Rebranding

Twitter is now X.  Facebook is Meta.  Lots of other corporate entities have rebranded over time.

A true rebranding is a fresh start.  It might start with a name change, yet usually indicates dropping the old and bringing in the new.  A radio station might change their name.  New management comes in and after doing some market studies decides that the audience numbers are suffering and instead of Classic Rock it’s time to go with lots of Katy Perry, Taylor Swift and that more modern set.

Twitter in particular doesn’t seem like a true rebranding to me, more like an attempt to disassociate from recent turmoil and financial problems.  A reliance on how forgetful people are about how due diligence on digging into the past is important instead of the old conspiracy method of claiming, “I never said that.”  Yes.  Yes you did.  But it’s all just a show to present what your new audience wants to hear.  About how they can become rich and famous by giving you money.

The term is soft rebrand.  Your not totally throwing out the old and making a fresh start.  It’s just a name change with new packaging.  In the old TV days they studied how many shows for a series needed to be produced for a successful run in syndication.  A famous example being Star Trek, which was right at the borderline.  The old rule of thumb was 100 episodes or four seasons.  The average memory has enough time to forget enough about a single episode during the run, so by the time the 108th and last episode finishes and season 1, episode 1 comes back on it’s fresh enough for entertainment value long enough to get butts on the couch long enough to be influenced by the commercials.

So far, there’s only been one true rebranding in the gematria conspiracy theory gang.  When Hubbard dropped the Illuminati/Freemason/Cabal storylines in the FTFT blog and changed to the current Gematria Effect News brand.  Now it’s Jesuits this, Jesuits that, Jesuits everywhere.  With generous commercial slots for reminding the audience that it’s really the “you know who I’m really talking about”.  The subliminal scapegoating of anti-semitism.

I’ve noticed lately that there’s been some dabbling in the rebranding arena from the mid-level tier of the MLM structure.  The kind of people who have been around for years as opposed to moving on to the greener pastures of slightly more lucid conspiracy content.  (Let’s face it, a YouTube channel dedicated to how much you love guns simply because you love guns is a lot more sane sounding.)  It’s all about engagement and keeping butts on the couch long enough to get them lost in the rabbit hole.  Sincere sounding messages are put out about how they’ve changed, usually to be more spiritual and loving than they used to be.  Anecdotal “evidence” provided for the motivation includes run ins with law enforcement, concern over viewer counts on videos, reasons to suddenly get back into gambling.  That evidence may or may not be true.  The advertisers don’t care.  Only now the advertisers are grifters instead of somebody trying to sell something more or less legitimate.  I’ve personally scambaited a couple of them.  The girl down on her luck because she was raped by her father.  The biker chick who has the husband thrown in jail.  There’s a bunch who just go for the old fashioned selling of porn.  All eager to like videos long enough to post a couple comments to see if the ad makes an impact on the unsuspecting.

A soft rebrand is never on the lines of someone talking about how they’ve given up on conspiracy content completely.  It’s always limited to how much I don’t like So and So today.  If there is a hard rebrand they don’t rage quit and announce they are quitting because of So and So.  They just slink away into the night.

Mostly.  The recent rebrands have been renaming the YouTube channel without much change in the actual content.  It’s still about whining about how evil the world is.  Attempts to do a hard rebrand and attacking an entrenched gematria guru always backfire.  New entrants into the pyramid scheme are pressured to attack.  There’s a weird entire economy surrounding conspiracy content where the constant attacks add to the lack of coherence in the overall message.

If you’re interested in genuine research into the disinformation world there’s an opportunity to find some blatant hypocrisy here.  My all time favorite is the Gematrinator posting on blog about how Zach started making accurate sports picks like crazy years ago.  The day after he joined the comments of a Zach Attack video complaining about how much of a pain in the ass he is.  Highly unlikely the rebranding lasted a matter of hours, not even a few days.

To be fair, the newest versions of long timer content are a lot less openly hateful and violent.  In that respect, some progress has been made.  Whether this is a sign of users mellowing or not - ??  It’s not that certain.  Weird is ok.  Being weird doesn’t directly interrupt the lives of others too much.

(And change your channel name as much as you want.  If you don’t join the internet equivalent of a convent we’ll still find you in the comments sections of other videos.)