How Digital Media Companies Inflate Numbers to Get Investors | Joe Rogan & Tim Pool

But let's talk about clicks. One of the things we talked about the other day is traffic assignment. So I know you asked me they're fighting for their lives. It's a serious issue, but I'd just like to point out their lives never existed in the media space. Yeah, please explain that because that was one of the most illuminating aspects of our conversation on the phone. Yeah. It's publicly known, but not talked about a whole lot, that these media organizations, mostly these digital new startups, don't actually get a lot of views. So what they do is it's called traffic assignment. There's a company called Comscore that tracks the viewership, the unique views these sites have. If you're trying to attract investment and you say, we get 20 million views per month, they're going to say, that's cool, but this site gets 60. What do they do? Well, there are some sites, this is according to Variety, modernfarmer.com. What is that? I have no idea. I've never heard of it. But there are many sites which you've probably seen where it's like the top 25 celebrities who mess up their makeup. You click the page and it'll show you a photo. In order to see the next photo, you got to click the next page. That way they turn you, one person, to 25 unique views. Or 25 views, I don't want to say unique. Then a company like Vice, for instance, will buy the assignment of your traffic and attribute it to themselves. So when the Comscore numbers come out, it will say all of those views from those clickbait sites are actually Vice. That's fucking crazy. There was a controversy a bit. Again, I'm quoting Variety here, I don't want to get sued, but Variety said that their traffic went down 17 percent because someone they were buying traffic assignment from was like going through turmoil and being shaken up. Another one of their traffic assignment partners switched to, I think, got sold to NBC or something. So what ends up happening? Well, I can say a little bit. There was a company that was a prominent digital news outlet. I knew someone there who was decently high up who told me our company is contemplating whether or not we should engage in traffic assignments to inflate our numbers. And I said, don't do it. That's wrong. And they said, but we need investment. So I wonder if, is that fraud? But if Comscore is just lumping the numbers together, and I go to you and say, according to Comscore, our network brings in 60 million. I didn't lie. That's all true. Yes, that's true. So here's what happens. These companies get massive investment. They don't actually generate enough clicks or enough money. Then once the investment runs out, those jobs never existed. Those were those were padded by investors. So God, that's squirrely. Everything collapses. It seems like fraud. It does to me. That seems like if that was, if you were doing that with some tech stock. Yep. Yeah, right? Yep. Yeah. Is it a click? The one else or something like that. You know, I was told by another individual who was at one of these digital companies that he felt like what we were seeing was akin to the securities problem that the mortgage back securities from 2008. That's a better analogy. Right. That's what he said. He said, think about this. These big companies, these big investment, hundreds of millions of dollars, $200 million invested into these digital media outlets because they're seeing these numbers, but underneath there's nothing there. It's crazy. So if you're investing money, say if you've got some cash, you've worked your ass off and you've generated a lot of money and you're like, look, we're going to get into the digital space. We have a website that has 90 million clicks and we're going to take that and then you find out you just got fucking hosed. How is that not fraud? Because buyer beware. Well, because there's laws that legalize fraud. You know, here's the thing, right? Is it a law? Is it a law? Is that the correct way? It's an interesting loophole. It's not fraud because they didn't lie to you. They didn't deceive you. You had every opportunity to look at those numbers and see where they came from to understand what their network was. Okay. Well, that may be the case, but the act of doing it and the act of the fact that you can do it and really you're getting modern. It's fucking crazy shady. But I'll tell you what, something else too. And I say this with the utmost respect for Shane Smith who, you know, I worked at Vice. We've gone out for drinks. They flew me out. I love Shane. He's cool, dude, but he's brilliant. Absolutely brilliant. He is a master of, I don't know what you'd call it, but it's a form. So I grew up with a bunch of hacker buddies in a small little hacker community and social engineering is something that I've been relatively well versed in. And Shane, whether he knows it or not, really, really understands how people think and how to get them to do things. So I'll give you a fascinating example. I left Vice in 2014. And after I left, some of the people I had brought on through recommendation were still there. This buddy of mine says, dude, good news. I'm going to be running, I'm going to be helping produce the news program for the cable channel. I was like, wow, congratulations. Does that mean you're moving