ShoeMoney Sucks, According to Fast Company?

Fast Company ran a contest to measure influence by clicks. ShoeMoney won it. Then the magazine left the winners out of the issue.

In July 2010, Fast Company launched The Influence Project. Everyone who signed up got a unique link, and your "influence" was the number of clicks you could drive to it. The prize was a spot in the magazine's November issue. By Fast Company's own count, more than 30,000 people signed up and more than 1.5 million visited.

The winner was Jeremy Schoemaker, the affiliate marketer and blogger known as ShoeMoney, with a reported 500,000-plus clicks. Under Fast Company's rules, he outranked Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs and Michael Arrington.

The snub

On October 20, 2010, TechCrunch reported the project was wrapping up, and noted the problem. The November issue's story on the new faces of social media featured other people. The top clickers were not in it. Danny Sullivan pointed out the gap. Arrington had already called the whole thing a mix of link-baiting and a pyramid scheme.

That is the joke in this headline. Fast Company built a contest to find the most influential people online, measured influence the one way performance marketers would, and then did not want the performance marketers who won. We could not find a Fast Company line actually saying ShoeMoney sucked. The magazine's choices said it for them.

How it aged

The Influence Project is now remembered as an early proof that clicks are not influence, years before the influencer industry built itself on fake followers and bought engagement. Schoemaker went on to found PAR Program, sold to GoSocial in 2015 for a reported $12 million.

This page rebuilds an October 2010 IndustryPace post whose original text is not available. Facts come from TechCrunch (October 20, 2010), Fast Company's published figures and Everything-PR. Disclosure: TechCrunch listed Pace Lattin, the author, among the project's top 10, so he competed in the contest this post is about.