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"I didn't know that black-hat content marketing existed" (from the Twitter thread) I haven't laughed so hard in months :))) I've talked with over 150 founders

"I didn't know that black-hat content marketing existed" (from the Twitter thread) I haven't laughed so hard in months :))) I've talked with over 150 founders (I'm running a website that deals with acquisition channels & user growth [1]) and this is like uncovering 0.01% of what's going on out there. I became friends with some of these founders, and some of them admitted that a significant part of their growth was "paying for being featured in publication X" Don't get me wrong, I'm against this "black hat content marketing" practice, but let's also consider the other perspective: a) 80% of the content on publications like TechCrunch [2] is all about Google/Apple/Tesla/Virgin. I challenge, you go there RIGHT NOW. COUNT the % of stories about FAANG companies. As the markets go into a "winner takes all" mode, these publications only cover the big winners. So people only hear about them, which amplifies the whole "winner takes all" thing, and the vicious circle continues. Some of these big publications have made "attempts" to be "indie-friendly", but that's one big BS. I won't name the company I contacted (it's a biger publication). I basically told them: Hey guys, got an interesting article that was featured on HN front page 3 days ago, can I do a deeper piece for your publication? Their answer: "Oh, that's great, go to our sister website X.com, we feature non-FAANG there". X.com was a website that wasn't even in the Alexa top 1M list. I also have some doubts that the OP has removed some bigger publication names (maybe afraid of getting sued? No idea). My point is: As publications get more "closed", the incentive for getting there via other means is going to get bigger. [1] https://www.firstpayingusers.com https://www.firstpayingusers.com [2] https://techcrunch.com https://techcrunch.com

troydavis 6y ago
> I also have some doubts that the OP has removed some bigger publication names (maybe afraid of getting sued? No idea). Just for completeness: I have not. This is everything I have near-certainty of. I omitted 2 or 3 possible authors who I'm not sure of because I'm not willing to accuse someone with less than near-certainty (where certainty would be their admission). If I knew anything else, I'd have posted it. Maybe more importantly, I don't have any reason to believe publishers knew this was happening, and have every reason to believe the opposite. Many of these blogs take transparency and disclosure really seriously.
ztusers 6y ago
I remember a big-tech publications (TechCrunch or VentureBeat) fired one author who was caught getting paid by startups. This was 3-5 years ago.
masswerk 6y ago
Anecdotally, my website has apparently cracked some SEO metrics threshold, as I'm enjoying the questionable honour of receiving various offerings on a daily basis. These are from agencies either directly asking for link placements, or offering payed posts, or, the other way round, offering ready made content (which may or may not contain an endorsement of some kind, most probably the latter). One thing these have in common is that those are the most stubborn cold call campaigns, I've ever seen. They do not give up, there's a 7th and 8th followup on an answered mail, eventually turning towards the passive-aggressive side. (While, clearly, they couldn't be bothered to have just a quick look at the site in question, just to recognise, how inappropriate and meaningless their advances are.) There seems to be quite a flourishing industry behind this. (Not so serious theory regarding overconfident influencers: Maybe they are just copying the style of the agencies, they get their pay checks from.)
- nitrogen 6y ago
  Do you happen to know if the follow-up emails were manual or scheduled/automated? I think it'd be interesting if someone actually wrote 8 automated follow-up emails and deliberately went aggressive in the later automated steps. Maybe that actually works enough times to be worth it?
  - walrus01 6y ago
    You've obviously never got into the CRM system radar of a low level sales person at Cogent.
  - iuguy 6y ago
    It's mostly automated. They'll use tools to dump out data based on search metrics into an Airtable or Google spreadsheet, then templates for the mail stages and tools to send and track opens.
- walrus01 6y ago
  Without naming your site or sharing any details, would you be willing to share how many daily unique visitors you are getting that it has reached over this threshold?
solumos 6y ago
I used to know an e-commerce startup founder whose entire growth strategy was focused on this brand of "grey hat" backlinks SEO. He was a Forbes contributor and tried to get stuff published in high domain authority sites pretty frequently through "content partnerships" or other means. The e-commerce startup ended up failing. Now he runs an SEO agency that focuses on backlink building.
dang 6y ago
> I haven't laughed so hard in months :))) Please don't be a jerk in HN comments. We're trying for a different quality of discussion here. The rest of your comment would be just fine without that swipe. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- ship_it 6y ago
  Whats wrong expressing your feelings on thread and writing about it? Humans are now jerks ironically laughing at things? Okay. :)
  - dang 6y ago
    When you're laughing at how wrong someone else is (or you assume they are) on the internet, the default is that this is a snarky way of putting them down. If your intention is different from that, this is good, but then the burden is on you to express your feelings in a way that disambiguates your comment from the default. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=disambiguate%20burden%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
- techslave 6y ago
  I don’t see a problem with it. It says more about the comment author than it does about the article. If he (commenter) wants to out himself as a knowitallogist, so be it?
erostrate 6y ago
> a) 80% of the content on publications like TechCrunch [2] is all about Google/Apple/Tesla/Virgin. I challenge, you go there RIGHT NOW. COUNT the % of stories about FAANG companies. For the lazy, I did just that, 19 stories under the "latest" Tag, 7 of which are about Google/Apple/Tesla/Virgin/Microsoft. So about 36%.

