‘The Snappening’ Provides Boost To One Indiana Business
The furor caused by Snapchat photos that were released as “The Snappening” is paying dividends for one Indiana company. An Indianapolis based event planner’s website, Snappening.com, has seen a large uptick in traffic thanks to visitors who are looking for the hacked photos posted on 4Chan.
As previously reported in The Inqusitr, the hacked photos known as “The Snappening” are not of celebrities, but are of ordinary people who use Snapchat. About half of Snapchat’s users are between the ages of 13 and 17, which means that “The Snappening” likely contains a large number of nude photos of underage subjects. It must be quite a surprise for those who are looking for child pornography to wind up at Snappening.com and find themselves being offered event planning services.
According to Ars Technica, Snappening owner Crystal Graves has taken advantage of all the free publicity generated by the the photo release. She has even made use of the hashtag #TheSnappening in a pinned tweet on her Twitter feed.
Graves started Snappening in 2011. Her company’s site promises “event planning, in a snap.” She told the Daily Mirror she estimates Snappening.com will have received over 100,000 new visitors by the time the publicity surrounding “The Snappening” subsides. It couldn’t come at a better time, as she is trying to take Snappening.com to a national audience.
She isn’t concerned about possible damage “The Snappening” may do to the Snappening.com brand. She told the Daily Mirror,
“It’s fairly obvious when you get to our homepage that we probably don’t have anything to do with Snapchat, an internet hack or a batch of compromising photos.”
If anything, Graves seems to be having fun with the situation. She has been posting a Snappening ad featuring an image of a woman in the shower, with the words “Don’t worry ladies, we’ve got you covered in all the right places.”
So far, no one has offered to buy the “Snappening” domain name from Graves. She told the Daily Mirror that she wouldn’t sell the name anyway. She said that the name is one of her customers’ favorite things about her brand and that Snappening’s Twitter followers even have their own hashtag: #Snappeners.
Graves said the publicity surrounding “The Snappening” has been a boon to her company. She told Ars Technica about the main benefit.
“It’s given us an opportunity to have the entire world find us in an unexpected way, follow us on multiple social media channels and learn about what we do. That’s unusual enough for a startup! We’ll take it.”
It looks like people’s lust for porn is benefiting Crystal Graves and Snappening.com. Will she be able to turn short term publicity into long term success?
