How I Got On Vice for $12
A few weeks ago I heard an interesting talk from Showtime’s Mark McKinnon. McKinnon is a career political operative-turned documentary filmmaker, and one of the creators of Showtime’s “The Circus”
McKinnon claimed that the key to media coverage, and the key to Trump’s success was a simple storytelling framework.
It went a little like this (I’m paraphrasing):
Identify threat or solution: Terrorism, job losses, crime.
Identify the villian(s): Hillary Clinton, Illegal Immigrants, the media, China, and radical Islam.
Reveal the hero: Donald J. Trump.
Identify the opportunity: Make American Great Again. Bring back jobs. Secure the border.
Identify the victims: Middle-class Americans.
Identify the solution: Build a wall. Make great deals. Drain the swamp.
It seemed like a very simple model, but I was eager to test it out. Luckily, a good opportunity presented itself in early December.
I was studying for an exam when I noticed an unusual spike in traffic on one of my sites. Further investigation led me to see it was fake traffic, spam by a fame-hungry Russian hacker. He was ruining the data of thousands of websites simply to make himself famous, and making himself an enemy of webmasters everywhere in the process.
I was annoyed, but then I remembered something I’d seen go viral a few times this electoral season:
- Someone on the internet would find a domain name of a villain to be unregistered.
- They’d register it to something that villain likes least.
- As one fellow UChicagoan would put it, hilarity ensues.
I decided to give it a try.
I registered the .com domain for the name of the Russian spammer who’d become the enemy of the web ($12), redirected it to a not-so-nice urban dictionary definition.
I then wrote an open letter (on the blog affected) to this spammer, offering to redirect the domain if he stops spamming.
Lastly, I emailed a carefully worded story to a Vice reporter who’d previously written about the spammer, based on McKinnon’s framework. The whole process took 25–30 minutes.
The framework looked something like this:
Identify threat or solution:Spam, loss of valuable data.
Identify the villian(s): This one Russian spammer.
Reveal the hero: Me.
Identify the opportunity: Stop this spammer, once and for all.
Identify the victims: Website owners, small business owners, etc.
Identify the solution: Use domain arbitrage to pressure the spammer into stopping.
Which led to an email something like this:
Subject line: Shutting down [spammer name]
Hey [reporter],
I think I figured out how to take [spammer name] out of commision. I’m going to hit him where it hurts, the one thing he loves most: his name.
I bought his name’s .com domain, and I will redirect it to [not-so-nice thign] until he agrees to stop spamming people’s analytics. I wrote him an open-letter explaining the trade he can make.
What do you think?
Best,
Michael
And the next morning, my letter and personal website were linked to on Vice.com, and the reporter used precisely the narrative I gave him.
Just to be clear, this is not an article critiquing the media, or saying that this reporter did anything wrong.
I was 100% honest with him, and he published a true story that had a pedigree of getting read, which is the incentive that writers work towards these days.
I just think it’s worth noting how easy (and cheap) it is to game the system, and how well McKinnon’s framework works in practice.
In retrospect, I wish I’d handled this a bit differently. I don’t love having this article in my name. I think it was a really compelling experiment though.
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And here’s a [slightly redacted] excerpt from the article:
As for why [spammer] is pushing analytics spam, part of it is about “personal glory. I like my name — [spammer name] and want that it was known,” he previously told Motherboard.
With that in mind, some victims of the spam want to stop [spammer] for good.
“I think I figured out how to take [spammer name] out of commission. I’m going to hit him where it hurts, the one thing he loves most: his name,” Michael Sitver, a “maker” and political science student at the University of Chicago, told Motherboard in an email.
Sitver has purchased [spammername].com, and in an open letter says he will redirect the domain to wherever Popov wants. As long as Popov agrees to stop spamming Google Analytics, that is.
“I’ll even redirect it to the website of your favourite person, [a certain controversial politician],” Sitver writes.
However, at the time of writing, [spammername].com redirects visitors through to the Urban Dictionary’s page on “[a certain word].”
“someone being arrogant, rude, obnoxious, or just a total [removed]…” the entry reads.
This article originally appeared on my quiet little blog, Unimportant thoughts.
