ihiphop Targets My Mom

There are a lot of questions you expect to hear from your mom when she gives you a call. “Have you heard of someone named Nipsey Hussle?” is not one of them. Of course, because this is my life we’re talking about here, the other day my mom called me up with just that question.

It took me a second to react. I paused, gathered my thoughts and replied “yes, but why have you?” Her answer – “some website called ihiphop” added her to their email list. Yes, that’s right, ihiphop is finally going after the much coveted retired housewives who love Billy Joel demographic!

Is this the new face of Hip-Hop? Judging by the pictures of the random scantily clad, barely of-age, girls attempting to show off their butts on ihiphop’s member pages I highly doubt it. Here’s what I think, I think that someone at ihiphop has been jacking email lists, an act everybody knows is a huge faux pas in the world of email marketing.

My mom ending up on a Hip-Hop social networking site’s email list is something that is fairly ridiculous, but we can actually learn a thing or two from this situation. First and foremost we can learn that the size of one’s email list doesn’t matter if it hasn’t been filled via the opt-in method. Who cares if a site says they have hundreds of thousands of subscribers if any significant percentage of those subscribers have come from stolen lists and are people that have zero interest in the messages being sent? This is exactly what renders so many email list “subscriber” numbers totally useless.

There’s also a potential ad dollar aspect to this because every site that sells ad space in their newsletters does so based on the number of subscribers they have. From an advertiser’s point of view, if you’re purchasing ad space in an e-newsletter you’re expecting that ad to reach a certain demographic. When someone jacks email lists and adds them to their total regardless of whether or not anyone on the jacked list has any interest in the content, advertisers are usually none the wiser and will still get charged based on the number of people on the list, rather than the number of people who actually signed up to be on the list. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that my mother is not the target audience ihiphop’s advertisers are looking to reach. That is, unless there’s some kind of Phat Farm Over Fifty line that I don’t know about.

As far as the artists featured in the newsletter are concerned, any list that includes jacked names actually works to create more negativity around whoever they’re trying to promote than the positive press they’re looking for. Who wants to bet Nipsey Hussle doesn’t want to be known as “the spam that showed up in my mom’s email in-box?” Helluva title, right? It’s probably not what he’s looking for, but it’s a great illustration of the fact that adding names that don’t want to be on your email list can potentially do quite a bit of damage to your product.

Finally, since it was my mom’s email address that has started to get these emails I can only assume it was my email list that was jacked at some point in time by an ihiphop employee. If you are one of my many loyal subscribers who has been affected by this I sincerely apologize.

Oh yeah, and ihiphop, my mom’s taste in Hip-Hop is way more east coast lyrical!