OZY Media which was an Emmy-winning platform of digital media and very popular among young readers has closed to function on Friday, right after 5 days when stories started coming up about the questioning practices in business.
The company has unravelled about a top executive misrepresenting himself to be a YouTube executive in a conference with Goldman Sachs. As per the reports, the Bank was supposed to consider an investment of 14 million dollars in the company which was mainly based on the number of readerships that was self-reported as well as a purported connection with YouTube. Samir Rao who was the Chief Operating Officer and the co-founder of OZY had allegedly impersonated the executive of YouTube, Alex Piper who is the head of the company’s unscripted contents, in February during a phone call attempting convincing the bank for ending the deal.
The reports have further sparked loads of major complaints against the organisation and the founder Carlos Watson. Along with the accusations that have been long-running against the company it had also been inflating the size of its audience.
Sara Fischer of Axios said that the companies foundation had been built on “years of lies” which was pushed by the CEO, Carlos Watson and Samir Rao, the COO. To clean out the deals of advertising and attracting talent the company had faked the numbers of its audiences:
- More than 95% of OZY’s traffic for its flagship YouTube program was paid.
- More than 20m list of emails were created by using “dubious” means of marketing and requests of the readers for unsubscribing were ignored.
- Even the number of attendees of the live events created by OZY were inflated grossly.
- The followers of the company’s social media channels including Instagram, Twitter and so on were for money and had shown the least amount of engagement.