He put together hundreds of Squidoo lenses for companies with major brands and promoted it as a Squidoo product, Brands in Public. In a Squidoo HQ post, Godin reported demanding $400 per month from each of the companies, even though - shades of the future - neither he nor anyone else had permission from the owners to create the pages to begin with. What did the marketing genius do to earn Young’s condemnation? “ From permission marketing fame to cyber greenmail shame, Seth Godin has finally jumped the shark,” according to internet attorney Mike Young. In a notorious initiative, Godin discarded the concept that made him famous:Īd: Baby, It’s You. Other efforts descended from obvious to ridiculous You searched for “shower curtains” and you got a Squidoo catalog of pasted in Amazon products. Seth Godin built a site where anyone with internet access could pluck products from Amazon and sell them freely, gaming the web crawlers for key word dominance. There were no restrictions on marketing excess. Seth Godin at Work Godin has emerged as a skilled writer of inspirational marketing texts, but the results haven’t matched up to the rhetoric. | Source Let’s Look at the Historyįrom inception, although Godin and his partners promoted Squidoo as a place to write about your passions, it was the go to place for marketing products on commission for affiliates, especially Amazon and eBay.Īll the self-proclaimed experts selling strategies for making money on the internet, usually with little or no effort, on autopilot, sent their customers straight to Squidoo. Wikipedia goes on to explain that fraud can be both a civil wrong and a criminal offense. “ Fraud is a deception deliberately practiced in order to secure unfair or unlawful gain.” Being impervious to one’s own inadequacies and failures, as Godin also seems to be, is perfectly legal too.īut taking control of assets belonging to others and leveraging them for your own private profit, while scheming to cut the owners out of their share, isn’t. Of course, being a klutz at marketing management, which Godin certainly is, is not a crime. The mass hates change once the story’s embedded. That Godin retains a reputation for internet marketing brilliance, even after a bumbling of Squidoo that rivals what you’d expect from a failing high school senior, shows us that the blogosphere loves hewing to the ongoing narrative as much as the mass media does. ![]() Here’s my in the middle of the wreck commentary while kicking my way through the ruins… Seth Godin Killed Squidoo: Serious Trespass of Ethics or Worse?Īlready with a history of internet irresponsibility, his actions in laying the final hammer to Squidoo may top his other strange behaviors for their cunning ability to manipulate facts for PR and trusting followers for profit. It’s grisly, but when it comes to horror stories, the death of Squidoo in 2014 was the worst. Squidoo made it personal, for better, then for worse. Good faith counts as much as contracts when you write for the web. Mark’s Square, Venice, Italy, Fine Art Photography Print/© Deborah Julian. One, Seekyt, under new ownership, continues to publish my articles, credited to a different author.īecause the world trusts WordPress, I’ve migrated all my blog content… Some vanish without warning, taking your work (and sometimes royalties) with them. If you’ve been posting as long as I have, you’ve probably seen some gross abuse by website owners. Spammers hurt Squidoo, but writers took the brunt of it… while Godin and HubPages profited.Īssorted Ideas, Large & Small Intro for Seth Godin Killed Squidoo
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