MediaDefender — online porn merchant
p2pnet news view Freedom | P2P:- Online scalp-hunter Media Sentry, used by Vivendi Universal, EMI, Warner Music and Sony BMG’s RIAA as its principal ‘investigator’ in the Big 4′s anti-P2P sue ‘em all campaign, was getting all the flak until last week, following revelations from leader in Australia, p2pnet highlighted BayTSP.
Now it’s the turn of MediaDefender, which has never recovered from seeing its confidential material leaked across the length and breadth of the Net.
Widely used by the entertainment cartels for its fake ‘spoof’ and decoy posts, it’s also a purveyor of porn.
“We recently discovered that Mediadefender had (or has) some interesting side projects – selling access to adult sites,” says TorrentFreak, going on:
“From the leaked internal emails we’ve now learned something that wasn’t covered before. MediaDefender was spamming Limewire and other file-sharing networks with thousands of porn related files, trying to convert P2P users into paying porn subscribers.”
The post includes a quote from one of the emails MediaDefender’s Ben Grodsky sent to colleagues, to wit »»»
One of the theories I`ve had about why the LimeWire redirects sell so many porn subscriptions is because one basically can`t get porn on old versions of LimeWire because our popups and spoofs overwhelm the user.
And, the story continues, “in the same email, Adult Friend Finder was mentioned as one of the affiliate programs they were working with, and probably made a lot of cash from.”
This is confirmed by another email, where they discuss the conversion rates, says TorrentFreak’s Ernesto »»»
Adult Friend Finder converts 1 in 2000 on LimeWire. If we want more users, Dylan`s eDonkey messages would get us a lot of Europeans that are a little bit older crowd .
The post continues »»»
MediaDefender also used LimeWire to promote their infamous Miivi project. In one of the emails they discuss how they can drive more traffic to Miivi, and redirect Limewire users to searches on Miivi:
Paris Hilton and Pamela Anderson ARE in the system. Some of these are on the PM2 Data Collection owner sending traffic to our porn site. Any ones sending traffic to our porn site (www.enterallsites.com), you can switch over to the MiiVi links that Colin indicated below.
What`s interesting about this last email is that they don`t only use Adult Friend Finder, but they have their very own porn site, enterallsites.com. Other emails show that this site was advertised by MediaDefender on Limewire and eDonkey too.
It looks like porn was big business for MediaDefender, and we`re curious whether their stock holders are aware of this, since it is never mentioned in any of their financial reports. Thus far, the adult revenue stream has never been mentioned. Nevertheless, traffic reports from Alexa and Compete show that the active advertising stopped directly after the emails leaked September last year.
We assume that MediaDefender stopped advertising their porn projects on LimeWire and other file-sharing networks after the emails leaked, in an attempt to avoid more bad press. They did the same with their Miivi advertising after that project was uncovered. Nevertheless, even without the porn connection being out in the open, their stock price dropped to less than $0.01.
It is worth mentioning that while MediaDefender was selling pron subscriptions to thousands of file-sharers, they were also working with the New York Attorney General to track down child porn downloaders. Nothing wrong with that of course, but we raised our eyebrows when one of MediaDefender`s employees found a suspicious file on The Pirate Bay, and said: I`m trying to download it now from a dedicated server, but it isn`t finding any peers.
Today, “more than a year after the MediaDefender email leak, enterallsites.com is still up and running,” Ernesto notes, adding:
“.Several other adult domains also owned by the company are still redirected to the site as well. With Piracy and Porn, it must be a great working for MediaDefender.”
Definitely stay tuned.
p2pnet highlighted BayTSP – Letter to online scalp-hunter BayTSP, September 17, 2008
confidential material leaked – MediaDefender, Revision3, screw-up, May 29, 2008
TorrentFreak – MediaDefender Secretly Sells Porn to P2P Users, September 20, 2008
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September 22nd, 2008 at 1:37 pm
Good on them
LOL
I wonder what kind me damage we could do to the RIAA
September 22nd, 2008 at 9:21 pm
I wondered why they suddenly stopped pushing the “P2P is a den of porn and needs to be
shut down for the children’ angle.
It’s because they got caught selling what they claimed they were fighting. Nice.
September 22nd, 2008 at 9:25 pm
I suppose it’s not that much different than Prohibition Era politicians
secretly getting rich off of black market booze sales using laws
they crafted to help create that market.