No Manufacturers, IPVM Will Not Sell You An Article To Attack Hikvision

JH
John Honovich
Mar 30, 2015
IPVM

We had a request today:

"Do you have a kind of policy that if we buy 100% permission from IPVM to use your Article? We are highly interested in The Hikvision Hacking Scandal article and want to spread it out to all our ... customer."

IPVM never sells reprints nor provides manufacturers permission to use our material in any promotion.

For old world media, this is actually fairly common, so I am not surprised that the question is asked. I am also not upset with the manufacturer who did ask because he asked first and allowed us to make it clear that we would never do this.

That said, it is worth reminding every one of our policy here.

Related, if you see any manufacturer ever using IPVM material in promotions, emails, marketing, presentations, etc., know that it is unauthorized. Please let me know - john@ipvm.com

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Avatar
Christopher Freeman
Mar 30, 2015

Thank You john for taking a stand,

This sometimes can be a very trying endeaver.

The industry tactics are not always ethical or have integrety.

Some of the Tactics to get to the top are really out there.

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U
Undisclosed #1
Mar 30, 2015
IPVMU Certified

If you had made the article public, like you sometimes do, would it be wrong to link to it in an email?

(1)
JH
John Honovich
Mar 30, 2015
IPVM

Public or not, the question is not the link but what the manufacturer says in their email / promotion.

If it's something like "Hikvision is spamware, see IPVM article", it's still promotional because IPVM is being used to validate their assertion."

If it's something like here is a list of recent industry news that includes a link to the IPVM article, then I would not consider it promotional.

JP
Josh Penfold
Mar 30, 2015

What i usually see done in other industries: Company buys legit news sounding website name, Creates a web news outlet that looks at first glance to be a real news org, Adds generic industry news and pays freelancers $5-10 an article to make it look fresh, Adds in desired content like reviews or an article bashing a competitor or technology.

I actually did my PhD dissertation on contructed news events, and this happens quite frequently in main stream news in terms of Local TV and newspape stories.

U
Undisclosed #1
Mar 30, 2015
IPVMU Certified

John is no stranger to such tactics. ;)

UI
Undisclosed Integrator #2
Mar 30, 2015

That's a bit like many of the paid "studies" you will see for pretty much everything in the world. Deception and misdirection is a form of marketing. It is very effective, unfortunately.

I believe the hardline vendor agnostic approach sets apart IPVM. Anywhere else, I question everything because of the lack of journalistic integrity. When advertisers are your primary source of revenue they tend to hold major sway over what gets published.

JH
John Honovich
Mar 30, 2015
IPVM

"When advertisers are your primary source of revenue they tend to hold major sway over what gets published."

Somebody has to pay :)

The membership / subscription model is much harder to build up but a lot more resistant to influence / threatening.

We've heard many times from mag employees that manufacturers would cut their ad spend if they ran the types of posts that IPVM does.

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U
Undisclosed #1
Mar 30, 2015
IPVMU Certified

Public or not, the question is not the link but what the manufacturer says in their email / promotion

Well, I guess the Judo move here would be just to use the name of the article in the link, at in a 'boilerplate' looking section like:

You may be interested in:

  • The Hikvision Hacking Scandal - IPVM.com
  • Avigilon releases Q1 earnings. - secstreet.com
  • How Distributors help Dealers to Delight Customers - fluff.com

Though I understand your what your thinking is...

JH
John Honovich
Mar 30, 2015
IPVM

Yes, what mitigates this is that our titles are not typically that explicit. For example, our test titles are generally pretty generic.

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MI
Matt Ion
Mar 31, 2015
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JH
John Honovich
Mar 31, 2015
IPVM

We used to get the clickbait criticism more in the past....

I am not sure what changed, but there does seem to be less aggressive manufacturers these days...

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