I had another run-in with a recruiting service goon. The guy from the Nebraska Boneyard, Mike something or other. Big goon who is profiting off of harassing teenage boys for information and then selling the information to grown men in the form of a subscription to his site. In short, he is selling the grown man hope and excitement. Hope that their team lands a big recruit, the excitement of following that process (early Christmas present syndrome). On twitter, after his visit to the Indiana game, Quaran Hafiz posted something about “having to deal with all of the reporters now”. Mike, the Nebraska Goon, said, “Honestly I don’t blame him. We’re the worst”, basically chiding a kid who is giving him free info that pays Mike’s bills.
Angie is a very big goon who not only takes advantage of the recruits to pay her mortgage, but then also bailed on her entire reader-base to move to a site full of bigger goons willing to exploit recruits even more (i.e. you have to assume she got a pay bump to make the move).
The paywall model: get information for free, rebrand information into a commodity, sell memberships. It’s basically the same as the mafia “It fell off a truck” model. A much more honest model would be free information (since the recruits give the information for free), and then charge advertisers if they want to be on your site. It’s still shady, but it’s much less shady.
I was talking to NiceBeaver privately about this issue, and he brought up a good point:
I wonder if recruits could benefit from telling reporter they can’t have the story if they’re not going to make the content free to the public? The sites would still want to cover the kids, just to have content and to be able to tell their subscribers they’re on top of things. But the paywall really limits the audience reading the kid’s story. So, win/win for the kids if they put a condition on their interview that it must be free.
Correct.
Also, it’s not just the online recruiting services, but hosts of events (e.g. making college coaches pay 2k to attend an event where there are recruits they want to scout). These people are all low lifes. Those events don’t really affect us. The online recruiting services do, though. We can choose to not pay them and take a stand against the exploitation of recruits.