How to use Wikipedia to promote your business: tit torture edition

By Tippi Hadron and tarantino

Matt Nicholson, in his own words, is a breast man. In fact, he considers himself a bit of an expert on “tit torture” and claims to have written hundreds of short stories with a focus on this BDSM practice. He also runs a small web-based company called Darker Pleasures through which he publishes his writings. Darker Pleasures specialises in fiction “for dominant men or women men who dream of cutting loose, where sex is as rough as you want it, and your plaything’s breasts, bottom, and everything else are toys to enjoy, bend and, dare we say, break.”

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Business must have been bad in 2007, because Nicholson decided to help matters along by advertising his site on the PR professional’s website of choice – Wikipedia. He created the user account DPMaster, but unlike other editors contributing to the site, Nicholson made no secret of his real-life identity. His first ever contribution to the online encyclopaedia that anyone with a fetish will edit consisted in adding some “helpful” advice to the article on breast bondage. Quote: “Always use caution whenever the breasts or nipples begin to change color or become cool to the touch. Better several short sessions than one long one. If you decide to add to the binding by engaging in some flagellation, make certain that you use a low-impact device.” Of course Nicholson also provided a link to his Darker Pleasures website, thus promoting his how-to guide, The Breast Punishment Primer. He then went on to spread the joy in the article on BDSM.

But Nicholson had greater ambitions: in order to really make paying customers flock to his website, he set out to create a shiny new article of the kind that Wikipedia’s male-dominated editorship seemingly can never have enough of. Nicholson’s original version of the “tit torture” article contained two links to his website. He added a third one shortly afterwards, and another one two weeks after that. The language used in the opening paragraph betrays Nicholson’s heartfelt respect for women. Quote: “Tit torture refers to any of several erotic BDSM activities focusing solely on inflicting pain on the female breast and/or nipples for sexual gratification. Breast-oriented BDSM activities range from relatively safe and benign, such as the use of clothespins on the nipples, light flagellation, or simple breast bondage to activities that can include great risk, such as more severe caning, amateur piercing, or being suspended by the breasts.” To his credit, Nicholson rewrote parts of the article the next day and added advice on how to keep this torturous activity “safe” for the female partner.

But let’s not stray from the point that Nicholson consciously used Wikipedia to promote his online business. The Darker Pleasures website will tell you to this day that as the author of “the original version of Wikipedia’s entry on ‘Tit Torture’”, Nicholson “is perhaps best known in certain circles for The Breast Punishment Primer which is available through Amazon and Smashwords.”

Sadly for Nicholson, his Wikipedia fame came at a price. Apparently, the article on the online encyclopaedia soon appeared as the first google search result for “tit torture” and related terms, knocking his own commercial site off the number one spot. Nicholson complained to a senior Wikipedia editor, painting himself as the wronged altruist: “Gwernol, when I wrote the Wiki article on “Tit Torture” back on March 3. 2007, I did so because I wanted to do something for the public interest without any recompense. Unfortunately, I am in the process of learning I may have slit my own throat by doing so. You see, my website is a for-profit site with adult themes based on the same topic. When the Wiki article was spidered by Google and added as the #1 link for a particular set of important keyphrases, my site dissapeared for those same phrases. Research since then is indicating it is either the Wiki article itself, or the links to articles in my site from that article, that may have cause my site’s demise. In short, I may be paying for my generosity with my livelihood.” He went on to ask whether the article could be deleted, but the Wikipedia administrator was having none of it. To add insult to injury, Nicholson found out that he had lost his copyright claim over the text he had added to Wikipedia. He removed some of the links to his website and stopped contributing.

Earlier this year, however, he came back to “his” Wikipedia article and added a new reference advertising his “Breast Punishment Primer”, which is now available as a book. At the time of writing, that little piece of self-promotion, complete with ISBN number, was still in the article.

Image credit: “Great tit” by Alan Weir/Flickr — licensed under Creative Commons 2.0, Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0)