Squidoo Backs Down On ‘Brand Campaign’ As Many Are ‘Not so Happy’ About It
Squidoo founder and author Seth Godin has backed down on creating company pages by default as part of their new ‘Brands In Public’ service that launched a few days ago. The idea behind the new service is that brands …
Context & Ripple Effects
Seth Godin unveiled Squidoo's 'Brands In Public' just a day ago via what he himself described as a brandjacking-style experiment, with the service automatically creating pages for companies whether they wanted them or not. The backlash was immediate enough that within roughly a day Squidoo reversed course and dropped default page creation.
The retreat also lands on old scar tissue: back in July 2007 Squidoo took a sharp rankings hit across its lenses amid widely reported SEO spam and porn problems, while bloggers like Jason Calacanis publicly pressed Godin on why he stayed silent about the platform's problems. A founder whose personal brand rests on marketing credibility could ill afford another unilateral move against brands.
First-order effects
- Brands that were auto-enrolled in Brands In Public now get a say: Squidoo's reversal means no company page goes live by default, shifting the service to an opt-in model.
- Squidoo itself loses whatever launch momentum the mass-created pages provided — every brand page must now be earned through outreach rather than generated wholesale.
Second-order effects
- Other UGC and content platforms watching the episode get a clear price signal: monetizing a brand's name and search footprint without consent invites fast public blowback, making explicit permission the safer product design.
- Brands gain leverage in negotiations with any platform that aggregates their identity — the threat of a coordinated 'not so happy' reaction becomes a bargaining chip.
Third-order effects
- The episode hardens an emerging norm that a company's name in search results and third-party content is contested territory the company has a right to police, pushing platforms toward consent-based brand programs rather than scrape-first launches.
- For personality-led startups like Squidoo, founder credibility functions as risk capital: each unilateral move spends it, and reversals like this one show how quickly a marketing guru's own playbook can be turned against his product.
The trend: Platforms that assemble brand identities from web content without asking are being forced, one backlash at a time, into opt-in consent models for anything touching a company's public name.