Harry's Blog

My day job is holding the role of editor for a successful commercial videogames website. I spend quite a lot of my time talking to publishers and third-party PR reps who handle the promotion of their portfolio of games.

The vast majority of these PR bods are very knowledgeable and also work hard to make sure they get their game mentioned in the press as much as possible. Sites like the one I run do receive review copies of the latest games, and contrary to popular opinion are not badgered into giving good reviews. However publishers do expect their review copies to go to good homes.

After all, there's no point sending a disk to some tiny website with three readers. And while the disks themselves aren't really worth anything the time PR people spend dealing with you is expensive. I know from personal experience that you need unique readership figures in the tens of thousands, and in some cases hundreds of thousands, to expect to do business with certain games publishers.

Which makes my new experience in the realm of what we'll call "mummy blogging" all the more odd. The PR reps that deal with mummy bloggers are clearly completely out of their mind. I constantly see bloggers being offered free foreign holidays and expensive baby equipment despite probably having a readership of a few hundred unique visitors a day (and I'm being generous there).

Perhaps the PR reps get confused by all the site activity - lots of comments. But it's often the same bunch of bloggers posting on each other's blogs in some kind of PR-baiting circle-wank. I've found it quite amazing really. These PR reps are paid a lot of money by big companies to promote their wares, provided with thousands of pounds of free tat and holidays - and rather than doing some research into which sites may best serve their aims, they dump the lot on the nearest bunch of vocal yet unpopular bloggers.

The games industry would have a fit at the waste of money. And I expect the companies who employ these PR reps would too if they knew their gear was being offloaded in way that was little different from dumping the stuff down the local tip.

There are many brilliant blogs out there written by people who are read widely. And many of these bloggers are parents - though not necessarily marketing their site as a mummy or daddy blog. It's sites like this that PR reps should be seeking out - ones with varifiable and strong traffic - not the small circle-jerk specialist parent wafflers.

I must admit to rebranding my site a little recently as a daddy blog. That was partly down to a wish to bring some more traffic in. Though relatively modest, my readership has built up over the past few years and is quite steady and surprisingly large (thanks folks I really do appreciate it). I was thinking the site could be a nice little earner if I could bring the old mummy and daddy blogging crowd in.

But having seen the way the PR reps just throw money at every insignificant little site (like mine) it all seems a bit dishonest. You see such high value items going to sites with little or no audience and you wonder who benefits. The site owner I guess for getting free tat. The PR rep wins because they've ticked the boxes for what they were supposed to do that week. But somewhere there's a company that is heavily investing in such campaigns and I doubt they are seeing much of a return.

The more stuff that's been offered for review over the last few week the more I've felt it's a business I really don't want to get into. Forget being a daddy blog, I'll just carry on with the usual nonsense and along the way talking about being a parent too.