Laura Hale: Sole proprietor of a unique marketing opportunity

Meta
Title:	Laura Hale: Sole proprietor of a unique marketing opportunity
Creator:	liviapenn (and commenters)
Date(s):	July 23, 2008
Medium:	online
Fandom:	all
Topic:	archives, fanworks
External Links:	page one, Archived version; page two, Archived version; page three, Archived version
Click here for related articles on Fanlore.

Laura Hale: Sole proprietor of a unique marketing opportunity is a post by liviapenn on Live Journal on July 23, 2008.

There were 210 comments to this post.

From the Original Post

The thing you have to remember about Laura Hale, guys? It's all about the Benjamins....If you read Laura's comments about her wiki, one thing she likes to do is boast about how she has a million billion pages on her wiki, and any new wiki would just be wasting time and energy because hers is so comprehensive, and so on and so forth. Do you know where most of her wiki's pages come from? She has a bot that scrapes profiles from ff.net and creates them as wiki pages, automatically. So basically most of them are worthless, outdated, and random. But it sounds really impressive on her startup proposal, I bet. "A million individual pages on my wiki! A hundred thousand profiles of fans potential customers! Doesn't that sound like a really impressive database of information? Give me money."

Some Topics Discussed

• Fandom and Profit
• Fan History Wiki
• Gift Culture
• outing fans

Excerpts from Comments: Page One

• comment by gwendolyflight ("Great post, I appreciate you taking the time to collect links and pull out the relevant quotes, it sums things up nicely.")

• comment by slodwick ("I linked to this post, because OMG, I want everyone ever to see this. SIGH.")

• comment by ithiliana ("Thank you for this post--it's a wonderful round up of links. Am linking on my journal!")

• comment by ratcreature ("That is so crazy. Also, if this kind of thing worked I'd really want to have some internet scam of my own to make money. Not from my actual hobbies, because after all I want people to get along with me there, and you know, do hobby stuff, but I'd want someone to give me money for a bunch of junk pages about something random too. Unfortunately the realistic chance of getting an income that way seems about as good as from those scam emails that promise me I could earn hundreds of euro every week. Especially if you aren't an asshole essentially sinking to the level of making money through spam ads via faked google ranking pages and scraper bots or something. *woe*")

• comment by liviapenn ("It's pretty unlikely that she ever *will* make money off the wiki. Well, besides the ad revenue, and the aforementioned written-off "business expenses." The venture capital thing seems like a long shot, but who knows-- it only takes one sucker to bite! You kind of have to admire her vision-- 5-7 years ago it was very forward-thinking to already be on the "fandom as internet marketing demographic" bandwagon, wasn't it? But I think that ship has sailed by now I mean, look at the viral/interactive marketing for The Dark Knight-- that's where the cutting edge is now, in terms of engaging fans as a demographic. Comparatively, "lookit my list of names and email addresses, which anyone could scrape off ff.net just like I did," isn't that impressive.")

• comment by liviapenn ("Laura says: That doesn't even begin to get into various other things I have compiled, like lists of LiveJournal communities that you can advertise your in fandom material on, contact lists, private demographic studies I've done, polling data, etc. The potential there for using that from a marketing perspective at fandom is nice." It's kind of shocking to see someone attempting to monetize their fandom experience so *nakedly*-- but honestly, she's got a little bit of a catch-22 there. Companies who don't know anything about fandom won't see the value in her lists, and companies that *do* know the first thing about fandom will realize you can't just spam contact lists and lj comms to make money. I mean, can you imagine how fast most ads would get deleted from most of the comms you know? I can only LOL. I bet Laura Hale doesn't offer refunds if your account gets kicked off LJ because too many pissed-off mods marked your posts as spam.")

• comment by ratcreature ("Also I assume that she'd start to get into legal trouble if she seriously tries to sell "private demographic studies" and "polling data" unless she had the participants agree that there would be reselling for marketing purposes, and I assume she refers to the usual random "surveys" that get constantly posted in fandom by people, usually for some "paper" or another. Then again it's not like she's shy about wanting to do data mining, so for all I know she might have said and people still responded, anything's possible after all. (I mean personally I never participate in any of those surveys and polls, because I *hate* the whole "let's make my hobby into a course credit" approach to fandom for a whole a huge number of reasons, and that's just from academics and aspiring academics doing this crap, rather than people doing market research.)")

