UK Politician's Cross Border Attempt To Terminate Prostitute Review Site Only Bumps Up Traffic

from the nice-advertising dept

There was some news coverage last week of the UK's "equalities minister" (what the hell is that?), Harriet Harman, asking Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to shut down a prostitute review site called Punternet. As many legal commentators pointed out, this was ridiculous for a variety of reasons -- neither Harman nor Schwargenegger had any legal authority to shut down such a site. However, the really ridiculous thing is that all this request did was give the site a ton of attention. In a press release response, Punternet took issue with many of Harman's claims about the site, and then at the end noted how much she had helped the site's traffic:

How much extra traffic did you get on 30 September, the day the story first broke?

Just over 2.7 million hits, more than double the daily average. Here's the graph from my server statistics for September: http://www.punternet.com/daily_usage_200909.png

One must assume that wasn't Harman's intention. But, honestly, it makes you wonder what sort of politician these days doesn't realize that calling for the shutting down of a site will only boost the traffic to that site by a considerable amount.

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Move Over, Craigslist: Twitter Gets Prostitution Ads

from the didn't-see-this-coming dept

Craigslist has been catching a lot of flack, but Twitter might be next in line for the blame game. A British tabloid discovered that a brothel in England was using the site to advertise its services, and got a quote from a member of parliament labeling it "cynical and inappropriate". It's hard to imagine that this is the only business of its sort using Twitter to stay in touch with its customers, and it just goes to show that whatever media emerge -- from printed flyers to web sites to social-networking sites -- they'll be used to promote any sort of business, including sex-based ones. The brothel's response to the newspaper article is pretty amusing, though: a Twitter coupon, using the paper's name as the discount code. In the meantime, expect to see law enforcement officials start attacking Twitter for "enabling prostitution" in 3... 2... 1....

Carlo Longino is an expert at the Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Carlo Longino and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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