July 21, 2008
Is this what it has come to?
By Truth in Miscellaneous
When I first started blogging about Amway and Quixtar there were a number of blogs and sites about this opportunity and each seemed to have it's own niche. Quixtar Blog seemed to be one that broke stories, had a variety of different weekly posts. Monday Reader Mail, Farcial Help Desk, etc, etc. xanadu had his infamous blog that broke down the tapes and the BS that was on them, Quixtar Demons went to town on WWDB group, and of course On the Road with Dave was and still is a unique blog with an active IBO who was not on either side per se, just really sensible about the whole thing.
Today while approving comments I received two comments that caught my attention. First one was from "whoz" (Scott Larsen) and the second from "joecool". Larsen's comment was about all the sites that Insider (David Steadson) apparently owns, and joecool made a comment that the article on Larsen's site was in his opinion "The Smoking Gun" that Steadson is on the Amway corporation payroll for what he does on the net.
Well no doubt I found the words "The Smoking Gun" interesting and so I headed over to Larsen's site to get the 411 (sorry, my teen told me I needed to try and talk more cool). I was thinking what could he possibly have, bank statements? wire transfers? corporate memo? communications between Steadson and Amway? Much to my dismay I found a bunch of information I already knew for quite sometime. Insider aka IBOFightback aka David Steadson owns many blogs and has a ton of videos on YouTube. The article pretty much tried to paint a picture that it is next to impossible that someone would have this much time to do what is being done without getting paid.
Well before I go any further first of all I have no idea if Insider is paid for what he does. Seems to me he is not, but I could be wrong. Second not one part of that article was anything near resembling a "smoking gun" in my opinion. A list of sites and some speculation does not a smoking gun make.
I decided to go ahead and look into all those sites that Insider is claimed to run since they were all nice and listed there for me to copy and paste in my browser. The first thing I noticed is that many of those sites are blogspot which means they are free to own and operate. From the other sites I can't imagine a burden of cost that is all that great. So now the only thing to look into was the amount of time that was being spent.
Obviously the biggest chunk was the blogspot blogs that were created and so I checked into those first. Out of all of the free blogs I found a total of 81 posts, most blogs have been up for a year with only two being 3-4 years. Even so if you divide 81 posts by 52 weeks in a year that means Insider posted 1.5 times a week. Not very hard to do. Larsen also referred to Insider as a "frequent" editor of the Wikipedia Amway listing. A quick check over there showed roughly 29 edits in a year, which translates to about .5 edits a week. Yet again, not hard to do, and hardly what I would call "frequent".
The other sites owned by Insider seem to be what takes up the bulk of his time spent on this issue. First you have this Truth about Amway site, this is a site that I check out from time to time and I can say for sure that new articles are not going up everyday on the blog, and many of the other articles are cookie cut from news headlines about Amway.
The Amway Watch site is (or was supposed to be) about Amway news only with no other kind of commentary. At least that is what I was told in a private message when I inquired about it. Again most of the articles seem to be cut from headlines with news about Amway or Quixtar. But just for Insider don't think I didn't notice the links at the bottom to many "commentary" articles as well. Something I was told was not going to be part of the site.
Finally Amway Talk and Amway Wiki are the other sites. Amway Talk is a forum and I think that is self-explanatory. Amway Wiki could use up a great deal of time, but I also know there are others who are posting and editing at that site as well. Certainly not a one man effort.
Now don't get me wrong I am no fan of Insider. I have discussions with him on his site from time to time and just recently got on him for trying to paint the conclusion that Larsen makes big coin from his site ads. I also refer to him sarcastically on this site from time to time as well. In my opinion he is the master of the Amway spin, and can usually spin his way out of anything. In the end if you are honest with yourself you have to have to give him a little respect cause he won't back down and he isn't your average everyday drive-by commenter like so many other IBOs who comment on this site.
In the end I have to ask the question "Is this what is has come to?" As far as I am concerned I believe there are still issues with this business and abuses going on in Lines of Sponsorship. Matter of fact from some of the comments and e-mails I get I know it is still going on. But from both sides (Insider included) it seems anything will do when trying to paint a conclusion about others on the web. From comparing critics to jihadists, and posting such vile things that even a Quixtar corporate blogger calls you a cyber-bully, to others wanting "some sort of medal" for their delusional self-promotion of victory over another site, comparing Amway to Nazis, and agreeing with any sort of article, even though ten minutes of research would show it has no foundation, just because you dislike the person it was written about. Frankly, it's all starting to get just a bit ridiculous.