‘Our spat went viral? That’ll cost you €5.3m!’
A HOTELIER has turned the tables on a YouTube ‘vlogger’ who asked for a free stay in exchange for positive coverage – by invoicing her €5.3million for ‘publicity’. Paul Stenson’s jokey response came after Elle Darby, 22, wrote to his White Moose Café and Charleville Lodge Hotel in Dublin and asked to ‘collaborate’.
She had written: ‘I would love to feature you in my YouTube videos/dedicated Instagram stories/
‘I don’t feel like I did anything wrong’
posts to bring traffic to your hotel... in return for free accommodation.’
Her request was greeted with disdain by Mr Stenson, who put up his response online in which he told her she lacked ‘self-respect and dignity’, and asked who would pay his staff during her free stay.
Mr Stenson, who famously barred vegans from his cafe in 2015, did not identify Ms Darby in his post, but the vlogger outed herself after spotting it online.
Now he has sent Ms Darby, who has 94,000 YouTube subscribers and 86,000 Instagram followers, an invoice for the publicity she has received in the wake of their exchange going viral. The invoice states she is being charged for ‘the provision of features in 114 articles across 20 countries with a potential reach of 450 million people’, and the publicity Mr Stenson has obtained for her would be valued at €4.3million plus VAT. He also posted a picture of a jug containing ‘tears of bloggers’ after getting attacked on social media.
In her YouTube response titled I Was Exposed (So Embarrassing), Ms Darby of Bath, western England, said: ‘As a 22-year-old girl, who’s running her own business from her home, I don’t feel like I did anything wrong.’ She accused trolls of targeting her.
In a follow-up post on Facebook, the hotel announced all bloggers are banned from the business.
Mr Stenson wrote: ‘The girl in question was never identified in my original post, but she herself went on to create a video explaining how she was “exposed” with “malicious intent” for asking for a freebie.’ Mr Stenson said yesterday he did not condone the abuse she got and called on those targeting her to ‘lay off’. ‘She’s learned her lesson,’ he tweeted.
YOU’VE got to have some sympathy for Elle Darby, the ‘social media influencer’ who got a roasting from a Dublin hotel after she emailed to cadge a free stay in return for a positive review.
Elle, a 22-year-old ‘vlogger’ with 94,000 followers, tangled with the wrong victim when she decided to hit up Paul Stenson and his White Moose Café in Phibsborough for a freebie. She was banking – literally – on impressing an unsophisticated bumpkin of a hotelier (well, it’s Dublin, innit?) with her amazing mastery of a marvellous new gadget called ‘the internet’.
Here was how it was going to work: he’d give her and her boyfriend a free Valentine’s weekend, she’d give him a great plug in a place called ‘online’, and tens of thousands of her devoted followers would flock to his gaff. She’d done it before for Universal Orlando in Florida, she assured him, and ‘it’s been amazing for them’. Yes, Ms Darby claimed her followers made a marked spike in custom at a theme park with an average annual attendance of 10million, but hey, Mr Stenson is just a dumb Dublin hotelier – what would he know?
More than she did, as it turned out, about how to use social media to your advantage. A lot more, in fact, and now not only is Ms Darby suffering a serious backlash online, but the White Moose Café is enjoying global fame, and the entire scam that is ‘social influencing’ has been exposed as a great big exercise in legalised extortion.
If she’d done her homework on Paul Stenson before targeting him for her latest free jolly, Ms Darby might have revised her condescending assumption that ‘older people don’t know how social media works’. Very few restaurateurs anywhere are as clued-in to the potential of the internet, and as attuned to a growing impatience with assorted modern humbugs, as Paul Stenson.
His YouTube channel – yes, Elle, they’ve heard of YouTube in Dublin – features hilarious videos such as his straight-faced announcement of a new staff post: a heavily tattooed MMA fighter employed to run vegans, food-faddists, gluten-intolerants and other purveyors of ‘made-up gastrointestinal complaints’ off the premises.
And so when a ‘vlogger’ tried to hit on him for several hundred euros’ worth of free hospitality in return for a good write-up, he was ready and waiting.
First, he re-posted her wheedling email online, having blacked out her name and details. She had ‘come across your stunning hotel’, she’d gushed, ‘and would love to feature you in my YouTube videos/ dedicated Instagram stories/posts to bring traffic to your hotel and recommend others to book up, in return for free accommodation’.
Let’s just pause here and marvel at the casual con that Elle was proposing. If she got a free stay, she’d recommend the hotel to her followers. Even if she found cockroaches in the beds and toenail clippings in the food, she promised she’d plug the hotel to her army of unsuspecting dupes anyway. After all, if she gives this venue a bad review, it won’t be so easy to persuade the next place to put her up for free, will it? That’s not reviewand ing, where professional critics pay their own way and give a fair verdict. That’s not even advertising, where independent watchdogs monitor standards and claims. At best, it’s deception. At worst, it’s graft.
