the whole racially offensive episode on the web. Normally I like to head out and get quite drunk with a few friends, but on company money and then acting innappropriately, not the best idea for a company that needs to base itself around a very professional image.
Now it is reported that PayPerPost have been very unprofessional towards a potential employee. I am not going to go into all the details, but they can be found on Techcrunch.
An interesting twist however to the whole story is that PayPerPost seem to have turned nasty now on Arrington. One of the PayPerPost VC’s, John Stein at Draper Fisher Jurvetson, has been pitching bloggers to write post saying Techcrunch has gone too far with his criticisms. PayPerPost think they are a very real threat to Techcrunch but I think this cant be further from the truth. Techcrunch as far as Im aware doesnt receive payments for reviews, but this is the key principle behind PayPerPost.
If someone from PayPerPost does read this article I would really like to know how they think they might be a real threat to Techcrunch and their key fundamental business!
1 Comment
Hey Steven,
I’ve blogged, advertised and invested with PPP. The competition between Mike/TechCrunch and PPP is pretty straightforward. The same reader that reads a gatekeeper blog like TC, also reads 20+ niche blogs based upon their varied interests. Thus, every single day sponsors are deciding whether to spend social media marketing dollars with a gatekeeper like TechCrunch or the long-tail via PPP to reach social media readers.
The more Mike can slow PPP’s progress the longer he can maintain gatekeeper status. The more progress PPP makes proving their ROI with sponsors and bloggers, the more Mike is disintermediated as a gatekeeper to social media readers.
This disintermediation of gatekeepers is a common theme in many industries and the gatekeepers always try hard to slow the inevitable.
Just my thoughts…I hope it helps.