That Commenter Is A Fake....But His Work Really Helps With The Comment Count

Paul Colgan reveals The Punch has readers who post dozens of comments under as many as 21 fake names. Colgan acknowledges one faker was allowed to keep posting comments at The Punch for at least two days after his japery was uncovered.

He thinks he knows who's responsible :

He’s bald, wears socks with sandals and lives with his mum. He surfs the internet from his bedroom, where on the wall is a pennant hung on an angle commemorating North Melbourne’s 1975 Grand Final win. He eats tinned asparagus and has a haphazard collection of Star Wars action figures in which the prize item is a Millennium Falcon but its radar dish broke off years ago.

The comment faker is, more likely, working out of a Melbourne PR office.

The Punch is certainly not the first News Limited blog to be infected by fake commenters pumping anti-green propaganda, or pro-war talking points.

At least one News Limited blog has even been known to publish comments by the girlfriend of the blogger, writing under an assumed identity, defending his opinions.

Another News Limited blog has knowingly allowed federal politicians to attack their enemies under fake names, and that blog has a particular blind spot for the fake comment work of staffers and advisors of Liberal and National Party politicians, particularly when they're in agreement with the blogger.

So far, no typing cats have yet claimed responsibility for recent comment faking at The Punch.


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The Harsh Online Reality For The Corporate Media Is That There Simply Isn't Enough Commenters To Go Round

By Darryl Mason

As I've said here before, probably a bit too rudely, this blog doesn't exist for the sake of comments. It doesn't matter to me whether there's 0 comments or 26, the posts will still be written and published.

But what if your online media business model, your basic plan for profitability, relied deathly on having dozens or hundreds of commenters spilling their thoughts and opinions on every story or opinion piece posted on your website?

The Murdoch Online Experience has already launched The Punch, and now, as Mumbrella reports, Fairfax are going to have their shot at creating an online aggregator site for its stable of digital newspapers, with a steady stream of commenters being seen as essential to push those daily hits into the five and six digit page view counts that advertisers like to see.

Unlike The Punch, however, who've made the effort to recruit writers who aren't already writing for other Murdoch media, The National Times is expected to fill itself out with opinion pieces already published elsewhere in Fairfax's digital newspapers.

As usual, I found it easier to put my thoughts together on this while commenting at another blog. So here's the comment I left at Mumbrella :

The Punch has had some interesting columns so far, but nothing that has set fire to the comments boards. It seems overall quite safe and pedestrian. For now at least. Nothing controversial, nothing that you don't already see in mainstream newspaper columns and op-eds. If the aim is too have a "national conversation", the convo has been damn quite with most posts in the past week pulling 0 to 6 but rarely 10 or more comments.If people who visit can't be arsed to comment, why will they want to eventually pay for it?

A huge turnover in comments, in the hundreds for each or most posts, is what The Punch needs to ramp up the hits, obviously. But how are they going to do that? Where is that hardcore crowd of a few hundred who will burn up the boards like they do at Piers Akerman's or Andrew Bolt's blog going to come from? .

The problem, as Fairfax will soon find out, is that there are a limited number of Australians who bother to comment on any story or column or blog post anywhere online, particularly when the content is centred around politics or culture or news events.

Even if you do like to comment on what you're reading, there are so many places to do so elsewhere, from Facebook to YouTube to Twitter to ten thousand more fun to read and riotous blogs elsewhere in the world.

The Punch has discovered that regular commenters for blogs and news sites that aren't stirring up racism and xenophobia and general hate, or raging about Israel and Palestinians, are pretty thin on the ground in Australia.

There might even be as few as three or four thousand in Australia who will write comments on local political/cultural blogs and news sites most days, as a habitt, not including those who are paid to professionally comment by PR companies and political parties.

There's no shortage of places to Have Your Say on Australian blogs and news sites now, but there is most definitely a shortage of normal everyday Australian commenters. The Punch now knows this, the National Times will most likely learn that too, very soon.

There are a few good free ways for corporate media sites like The Punch and National Times to pull quality and volume-high comments to their sites, but why give away good ideas like that?

"I Know I Left It Somewhere In The Shed About Five Years Ago..."

By Darryl Mason

The Murdoch media's The Punch is worth checking out, and it will be (to media watchers anyway) fascinating to see how it evolves in the months ahead. It seems to have gotten off to a pretty decent start.

Eventually, if it survives and thrives, The Punch will become a test site for Rupert Murdoch's hilariously ill-fated fantasy to try and get people to pay to read what he hasn't paid anyone to write.

But is there something more suspect going on over there?

A conspiracy-minded friend, now living in England, thinks yes.

"Hey, I checked out that website you sent me the link for."
"Rate My Bourbon Vomit Wall Paintings?" I asked.
"No, the other one."
"The Punch."
"Yeah, The Punch."
"Yeah? What did you reckon?"
"S'Alright. It's a Murdoch thing, isn't it?"
"Yeah," I said.
"So where's all the tits?"
"........what?"
"There's no tits. It's Murdoch, and no tits."
"This is Australia," I sad. "Rupert's mum doesn't let him run photos of some 18 year old girl's tits in his Australian media."
"Oh."
"So did you read any of it?"
"Yeah, a bit. If it's not going to have tits on it, it needs more sports and movies stuff, somewhere I can say how much fucking arse Terminator 4 sucked."
"I think The Punch is supposed to become like the Blog Discussion Of The Nation or something like that.I think they have higher aspirations than running an open thread on 'Terminator 4 : How Much Does This Movie Suck Arse?"
"Yeah? Well, good luck to them....There's something else, though. It's weird."
"What's that?" I asked.
"It made me want to go back to smoking pot."
"What the fuck are you talking about?"
"The Punch. That website. I looked at it, and I thought, 'Fuck me, I'm suddenly hanging to punch down some brekkie cones'."
"I don't think you can blame some website for those thoughts, can you?"
"Yeah, I can. Maybe it's subliminal or something, but just after I looked at it, I'm thinking about which geezer at my local might be good to score some hash off and if I still had my old bong kicking around in the shed somewhere."

Ridiculous you say? Perhaps. But what about these screenshots from The Punch?






I put the following question to The Punch editor David Penberthy at Twitter :



I'll update on any replies from 'Penbo'.