troydavis 6y ago

> I also have some doubts that the OP has removed some bigger publication names (maybe afraid of getting sued? No idea). Just for completeness: I have not. This is everything I have near-certainty of. I omitted 2 or 3 possible authors who I'm not sure of because I'm not willing to accuse someone with less than near-certainty (where certainty would be their admission). If I knew anything else, I'd have posted it. Maybe more importantly, I don't have any reason to believe publishers knew this was happening, and have every reason to believe the opposite. Many of these blogs take transparency and disclosure really seriously.

ztusers 6y ago

I remember a big-tech publications (TechCrunch or VentureBeat) fired one author who was caught getting paid by startups. This was 3-5 years ago.

masswerk 6y ago

Anecdotally, my website has apparently cracked some SEO metrics threshold, as I'm enjoying the questionable honour of receiving various offerings on a daily basis. These are from agencies either directly asking for link placements, or offering payed posts, or, the other way round, offering ready made content (which may or may not contain an endorsement of some kind, most probably the latter). One thing these have in common is that those are the most stubborn cold call campaigns, I've ever seen. They do not give up, there's a 7th and 8th followup on an answered mail, eventually turning towards the passive-aggressive side. (While, clearly, they couldn't be bothered to have just a quick look at the site in question, just to recognise, how inappropriate and meaningless their advances are.) There seems to be quite a flourishing industry behind this. (Not so serious theory regarding overconfident influencers: Maybe they are just copying the style of the agencies, they get their pay checks from.)

nitrogen 6y ago
Do you happen to know if the follow-up emails were manual or scheduled/automated? I think it'd be interesting if someone actually wrote 8 automated follow-up emails and deliberately went aggressive in the later automated steps. Maybe that actually works enough times to be worth it?
- walrus01 6y ago
  You've obviously never got into the CRM system radar of a low level sales person at Cogent.
- iuguy 6y ago
  It's mostly automated. They'll use tools to dump out data based on search metrics into an Airtable or Google spreadsheet, then templates for the mail stages and tools to send and track opens.
walrus01 6y ago
Without naming your site or sharing any details, would you be willing to share how many daily unique visitors you are getting that it has reached over this threshold?

solumos 6y ago

I used to know an e-commerce startup founder whose entire growth strategy was focused on this brand of "grey hat" backlinks SEO. He was a Forbes contributor and tried to get stuff published in high domain authority sites pretty frequently through "content partnerships" or other means. The e-commerce startup ended up failing. Now he runs an SEO agency that focuses on backlink building.

dang 6y ago

> I haven't laughed so hard in months :))) Please don't be a jerk in HN comments. We're trying for a different quality of discussion here. The rest of your comment would be just fine without that swipe. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

ship_it 6y ago
Whats wrong expressing your feelings on thread and writing about it? Humans are now jerks ironically laughing at things? Okay. :)
- dang 6y ago
  When you're laughing at how wrong someone else is (or you assume they are) on the internet, the default is that this is a snarky way of putting them down. If your intention is different from that, this is good, but then the burden is on you to express your feelings in a way that disambiguates your comment from the default. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=disambiguate%20burden%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
techslave 6y ago
I don’t see a problem with it. It says more about the comment author than it does about the article. If he (commenter) wants to out himself as a knowitallogist, so be it?

erostrate 6y ago

> a) 80% of the content on publications like TechCrunch [2] is all about Google/Apple/Tesla/Virgin. I challenge, you go there RIGHT NOW. COUNT the % of stories about FAANG companies. For the lazy, I did just that, 19 stories under the "latest" Tag, 7 of which are about Google/Apple/Tesla/Virgin/Microsoft. So about 36%.