to Toronto? He goes, why would I move to Toronto? And I was like, to work on the cable channel. This is back in 2014. He goes, what are you talking about? We're getting a cable channel. We're going to work on the news show. And I was like, dude, it was a Rogers deal. The cable channels in Canada, it wasn't a couple years later till they got the US based channel. But what happened was a bunch of my friends who worked at Vice didn't know the cable channel they got was based in Canada, but they believed they were going to be working on a cable channel in the US. That's important because you need people to really want to work there and be passionate. And Shane was a master of giving you just enough information so that you believed in what you were doing without realizing it's actually not that great. I'm not trying to be a dick. I think Shane's fantastic. I don't blame him for this, but it's clever. You get a bunch of employees who believe they're going to be on this big new American cable channel. Well, Shane never said American. He just said cable channel. It's your fault for assuming it was going to be in America. But that meant a lot to those employees. So you're able to boost morale, get everybody really excited until they find out I was in Canada. And then they were like, wait, what? But eventually they did get their US channel, but that's, you know, Shane's, he's brilliant. He really is. He's a, he's, you ever play civilization in the video game? No, it's fantastic. I love this game. I'm playing Civ six right now. And you can get, they're called great people. They're called great people that if you earn enough points, you'll get like, you'll get like Galileo. He'll appear in your civilization. Use him. I firmly believe that in a hundred years, the next, you know, civilization 50, you'll be able to earn a great merchant to Shane Smith because of how I, you know, he was able to build this empire. He did it through very clever ways of getting investment. And admittedly, I really liked the stuff they used to do back in the day. I think the guys, wow, he knows how to do it. And the reason I bring them up is because the big story about traffic assignment was Vice losing like 17% because of that practice they were doing. So he really knew how to do the smoke and mirrors, you know? But when you look at the other, when you look at how it pays out, pans out to all the other news outlets, then it's laid off. You have to one, you don't have to wonder why a thousand jobs just got lost in the past week. It's just investment money. And once they reached their threshold at all, you know, came crashing down. God, the modern farmer example, like the modern farmer, what is it? I think it's just the clicks, just the fact that you can actually buy those clicks and attribute them to something different. And then you can tell people in the way, oh, how many views I got? Yeah. So I could go out and do that and send them over to Joe Rogan.com. Yeah. Oh yeah. And there's other really clever things too. Like I don't think this one is on par, but make, you have one YouTube channel with a thousand subs, make 10 more, ask all your subs to subscribe. Now you've got 10,000 subs. Get it? Right. Same thousand people, 10 times. And you've got, you go around telling people, I've got 10,000 subscribers, when in reality it's just a thousand people on 10 channels. So there's really clever ways to inflate your numbers and this attracts investment. It also, but more importantly, it allows leverage in dealing with ad, with ad buyers and ad networks. What are you doing when they're boosting up their Instagram numbers? I don't know a lot about Instagram. I'm trying to pull it up. I can't show you right now. I just went to a website, buy YouTube views.com for $2,800. You can have a million views. But there's good reasons to do it. Not if you want to be a YouTuber. If you want to be successful on YouTube buying views, insurers, you will never make it. But look at it this way. No one do this. I am not advocating for what I'm about to explain. Film 10 videos, a full season of the Joe Rogan travel adventure. Buy a million views on each to be padded out over a month. Go to A&E. Look at this show we launched. Million views per episode. You want to buy it? Wow. It's got a bunch of fans. A million people watch easy episodes. Fantastic. You see what I mean? Yes. Well, if you're full of shit, it's a good move. Yeah. But hey, man, there are people who, it's snake oil. There's people who do this. But here's the thing. You get access to a network with real views. Yeah, you'll get traffic. If you can trick your way into getting on TV, fake it till you make it. It's dirty. It's illegal. Is it illegal? That's fraud. Well, actually, I don't know if that... I don't think it is fraud. If buying the clicks like that... I think New York. There was someone sent me an article that the Attorney General of One State, it may have been New York, said misrepresenting yourself online through fake views, clicks, and likes is illegal. I think what they were saying is that using other people's images to create fake accounts is like invasion of privacy or something. But we're getting to that point. But there's people who play that game, I guess. You can really pull it off. I've met a lot of people who... There's a bunch of tricks, man.