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Nationwide Domain Name/Yard Sign Conspiracy
robertjmoore writes "Everywhere I go lately, I see these lawn signs that say "Single?" and then give a URL with my town's name in it. Being a huge business intelligence geek with too much time on my hands, I decided to track down who was behind them and wound up uncovering ten thousand domain names, a massively coordinated and well-funded guerilla marketing machine, and the $45 Million revenue business hiding behind it all. Hot off the presses, these are my findings."
Has anyone seriously got a date from one of these sites ? It seems Mr. Moore overlooked a vey obvious question in his research.
These signs appear in my neighborhood about once a week in the wee hours of Monday morning. I usually remove about 10 of these signs from my neighborhood by 8:30 am. To date I have disposed of about 250 yard signs. It is illegal to post the yard signs on my property and my fellow home owners property without our permission. Thanks to your research our lawyers will be able to send letters to the proper people now.
I've been wondering the exact same things, but been too apathetic and lazy to do the work.
This is genuinely relevant to my interests, and made my day better.
If you hate them as much as I do, visit this site for tips and contact your local code enforcement office.
Legally, they are no different from litter. If you don't have a permit to leave something in a public place, it's nothing but trash. That said, the neanderthal assholes who post them might not be aware of that* and almost certainly won't be happy if they catch you taking them down, legally right or not, so be careful when picking up trash.
* and I'm sure the assholes who SELL the signs never mention it, either.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Agreed.
What I'd like to see next is this guy taking out the "Crazy Fox" scam. Late-night TV commercials with the same video, namely a poorly-rendered CGI fox, talking about what an awesome home-based-business... yadda yadda yadda. The commercials are identical, except for a random number prefixed or suffixed to the domain name containing the string "crazyfox".
It's obviously a pyramid scheme of some sort, but the mechanism of spamvertizing it is ultimately the same as that employed by the "randomaffiliatename"{singles|dating}.com scam. The only difference is that it uses TV commercials (which are probably the "thing" being "sold" by the people at the top of the pyramid) instead of lawn signs.
Let's think this through:
1. Anyone who wants to get more Obama can go to news.google.com and read through several dozen international news sources, as well as the Huffington Post and Fox "News", and get more than enough of the regular headlines.
2. Slashdot, as a news aggregator, is finding slim pickins on the tech side, as Obamamania sucks the oxygen out of every other news story. Cool for us political wonks, not so cool for CowboyNeal & co.
3. This really is a nationwide conspiracy. Every tiny suburb and exurb of Dallas is frequently spammed by these guys. I thought they were a local outfit, so it's very interesting to see the extent of their reach.
4. The way the guy investigated is cool, and I'm sorely tempted to upgrade my own DomainTools.com account to "paid" status, now that I know that it really works.
5. Last, but CERTAINLY not least, it's about a DATING SITE. Dating, as you may have heard, is part of the mating ritual of Homo Sapiens Solaris, aka "those of us who have emerged from our parents' basements". It involves meeting FEMALES, which is kind of an awesome concept when you think about it. Opportunities for +5 Funny moderations abound (deserved or not).
I think the "Together Dating" guerrilla marketing behemoth, with its sign spam, is reaching the same shallow end of the gene pool that buys enough v1@g@ra to keep our inboxes full of e-spam. Pretty sad. Especially when there's a free dating site that almost certainly generates better results. But I guess some folks think, if you don't pay for it, it's not worth anything. Hopefully, those folks won't be asking me for a date.
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
Has been around since long before the web- this is just their latest marketing technique. I'm actually a somewhat satisfied customer- turned out to be a great way for a geek to get a family, just faxed them my commute map and they introduced me to a gal who became my wife two years later. It helped greatly that her apartment was halfway home on my commute.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Great primary research and very entertaining. Reminds me of the p-p-p-p-power book scandal. Gotta wonder if he had a slow day(s) with his business to do this.
import system.cool.Sig;
More or less agree since the logic is that if you're single, you're somehow worth less than someone who's with someone (i.e. you're a loser). Sort of like if a woman isn't married by 30, she's over the hill.
As far as the money/time/etc is concerned, agreed, it is yours and it is great not having to worry about anyone bouncing a check, spending more than you had planned or a whole host of other things.
The flip side, as you allude to, is that there are those times you want to spend it with someone, whether a football game, a movie or a simply walk in the woods. Then there's the whole human touch thing for those of us who are of the affectionate type. It's especially difficult when you work with a few cuties and your mind has lascivious thoughts of them throughout the day. Not good for work performance.
Then again, dating is like combat so it's not necessarily an easy thing to do.
But then, what do I know? I have an entire region of women who want nothing to do with me unless they want a problem solved.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
In my city, a little old lady was arrested walking down main street placing more of these signs by none other than the chief of police. The signs stopped appearing for awhile, but apparently they got someone to replace her.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
I wonder how secure the database is? Why not just hack into their servers and steal their database, then you'd have thousands of potential dates in every state to hit on, and since you know they're desperate (having submitted their info to one of the sites) you're chances are greatly improved. You could even call them pretending to be from the company and tell them you've found a perfect match for them, then set yourself up on dates with them! When you're all done, you could then sell the whole database to some other sleazy marketing company.
-==- Buy a Mac and leave me alone!
$3600. About $3100 of that was wasted, as I purchased a block of 36 introductions and only used 5.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Nope, never used the remaining 31 introductions, and my local office of Together got sold to something called Relationships NW, which went bankrupt a few months later.
That was 8 years ago.
So the only thing I got out of it was a very satisfying marriage and a little boy with CP who is happy all the time (in fact, that was his first word- happy- amazing that his mother and I, both of whom are very pessimistic people, have a child who is so happy).
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
This line caught my attention in your essay,
No longer is dating an activity to be pursued because one wants to find their 'one and only' but rather, dating is an investment in time.
Like any statement that involves the phrase "these days", "nowadays", and "in this day and age" it is actually the opposite of what is stated. Dating today is probably more about finding the "one and only" than ever before.
Case and point, after my grandfather died and we were sorting out his belongings I had the opportunity to look through some of his old books. I came across a book he had during his college days, the 1950's, that was about college study practices. It had what you would expect in it, good study habits, a disciplined schedule, etc. But the interesting part was that the sample schedule had set aside a few hours each week for dating. Along with that was a whole chapter on proper dating techniques where the entire emphasis was basically about efficiently finding a good mate.
This was over 50 years ago and dating was really this cold interview where you were looking for someone worth your investment. From talking to my grandmother, it was common, and expected, for a person to date many people at once and never really enter into an exclusive relationship until a proposal for marriage. She said she herself was dating several men up until the day my grandfather proposed to her.
And in the centuries before this arranged marriages were quite common, which is as far away from the "true love" thing as it gets.
In conclusion, I would say that throughout the history of civilization, human coupling has been more about pragmatism than romance. Thanks to the luxury of modern life, we don't need to be so pragmatic, so there is more romance involved than any previous time in history.