Turns out that The Smoking Gun only winged Stamps.com after all.
You might recall that last fall we told the story of how a test run of Stamps.com’s wildly popular PhotoStamps service had been suspended by the U.S. Postal Service in the wake of embarrassing publicity brought upon it by the merry pranksters at www.thesmokinggun.com. PhotoStamps was designed to let consumers order personalized postage online that features photographs of themselves, loved ones or favorite scenes. It was a spectacular hit, as virtually every media outlet in the country did a story about the service. Some 83,000 images were uploaded in just seven weeks, and Stamps.com – an 8-year-old company that only last year registered its first profitable quarter – raked in $2.3 million in relatively easy revenue.
But then The Smoking Gun went bang-bang. Best known for posting celebrity mug shots and salacious court documents – the Web site decided it would be amusing to exploit what appeared to them to be a door left wide open to trouble. So the editors of the site ordered and were unquestioningly issued nine sheets of PhotoStamps that depicted the likes of Unabomber Ted Kaczynski, Yugoslavian war criminal Slobodan Milosevic, and executed spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.
When the gunslingers told the world what they’d done, Stamps.com found its new golden goose simmering in a pot of controversy. PhotoStamps was suspended in September and its fate appeared uncertain.
Last week that uncertainty cleared as the company announced it received the blessing of postal authorities to launch a new one-year test of PhotoStamps beginning May 17, with pre-orders being accepted now at www.photostamps.com.
But what’s to stop Internet wise guys from shooting more holes in the service?
“We did it because we thought at least initially they were going to have a tough time stopping people from abusing or attempting to abuse the system,” says Bill Bastone, editor of The Smoking Gun. “They’ve probably figured it out now so that if you’re trying to get a serial killer or a dictator on a stamp, it’s just not going to happen.”
There’s no probably about it, says Stamps.com CEO Ken McBride.
“We’ve spent the seven months since the first market test ended improving our processes,” McBride says. “We hired and trained some additional screening personnel with expertise in world history and world culture, and we’ve built a huge database of images that our screeners will be on the lookout for, as well as other capabilities that will help the human screening process.”
As a backstop, the company has fortified its acceptable-use policy that prohibits ordering stamps that depict celebrities, criminals and assorted bad actors – with the definition of “bad” extraordinarily broad.
“So the only way to sneak something through will be to violate the terms and conditions, and we’ll have to figure out at that point what kind of steps we might take to go after someone who does it,” McBride says.
He means the company is likely to unleash the lawyers. Here’s a nugget from the terms-of-use policy that should dissuade all but the most imprudent of pranksters:
“In the event you violate these Content Restrictions and you intentionally publicize such violation, you acknowledge that Stamps.com will suffer substantial damage to its reputation and goodwill and that you can be liable for causing such substantial damage.”
They’re serious. In fact, a colleague expressed interest in ordering PhotoStamps for his 89-year-old mother-in-law’s upcoming 90th birthday celebration and I advised him to make sure the woman doesn’t have a rap sheet before placing his order.
One thing McBride probably won’t have to worry about, however, is another shot from The Smoking Gun. Says editor Bastone about PhotoStamps’ reprieve: “It may not seem so given our little gambit last summer, but we’re kind of happy for them.”
The address is buzz@nww.com. Don’t forget the postage.