• comment by lydia petze ("Something else that occurred to me - when I first stumbled onto the wonderful thing that is online fandom almost a decade ago, I was thrilled and excited that there were other people out there like me. The first thing that crossed my mind was NOT "Hey, how do I make money offa this?"")

• comment by liviapenn ("Yeah. And the thing is, the reason she's been so successful, so far, is that we're not used to thinking this way. Fans trust other fans. We look at polls and ficathons and archives and fannish projects and we don't think of them the way we think about other sites on the internet-- "Hey, if I sign up for this fun little Flash game, are they going to take my email and other information and sell it?" Fans are hard workers. Fans love contributing their time and energy to dream up, make and build awesome things. She's taking advantage of that, basically tricking other people into working for her, for free. What annoys me most, I mean besides ALL of it, is that she's tainting the hard work of every other archivist, organizer, list-mod and comm-founder in fandom who wants to build useful fannish infrastructure-- NOT for our own gain, but just because we like fandom to be easy and well-organized and convenient.")

• comment by elfwreck ("When I first saw her site, I was a bit confused at how... empty... it was. How incomplete. I mean, I know fans love working on projects--especially rough-draft projects that don't ever have a deadline, where you can throw small factoids around and never have to reach any conclusions. We LOVE brainstorming. A wiki is a giant brainstorming project, with research bits. (On Wikipedia, the listing for Malta is about 7500 words. The listing for the Tardis is over 8000. This tells you something about fannish priorities.) A fannish wiki... should be active and thriving. All you'd have to do to make it work, is not enrage huge swaths of fandom.")

• comment by liviapenn ("Maybe I've just been in the right places at the right time, but I keep seeing it over and over-- Laura shows up somewhere, goes "Rah rah rah, fandom history is awesome, let's be awesome, let's all play! Come help contribute to a fannish resource!" (Or, depending on her audience, "Hey, kid! *You* can be the first to write up the wank report! Better get in and set the record straight before your enemies do!") And so people sign up and start editing things, and sometimes this involves deleting a bunch of random entries that don't make a lot of sense, or changing terms that nobody in fandom actually uses (but Laura thinks they SHOULD use) like "ebandom," or getting on the wrong side of one of her grudge-wanks, and Laura flips out and bans them for vandalism. Last time it happened was just-- a few months ago? Or last year sometime-- in Marvel fandom, and I saw some random post on friendsfriends, "Hey guys, since we've all been in X-Men fandom for like, ten years, let's all add stuff into the wiki!" Two days later: someone gets banninated, God knows why, and the rest are like "well, fuck THAT." She sabotages herself over and OVER again...")

• comment by ranalore ("This is so not about the OTW. I know at least two of the fans she's outed thus far aren't part of that organization, because they're deceased, and I know one of them died before the organization was ever announced. This is about LH's total lack of respect for privacy or the wishes of any fan as to what personal information is posted about her publicly and where, and about her desire to profit off of fandom any way she can.")

• comment by liviapenn ("I know it happened to at least one other fan, not sure who, but it definitely happened to thamiris. Who was absolutely NOT out in real life, but after she died, of course people were linked to her obituary and funeral announcement. If you google around, you could probably find her real name. But all of Thamiris' close friends agree 100% that she never would have wanted to be "outed". This is just another case of Laura Hale deciding that if you CAN do something then you SHOULD do something. If you can find the information, then you should post the information! It's pretty sick.")

• comment by cereta ("I'm at the point where I would have to seriously rethink any community that let her post anything more fannish than a cake recipe, and I'm not all that sure about that cake. Jesus.")

