The tech blogs are abuzz (or, were, while you were eating turkey and I was out of town) about this post on TechCrunch, in which Dan Ackerman Greenberg, a Stanford business student who makes a living “run[ning] clandestine marketing campaigns meant to ensure that promotional videos become truly viral” shares “some of the techniques I use to do my job: to get at least 100,000 people to watch my clients’ ‘viral’ videos.”

TechCrunch later published a letter from Greenberg, in which he claimed his “original post was framed quite differently, but after going through the TechCrunch editorial filter, it ended up sounding like a tell-all about our shady business practices.” Greenberg went on to say that he had intended to write a “how-to for marketers on YouTube, morals aside, in an attempt to bring to light everything that could be (and is) going on on YouTube and beyond. However, I DO NOT EMPLOY OR ENDORSE ALL OF THE STRATEGIES USED IN THE POST.”

Bloggers and the TechCrunch commenters got all up in arms about the very idea that corporations are essentially paying a firm to game YouTube, but I’m wondering if this really news? More after the jump.

Maybe Greenberg’s post was misleadingly edited, but there’s still one section where Greenberg gives a fairly detailed, thinly-veiled breakdown of one campaign he worked on for “a Hollywood movie studio” that involved the promotion of a number of clips that “were 10-20 seconds each, were shot from what appeared to be a camera phone, and captured a series of unexpected and shocking events that required professional post-production and CGI” and were “created in advance of a blockbuster.”

The detectives in the TechCrunch comments quickly deduced that Greenberg was talking about Cloverfield, the JJ Abrams-produced monster movie that came out of nowhere to dominate blog conversation last summer (see previous coverage here, here and here). They’re probably right. But as one commenter puts it, Greenberg’s firm may be taking too much credit for Cloverfield’s online success, “as the teasers for the Cloverfield were released alongside Transformers in theaters, so the shady tactics had less to do with Cloverfield’s success in YouTube than what the studio did otherwise.”

That seems like a super valid point. It also seems a little weird that anyone (let alone hundreds of blog commenters) would find it at all suspect that a movie studio was paying a firm to promote their product online. As Greenberg put it (rather cockily, pre-backlash), “You simply can’t expect to post great videos on YouTube and have them go viral on their own, even if you think you have the best videos ever.”

Fair enough, right? Did anyone really think that Paramount had an intern upload those Cloverfield videos to YouTube, and then the entire company just sat around with their fingers crossed, hoping the kids would dig/Digg it? Even with all the snark and mean-spirited bitchery, you can sometimes still find this kind of utopian naivete on the internet that never ceases to surprise me. Such faith that such phenomena could just sprout organically seems misguided, and this kind of promotion doesn’t seem to be materially any more evil than movie promotions of old.

What do you think? When people act like they’ve been conned by a studio into expressing interest in a movie that hasn’t come out yet, aren’t they just basically making a case for their own gullibility? Should I have more faith in the inherent goodness of my internet brethren? Is it reasonable to assume that the internet is/was/should be some kind of happy fantasy land where no one would ever try to get you to watch a video in the hopes that you’ll buy something? Am I wrong to assume that as a microcosm of society, the internet is basically driven by the same base desires for sex, money and status that rule most of the rest of our lives? You be the judge.