unjapanologist: (Default)
[personal profile] unjapanologist
Fanfic.me appears to be a company that tries to coax people into posting fanfic on its site so it can market visitor eyeballs to advertisers. [personal profile] watersword has a ton of details here.

In-depth analysis and mockery will have to happen after a good night's sleep, because right now my brain can't seem to get past how incredibly hideous that site design is. So much orange. Ugliest banner ever. Why. And I don't know if there are even any real people over there, the profile names of the fic authors aren't clickable and all the comments seem to have been made by Fanfic.me itself. Did they just harvest stories from FF.net and change the author names? I tried googling the first sentence of a couple of the fics, and they were all posted to FF.net or deviantART under different author names. 

Regardless, this one looks like a really special train wreck. It's... kind of pathetically cute, the way they throw "fanfic" around as a keyword, as if it's a magic spell that will draw all the "fanfic" writers to their site. Look at the way they keep using it as a hashtag on their Twitter account. I almost feel sorry for them, they're so obviously ignorant and incompetent and doomed and unable to see what's coming their way.

EDIT of no, still not sleeping: There's a lot more discussion/sleuthing going on in[personal profile] watersword's post, including[personal profile] franzeska digging up a hilarious news article about Fanfic.me.

Date: 2011-10-01 06:49 pm (UTC)

delphi: An illustrated crow kicks a little ball of snow with a contemplative expression. (Default)
From: [personal profile] delphi
I can't say I feel sorry for any of them at this point, if only because of the patronizing angle these efforts are invariably pitched from. It's kind of funny that we live in an era of almost unprecedented market research, and yet the biggest guiding forces are based on things that research doesn't bear out but which everyone in the industry "knows." Things like, "girls and women can relate to male characters but men and boys can't relate to female characters," or "people won't see movies unless the leads are white," or "the 18-35 demographic hold the real spending power," or "women don't experience visual attraction."

A friend of mine in academia recently had an unpleasant run-in with a colleague who had decided he was going to be the first person to study fanfiction. There is a not-inconsiderable group of people who think so highly of their knowledge in their field that they believe if they haven't heard of something, it must not exist.

Profile

unjapanologist: (Default)
unjapanologist

June 2021

S M T W T F S
  12345
6 789101112
13141516171819
20212223242526
27282930   

Most Popular Tags

Page Summary

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags
Page generated Jul. 4th, 2025 08:21 pm
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios