Scandalous Marketing Via Spitzer & Dupre

Two obvious business “beneficiaries” of all the attention the Spitzer scandal is generating are MySpace and Facebook. Publicity about Ashley Alexandra Dupre’s profile on both social networks has been plastered all over the media. Here’s just a few:

CNN
New York Times
MSNBC
Los Angeles Times

I assume she’s getting a lot of friend requests. If there is anybody in America who didn’t know what MySpace and Facebook were, I assume we are now well beyond that point. Nothing like a scandal to make people sit up and take notice.

I wonder if this publicity is good for these social networks? Yes, it is a tremendous amount of free attention, but it also reinforces the lack of privacy that is part of this environment. My guess is that in the short term it will monetarily benefit Facebook, MySpace and most certainly Miss Dupre. It’s difficult to assess the long term effects.