Puff Pieces as a Service (Fake Articles for Sponsors to Link to)
Channel Futures and Red Hat Summit, money seems to have changed hands
YESTERDAY we issued two critical articles about mainstream or national media generally sucking and looking for even worse options [1, 2].
The "tech media" is no better and probably a lot worse. In the past we wrote about sites that Red Hat paid for puff pieces (they don't even deny this!) and today we focus on Channel Futures, not because it's the only one doing it; it is just the current example or a blueprint.
We're going to use screenshots to make the point, showing publicly-visible pages and what they tell us.
Channel Futures explain that they "provide comprehensive marketing-as-a-service offerings via our Informa Engage platform which is used by today’s leading ICT providers, advertisers and sponsors to better communicate directly with their trusted channel partners."
In their own words:
They're pushing those notorious "media kits" that we covered here in the past in relation to Linux Foundation and others.
Here is what clients pay for:
It looks like Red Hat paid them for these puff pieces, e.g. [ 1, 2], or sent on a plane trip with hotel stays etc. The EPO habitually did this to buy itself favourable "coverage".
Pure stenography:
Red Hat later links to those puff pieces that it probably bought. This is from two days ago in redhat.com:
This is a very rogue "industry". More people need to talk about it because the Web is getting drowned out by dishonest (paid-for) garbage, not honest analyses/opinions. People cannot make informed choices when some rogue industry is paid to lie for brands. █