The Four Housewives Fired by Bravo Were Not Real Enough

Jill Zarin, Kelly Bensimon, Alex McCord, and Cindy Barshop have been fired from The Real Housewives of New York City (RHONY). I just found that out while populating the jobs category table of the No Limit List database with CNN Headline News on in the background. Those names meant nothing to me until late June when an article on one of the prototypes led to a marketing opportunity.

Prototype F is an anti-cyberbullying service designed to empower victims and observers of cyberbullying to post stories anonymously just as easily as you can post a Rant or Rave on No Limit List. To better test my design we tried to jump start the site with a media research study on celebrity involved cyberbullying incidents with the goal of hitting 75 before the end of June. One of the stories was about an incident on RHONY in which Jill Zarin accused Simon Van Kempen of cyberbullying her. The report would have just been another number written off as quickly as possible to help us reach our goal and meet our deadline, but when I realized that the episode had not aired yet and only a couple articles could be found about it online I recognized an opportunity to establish a Google presence before air time that would have a chance to compete long term with entertainment news authorities after the episode aired due to domain name relevancy.

As I predicted it did well at first before slipping after a few days and bouncing back strong once the dust settled. Today it consistently ranks well for "real housewives cyberbullying", "simon van kempen cyberbullying", and other Real Housewives terms relevant to cyberbullying.

I also produced a You Tube video full of the cyberbullying clips from the episode titled "Mean Tweeting The Real Housewives of New York City" that turned out to be a huge disappointment with only 1,600 views so far despite being a top five Google result for "mean tweeting". To get an idea of how bad that is one of Prototype A's channels has accumulated over 2,000,000 upload views and that doesn't even account for videos removed by You Tube. I got 500,000 views in a weekend once by being one of the first to upload footage of LeGarrette Blount punching Byron Hout.

We received mixed feedback including a surprise email claiming to be from Simon Van Kempen. The email that was sent through the contact form using the return address Assistant@McCordvanKempen.com stated:

"For a site purported to be anti cyber bullying, it does you no favors to repeat unproven hearsay.

You are linking me to a blog that I do not and never have controlled. Even your update to the article implies you think it's all a load of nonsense. I would appreciate my name being removed from the above post.

Best

Simon van Kempen"

Anyone could have typed that address into the from textbox on the contact form and we never received a response from our confirmation request reply. It was also around the time McDougall from Tactical Intelligence started badgering me relentlessly about reports written about himself and Diamanda Galas by someone he said was stalking his singer client. Practical joke suspicions are high because McDougall seems like a funny character, but until proven otherwise I will consider the proximity of these incidents to be a coincidence. I still find it hard to believe that such an unknown website could attract such notable attention in such a short time period.

Speaking of unknown we think Prototype F failed to make headlines on its own merit for reasons similar to why these people were fired from RHONY. I have only seen one episode, but that was all it took to convince me that those women were shameless self promoters and overexposed. That can be a lethal de-legitimizing combination for anything remotely based in reality. In their case it made all the drama appear staged. Those women knew that drama was the only thing separating their show from a tour of homes documentary and were desperate to do anything they could for air time. It worked most of the time, but in the end people could see right through it like I did and just were not interested in them anymore. The low view count for the video and the low impression numbers for Prototype F resulting from that episode according too Google Webmaster Tools support my theory that with such good placement the most likely explanation for the low numbers was lack of interest in the subject.

I can relate because even though I'm still a regular nobody I've been on television more times that I can remember off the top of my head, was featured in a magazine once, was a guest on a local comedy show, mentioned on the radio a bit, and have noticed my work being discusses on countless blogs, some press releases of mine have been published as news by a handful of small TV news stations, I've been in two stories that CNN has picked up promoting two different sites and the first of those stories became number 42 on Google Trends one day. That might not be a lot of experience, but its not bad considering that I've only been out of college for a couple years and never studied the media beyond a little business writing homework on how to write a press release. During this time I learned that the news like most types of TV put audience preferences above all else. As a result they love controversy, love real original drama, and hate things that appear fake or lacking in originality.

In my case members of the media loved to make people hate me at first because I gave them a real original human story that was controversial and emotionally charged. Later on I started targeting other controversial issues and did well at first, but experienced a decline probably because media outlets started noticing a pattern of niche complaint sites targeting hot button issues being churned out one after the other from the same source. I did get one interview exclusively for Prototype F at the only local station yet to cover any of my work, but it was bumped due to a local celebrity getting kidnapped before air time. I called it bad luck, but my co-workers called it karma and they might have had a point. Unlike the news they knew that the prototypes were really the result of the most valuable lesson I learned from Prototype A. The lesson was that shock value will only take you so far unless your product is good enough to keep people coming back for more.

Conclusion

Those Real Housewives must have went from a real original human story complete with the right amount of controversy needed to get people interested and keep them interested for awhile before eventually staging incidents to create drama kind of like how I started building prototypes designed to be controversial. In the end Jill, Kelly, Alex, and Cindy became no more valuable to Bravo than one of my later prototypes was to the journalist who asked me "so, you're just a guy who builds websites and now you've built this one?" That journalist might as well have been a RHONY viewer saying something like "so, they're just a bunch of women that bitch all the time and now they're bitching more?"