But that’s what the entire industry of ‘social media influencing’ is built upon – you scratch my back, and I’ll flog your patented, electronic, scientifically proven, clinically tested, €299.99-plus-postage backscratcher to my thousands of dimwitted acolytes. It’s a product of the ‘fake news’ culture, where facts/claims/ideas consumed online are swallowed wholesale without any recourse to critical analysis, because they’re presented in a format that allows truth and fiction to appear indistinguishable, and figuring out the difference is beyond the attention span of the social media community.
Nastiness
Paul Stenson, to his credit, was having none of it. Having displayed her request, he posted his reply. If he let her stay for free, he said, who would pay his staff? Who would pay the waiters, the housekeepers, the cleaners, the receptionist? Who would pay for her electricity, her laundry, her food? He also told her that ‘I blog a bit’ – adding that this is another way of saying ‘I write stuff on the internet’. He ended by advising Elle to ‘pay your way like everyone else.’
Instead of taking this sensible advice, or even accepting his rejection like an adult, Elle threw a tantrum. In characteristically entitled snowflake fashion, she made a video wailing about being exposed and humiliated (even though he hadn’t named her) and claimed she’d been ‘bullied’ when the social media beast she’d been cultivating turned around and bit her on the bum: thousands of indignant users applauded Mr Stenson’s approach and slammed her as a free-loader and a parasite.
But then her followers ganged up on Mr Stenson, heaping vile (and often semiliterate) abuse on his premises and flooding it with negative reviews. He responded by banning all bloggers from the premises because of the ‘nastiness, hissy fits and general hate displayed after one of your members was not granted her request for a freebie’. Pointing out that she was the one who went public with the exchange, he said that ‘this kind of victimisation is very prevalent in the blogging industry, in keeping with their general modus operandi of wanting everything for nothing.’ The story went viral globally, with the bulk of public opinion weighing heavily in the hotel’s favour, and Mr Stenson was quick to exploit it. He made a Trumpstyle press conference video offering an apology to ‘absolutely nobody’ and noting that the entire saga had earned them both a fortune’s worth of publicity. He later sent Ms Darby a bill for €5,298,000 (including VAT) for generating 114 newspaper articles in 20 countries with a potential reach of 450million people.
And given the sheer vacuity and gullibility of the kind of people who follow these ‘social media influencers’, he’s right to suggest they’ll both reap the rewards of the spat. The evidence that Ms Darby’s ‘recommendations’ aren’t worth the cyberspace they’re written on, and are demonstrably being peddled entirely in return for freebies and goodies, won’t put her ‘followers’ off their slavish devotion and simple-minded solidarity. And fairminded folk, angered by the whole ‘social influencer’ shakedown, will reward Mr Stenson’s stance with their business and support. There’s a world of difference between an ‘influencer’s’ review of a restaurant, which appears to depend on the value of the food and wine they manage to blag for free, and that of a professional critic like our own Tom Doorley: professionals don’t put themselves in debt to their hosts, and they make their judgements on the basis of years of expertise, not short-term favours.
So this whole affair has shone a light on the sly ‘nod-and-a-wink’ world in which these ‘influencers’ operate, and their ability to extort goods and services out of hard-pressed businesses on the implicit threat of rallying a vengeful mob online. It’s not uncommon, according to one newspaper food critic, for ‘influencers’ to offer to trash a restaurant’s rivals with terrible reviews in return for free meals.
Clothes, beauty products, trips, tickets, music and electronic goods all flood into these chancers’ hands on the understanding that they’ll push them on their followers if the businesses play ball, or lambast them if they don’t.
Like much of the internet, the world in which Ms Darby says she makes her living is murky and unregulated, beyond the reach of consumers’ rights watchdogs or advertising standards authorities. Hopefully, though, this episode will open the eyes of anyone tempted to rely on online reviews in choosing how to spend their hard-earned money – chances are the person rhapsodising about the food/ hair product/hotel didn’t actually part with any dosh of their own.
And, perhaps, consumers might take time to distinguish between the reviews of ‘social influencers’, funded by their sponsors, and of old-fashioned journalists whose only duty is to their readers. It’s not that free stuff doesn’t sometimes come your way in the traditional media, either, but at least we all learn the first commandment of journalism, as decreed by the famous Dublin diarist Terry O’Sullivan. After Terry took him to a lavish free lunch, a young trainee asked when they’d write up a suitably glowing review. ‘Dear boy,’ said the elder hack, swirling his gratis post-prandial port, ‘let us astonish them with our ingratitude.’ Amen to that.