Brand.com

» see brand.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

You did not sign up for Brand.com. Somebody hired it, usually a company and occasionally a person, and what they were paying for was the disappearance of a page about them from the first screen of Google results.

It started in September 2009 in West Chester, Pennsylvania, under the name Reputation Changer, co-founded by Rich Gorman. In 2013 it paid 500,000 dollars for the brand.com domain, moved into Philadelphia and took the domain as its name. There was a mayoral welcome. The company had roughly 135 people that year, and Gorman would later put 37 million dollars of revenue against its first two and a half years.

The product names promised authority over somebody else's index. There was a service called Google Eraser and another called the De-Indexing Action Plan, with a Command Center where a client could watch the results move. Underneath the naming the mechanism was ordinary and always had been: publish enough new material about a client that the old material falls off page one.

In September 2014 Google penalized the company's own network of sites for manipulating rankings, which removed the lever the whole business rested on. By March 2015 the phone numbers were disconnected and mail to brand.com addresses was bouncing. A reputation management firm had made itself impossible to find, and being impossible to find was the exact product.

I have never been on the buying side of this, and the buying side is the only side that ever had an account. What everybody has been is on the other side, reading ten links under a company name and taking them for the record. By 2015 I was an engineer who understood in principle how that page gets assembled, and the understanding changes nothing. You still read the ten links and you still form the opinion. Brand.com's entire business was the distance between knowing how a ranking works and reading one anyway.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what a client was buying ~

The catalog was broader than search. Brand.com managed Wikipedia profiles on behalf of clients, went after reviews on Yelp and Google, and ran what it called paid journalism, meaning articles placed where a search engine would count them. Michael Zammuto, president from November 2012, told Quartz in 2013 that the company helped ensure information on Wikipedia was accurate rather than false or defamatory. That is one description of editing an encyclopedia for money.

The harder version of the work was building websites whose purpose was to exist, filling them with material about a client, and letting volume do the burial. A Huffington Post piece connected to the company came down over an undisclosed conflict of interest. None of this was secret or even unusual for the industry. It was priced, invoiced and reported on quarterly.

~ the seattle invoice ~

The clearest single record of what the service actually delivered is a public one. Seattle City Light, the municipal electric utility, hired Brand.com to push down a critical 2008 article about its chief executive Jorge Carrasco. The article did not move. In May 2014 the utility asked for its 17,500 dollars back.

What makes that invoice useful is that it is legible at all. Almost every other contract this company signed is invisible by design, because a client who admits to hiring a reputation firm has produced exactly the story they were paying to suppress. Seattle City Light was spending public money, so the receipt survived. Everyone else's receipt went down with the phone lines.

~ what the hearing said ~

Gorman came back to the company in January 2015, found it in the condition it was in, and filed for Chapter 7 on its behalf that spring. At the bankruptcy hearing he blamed Google's change of policy around reputation management, which had taken the main offering out from under the firm, and said former chief executive Dave Armon had fired the entire staff and closed the business in practice before anything was filed.

The filing lists the brand.com domain sold onward for 300,000 dollars, against the 500,000 paid for it two years earlier. That is the whole arc in two numbers. A company bought a word, wore it for twenty-odd months, and sold it at a loss on the way into liquidation, having spent the interval selling other people the promise that a name on the internet is a thing you can control.

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