• comment by veejane ("The structure and style of the wiki itself is evidence that it is intended to be sold. It's full of information spectacularly useless to its user-base -- unless the user-base is actually advertisers or purchasers of data. (I'm... not sure how useful the data are to that group either, but, at least they might want to know the release date of a movie for every single country on the planet.) The thing that really freaked me out about the wiki was when I heard a rumor -- well-founded, but something of which I have no experience myself -- that Laura does the spyware thing with the IPs that visit her site, and gathers data thereby in a manner that is resoundingly unethical and creepy. That's the real reason I don't visit or link to the wiki. If she were simply a grudgewanky egomaniac, that would be fine -- annoying, but fine --; but the idea that she's a grudgewanky egomaniac with the ability and willingness to stalk me (or anyway, someone more interesting than me) is really bothersome.")

• comment by brown betty ("Usually called a web-bug rather than spyware, and it's not-- Well, I can see why people would be concerned, but it's basic information that is available to almost anyone who hosts their own content. Not intended as a defense, I assure you ever so much, but it's pretty low down the scale of things that are spyware.")

• comment by temaris ("I wondered when I saw her post about driving more readers to Fanlib, and then I saw your link to the techcrunch pitches thing, and everything else and, well. Thank you for rounding all of those up. The whole thing is grotesque, the more I read the more appalled I am. I sincerely hope it all falls apart on her -- it looks like it is. It's fascinating how unanimously people are short circuiting the one thing that might make it succeed anyway: no linking. A very practical shunning.")

• comment by ratcreature ("This whole scheme might have worked better for her if she hadn't tried so hard. I mean, in general people in fandom don't ask for accounting for sites, because who knows or cares whether they operate at a profit or at a loss as long as they are there and good to use. Like, I have no idea for example how ff.net finances itself, whether it just scrapes by with the ads or maybe it makes a profit, or maybe it even looses money, but anyway, it is large, fairly stable, provides a service, and beyond the policy kerfuffles a while back nobody really has any huge issues with it afaik, beyond some fans feeling snobbish about there being more teenagers or whatever. But I think with its traffic and size it's at least possible that it's the kind of site that generates income for the owner and not just covers operating costs. I just don't know, and yet I still read and bookmark fic there, and don't really care, since it's not like they ask for donations from me to keep the site open, afaik. Which is really the main scenario when fans ask about the balance sheets. So if she had just created a site, made sure that the setup was cool enough for it to become popular filling its gossip/history wiki function, and then left it alone to the contributors to do their thing, and let it grow and just slapped ads on the pages without hassling anyone, nobody in fandom would have cared if she kept the money and somehow managed to make it profitable for her.")

• comment by cofax7 ("Even an instant apology and take-down of the wiki and throwing herself at fandom's feet weeping in repentence is not gonna help here. On thinking about it, what killed her more than anything else was her choice of target. Almost any other fan of lesser standing wouldn't have gotten her nearly as much response as this, and maybe--just maybe--she might have gotten away with it, if she'd had the balls to stick it out. Instead she had to go after the biggest and most beloved BNF around. Because (I think) she resents her the most, for everything she has gained and for everything she has given to fandom. Woops.")

• comment by elfwreck ("I think a substantial portion--maybe even the majority--of the outrage is not because she's unethical (fandom often has a frightening tolerance for sleazy behavior; see fandom_wank), but because she's been stupid about it. "Profit from fandom" isn't a sin; Paramount makes millions from us. "Make a website you claim will benefit all of fandom, and instead slant it to your own purposes" is so common we ought to have a cute fannish buzzword for it. (Can we call it fanhissing in the future?) "Out people" is indeed the big no-no, but it's brushed over if someone apologizes... even if they do it again. And occasionally, news articles do so, and there's no great outcry to boycott that magazine/newspaper/website forever because of it. What we're mostly reacting to is her hubris. Her claim that she can do all these things, and in fact is doing them, and doing them well. And that claim, we won't let stand. We don't mind our villains, but we do insist they be competent. Or funny. And nobody's laughing.")

