Sex and Astronauts

By now you've almost certainly heard about Ms Novack's recent road-trip adventure. Every news source I use has been rehashing it. A song and dance:

[download this video] [view large]

But... two women having a catfight over some guy isn't news, if it wasn't for the sordidly memorable bit about the diapers it would have had far less coverage. There's a marketing lesson in that. Following a similar theme of sex, conflict and a little social transgression:

Orange County Weekly: ‘They’re My friends and I’m a Swinger!’

It's about the cops busting a local nookie joint. Notice towards the bottom there are three websites mentioned, but only one has a full domain name. You can bet that a local interest story about illicit sex in a sexually repressed part of the US is going to stir up a fair bit of traffic to those sites, and comefiesta.com is the one they'll hit first since it has an easy to use domain.

Interestingly, there isn't a website called comefiesta.com, it's a (deliberate) misspelling of cumfiesta.com, a Bukkake getup from Miami, right the way across the continent. Someone going by 'creep276' has an affiliate agreement whereby he gets paid for sending traffic to cumfiesta-with-a-u, and visiting comefiesta-with-an-o redirects visitors to the with-a-u.

So when the plump, sweaty, newspaper reading public of Orange County put their hairy palms to the keyboard after breakfast, someone makes a sudden surge of money. I'm not sure if the 'o' was a deliberate misspelling or not, could be the OC Weekly doesn't like to say cum, but it's suspicious, and a clever way to make a quick bag of pesos for the sly journalist, source or media hacker. The affiliate ID's a bit of a giveaway though, a single large frame or a cloned front page on the decoy domain would be more opaque.

Link: JealousAstronaut.com