Quixtar Supporters Caught in Active Information Warfare and Propaganda Campaign

November 26, 2007 By Matthew Paulson

Quixtar and other multi-level marketing schemes often tend to draw strong emotions from people, either a person is an avid supporter or they think these systems are a total rip-off, and there’s not much of a middle ground. It appears that a group of Quixtar individual business operators (IBO’s) and other Quixtar supporters have gotten tired of all the people who tell them they do not want to sign up for their multi-level marketing scheme because of all of the information on the internet which suggests that affiliating with Quixtar might not be the best way to make extra money. This group has developed an information-warfare campaign on the internet and are actively working to discredit and criticize journalism which does not further their cause.

For the uninitiated, Quixtar is a marketing company which markets products for affiliate companies by using a massive network of individuals, called individual business operators (IBOs), who are recruited by other individuals who are IBOs. Each business operator which refers another member to the company receives a bounty on the sales of the person that they refer. You’ll often see these pitched at convention centers in hotels. There’s nothing wrong with the business model itself, however some of the higher-up IBOs make much more money on selling motivational and sales-training material than they actually do in Quixtar sales, and many IBOs use inflated numbers and misrepresentations of the company to get new IBOs to sign up.

I first became suspicious of this campaign when I started my new blog called American Entrepreneurship. It’s a new blog so the traffic it is receiving is relatively low. I wrote a couple of articles about Quixtar which did not portray the company in a very positive light, and although there were only 50 unique visitors the entire day it was posted, it somehow had 3 comments, all which portrayed my arguments as disingenuous and incorrect. I took a look further at my tracking statistics through StatCounter.com and reviewed the referring URLs, or the sites that my readers were at before they clicked through to my site, and found that these Quixtar supporters have created a web-application which searches for new articles about Quixtar so that they can quickly respond to any new article which comes out and does not portray them in an extremely positive light.

My tracking software also told me the day that I wrote that article I received 17 unique visitors from Google’s Blog Search which all were looking for articles about Quixtar and IBOs. Receiving that many visitors from Google is a common occurrence, but on a relatively new site it should maybe be 2 or 3 a day, and certainly not all using the same keywords to search by.

No one can be sure what the extent of this information warfare campaign is yet, but it is happening. Articles written about Quixtar in a negative light are always criticized in the comment and often company supporters will write articles on pro-Quixtar blogs such as TheTruthAboutQuixtar.com that attempt to rip-apart articles and authors which do not support their message.

Posted in Quixtar