To continue the topic that you can’t make much money from paid blog placements. Last Friday I was on Vesti FM radio, on tuganbaev’s show. During the post-broadcast chit-chat, Askar told me that some “people” had approached a blogger we both know with an offer to “work on Navalny in the blogs.” Supposedly, a budget had been allocated. This mutual acquaintance turned them down, but it was obvious that someone would agree. Yesterday another acquaintance pinged me on ICQ and, with a cheerful chuckle, suggested I type my last name into blog search. A simple bit of research showed that since 12:00 p.m. yesterday, several people had suddenly taken a keen interest in the anti-Navalny blog. The content of the posts being placed was roughly as follows: Someone steals a couple thousand, while someone else swipes millions, all without getting their hands dirty or exerting themselves in the slightest. I came across an entertaining story at http://anti-navalny.livejournal.com/1658.html about “The One-and-a-Half Million Case.” http://vitus15.livejournal.com/929789.html He wrote smoothly and elegantly, but from past experience with detailed exposés, I still couldn’t shake the feeling that we’d soon learn something about our hero—and I wasn’t wrong. According to information kindly provided by anti_navalny, and taken from actual sources (that is, not made up), an interesting though perfectly ordinary story took place in the summer of last year: http://timur-kniazev.livejournal.com/2093507.html Here they lay out the story of a simply marvelous scam. http://anti-navalny.livejournal.com/1658.html?mode=reply Truly, the young colleagues of the Kirov governor are masters of their craft. Mr. Navalny overlooked just one thing: if you’re planning a deception, you need to agree in advance on what lies to tell the public, otherwise inconsistencies pop up. http://sirjones.livejournal.com/1194931.html Apparently this is about shareholder civic activism. But at the very least I’m prepared to agree with the conclusions of his opponents at anti_navalny that this beautiful story—about political struggle against state corporations and so on—“as of today is our hero’s only and main deed, his only supposed victory over the system, the example of his selfless courage and bravery.” http://users.livejournal.com/_lord_/1406876.html Later, just before the Yandex blog rankings closed, Mr. Navalny made noise across the entire Runet (the Russian-language internet) with a post exposing VTB Bank (“How They Loot at VTB”). Let’s try to figure out what kind of “fighter” this is... Interesting information is presented on the anti_navalny blog. http://www.luberblog.ru/post121011061/ and so on. Of course, such astonishing unanimity over such a short period of time could not go unnoticed by outside observers either. One. Two. The funniest part is that I personally know many of these “professional bloggers.” The ones who regularly make a little money from paid placements. Going back to the days of DaDebates. They’re reluctant to lose the money, but also uncomfortable with trashing me. So yesterday a couple of them asked me over ICQ: Listen, you won’t be offended if I link to this anti-Navalny thing, right? It makes no difference to you, and for me it’s a little side income from idiot clients. I wasn’t offended. Why am I bringing this up? Well, they’re smearing me, so they’re smearing me. Strange only that they didn’t do it earlier. I’m neither the first nor the last. What I mean is that this whole smear campaign is itself grounds for some shocking exposés. Do you know how much they pay for a post like that? 100 US dollars. When I found out, I was actually offended at first. It’s indecently little. But then I realized: Effective Managers are at work. An address to them: Dear crooks who paid to “smear Navalny in the blogs”: your order is being carried out by even bigger crooks than you are. No more than 100 dollars per post reaches the actual people doing the work. So when the “experienced PR specialists” you hired bring you a report about how they cooked up an awesome $200,000 PR campaign “through authoritative top bloggers, covering the entire target audience across various blogging platforms,” kick them out. The real expenditure is $3,000. The rest was stolen pocketed by the contractors. PS. So there are no unnecessary hard feelings: of course I do not think that everyone who mentioned anti_navalny in their blog did so for money. I haven’t gone so far into conspiracy theories that I’ve lost my mind. Some people quite genuinely wrote about it too, having also noticed the organized campaign. PPS. In general, over the last few days I’ve been feeling a bit too much strange attention directed at me. If reports suddenly start appearing that I attacked police patrol officers in order to seize their weapons—don’t believe them.
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