Saturday, January 22, 2011

Popular Taiwanese blogger HoneyQueen exposed

Blogging is huge in Taiwan! As I wrote already in one of my previous posts, almost every young Taiwanese has a blog or a Wretch account, where they post photos (and usually a lot of photos). So a nation of bloggers naturally produces few very popular bloggers, so called "blogger celebrities". Currently the most popular blogger in Taiwan is Benshee (aka flowermonkey 花猴), a twenty-something girl that writes about her life, makeup, clothes, travel and restaurants and has around 100.000 visitors a day! Yes! That's right: Hundred thousand a day. At this point I'd need about 6 months to reach that number and some bloggers would need years to have such traffic. And in Taiwan there's an unofficial rule, that a blogger earns the same amount of money per post as the number of their daily hits. For example, it's rumored that Benshee would currently get 100.000 NTD per post, if a company asked her to promote a product on her blog. That's around 2500 Euro per post (or around 3400USD). Imagine, she writes 5 posts and she can buy a new car with cash. This shows that blogging can be a big business in Taiwan and few are making some big bucks just by becoming popular.

But this post is not meant to write about Benshee, I want to tell you what has recently happened to one of her friends, who is also a popular blogger. Her nickname is HoneyQueen (林哈妮) and her blog has around 30.000 hits a day. That's of course a lot of traffic as well and gives her the chance to advertise various products by reviewing them and recommending them. And as the unwritten rule goes, she could well charge up to 30.000 NTD (which is around 750 Euro or 1000 USD) for a post. From what I heard, the things she recommended on her blog really sold well and some of her readers are (or were) real fans of her and would flood the shop or store she would write about on her blog. So it was a win-win situation for her and the company. But then something happened. She wrote a product review about a skin care product that supposedly removes pimples and she posted before and after photos. But one of her readers found out that she used a makeup foundation in her after photo to cover the pimple for the (nonexistent) effect.

The person who found that out, made an anonymous blog just to expose her and highlighted all the mistakes she made, you can see that here. For example: HoneyQueen claimed the before and after photos were 4 days apart, but the data proves that she first put make up on and took a photo and later used it as the after photo. Then she gradually removed the make up from the pimple and took more photos, which she used for the before photos. All photos were taken within few minutes, if the data is accurate. Also on both photos she's wearing the same clothes, her eyes look similarly red and her eye lashes also look the same way (if you zoom in the photos). After this was leaked, people started to check her older reviews and found out that she's done similar things in the past: Her credibility was instantly tarnished. Not only that, the Taiwanese mass media started to report the incident which lead to HoneyQueen's apology on her blog. However she only apologized for this latest incident and not for all the reviews she has faked in the past. From what I've heard, she's going on a hiatus until further notice. So far, no companies have claimed their money back, but at this point nobody is willing to promote their product on her blog, which is of course not surprising. What will happen with her blog in the future, we don't know, but these days, her traffic and popularity is constantly in decline (here's a Taiwanese blog rank). For now she's definitely lost her face and hopes that the media will quickly divert their attention to someone else.

And here's an irony: HoneyQueen herself once exposed a blogger, who did exactly the same thing by faking the effect of some diet medicine. I guess what goes around comes around.

What do you think about all this? Did you ever notice a blogger faked or exaggerated the effect of a product? How do you review products?

Update: Now even Benshee a.k.a. FlowerMonkey has apologized for not clearly explaining a photo of a product's effect and vowed to abide by much higher standards, when it comes to advertizing products on her blog. (We can only hope that will be the case...)

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