• comment by elfwreck ("Have dim memories of people at sci-fi conventions mentioning to me that they'd been interviewed by some magazine or newspaper, which blithely mentioned them as both "realname" and "also known as fanname," mildly outing their gaming or online ID. The concept that the names shouldn't have been mentioned together is apparently hard to get across to reporters. It was always brushed off as a nuisance--this was pre-www-internet, when such info didn't spread so widely. Publishing someone's name and popular alias is not a violation of privacy; it's just rude to do so w/o permission. Like saying, "oh, Shawna, did you get anywhere with that cute boy with the tongue piercing on Saturday night?" at work. No laws broken, but dammit, people with a remote sense of politeness just don't.")

Excerpts from Comments: Page Two

• comment by telesilla ("I actually think there is a grudge element here too and I think she used that to get people who have more legitimate issues with OTW to be on her side. Sure, her primary issue was to sell herself/FH, but she's also a wanky, grudgy kind of person.")

• comment by liviapenn ("I'm sure she learned that from being anti-Cassie Claire all this time. There's always people who will ignore how crazy and rancid you are because they're so desperate for someone to Bravely Speak Truth To Power! and Say What Everyone Else Is Afraid To Say! and Call Out Those Mean Old BNFs! and so on. Now that Cassie Claire is old news, the OTW is her new boogeyman. ETA: And I know there are people who are currently framing *this discussion* as that same thing-- poor, persecuted Laura Hale, being bullied and witch-hunted by the OTW, and so on. Completely ignoring, of course, that many anti-OTW and OTW-neutral fans also feel that it's not quite kosher to out other fans against their wishes, and to mislead other fans into donating time and energy into your personal cash-cow project, and to bribe your friends into purposely inciting wank in order for you to get more page hits, and so on and so forth.")

• comment by franzeska ("I've seen plenty of non-OTW people who are quite irritated to be lumped in with that sort of revolting behavior.")

• comment by fourteen lines ("LH's unending vitriol toward OTW suddenly makes sense. They're doing what she wanted to do - in fact, they're doing MORE than she wanted to do! - they're doing it better, AND they're doing it for free!")

• comment by myln ("I apologize if this has already been said (lots of comments here), but in case it hasn't: doesn't it violate LJ's TOS to use LJ material for personal monetary gain? I would think that the business of LJ would be rather ticked at their own information (lists of communities/interests) being sold by an outsider.")

• comment by dodger winslow ("Interesting stuff. Perhaps most interesting to me, as someone with a 20-year career in advertising/marketing strategy, is that she's made the inner bones of her venture capital proposals transparent enough for this information to become public within fandom circles. Even when advertising has no nefarious intent or negative consequence to the target demographic, it can still seem very manipulative and ethically deficit to industry outsiders, in particular ... often because it is manipulative and vaguely ethically deficit, even when it also benefits the target market by creating access opportunities to products they want that would not otherwise be available to them. But that her bottom-line agenda/strategy is being outlined not only where her market can access that information for public dissemination, but also in terms that are so specifically and unapologetically predatory of the market she's seeking to represent? That actually taps into some deeper issues that imply she's a little short on more than just tact and common sense. Sounds to me like she could use a marketing consultant to advise her what kind of things she shouldn't say in public as a marketing consultant.")

• comment by manna ("As someone who suffered through her research posts on FCA-L, I'm going with that. She's copying being a web entrepreneur in exactly the same way that she tries to copy being an academic, and in both cases she's failing miserably.")

• comment by heidi8 ("She tends to interprit such statements as "threats to sue" which "justifies" her locking down one's wiki page and banning one from any editing. There was (maybe still is but I won't look) criticism of me in there for "threatening to sue" when all I'd done was note that somerhing might be a violation of libel laws.")

• comment by blamebrampton (" I suppose that the most logical response is just to make the OTW wiki quite good and detailed.")

• comment by karthur ("At first glance, I thought it was an innocuous fan project for those with too much time on their hands. Now I know the truth.")

• comment by knitmeapony ("...is someone starting a wiki to try to undercut her? We just need one strong place for people to go that isn't being used to line someone's pockets. I've administrated wikies before on my domain; I don't have time to run it but I'd give the keys to trustworthy folk.")