TechCrunch takes down leakshield competitors with fake facts
In April 2024, Ceartas DMCA , a brand protection service provider from Ireland, closed a seed funding round with $4.5 million. TechCrunch published a detailed article on this, unfairly discrediting four of leakshield's competitors with incorrect facts: Rulta , BranditScan , Red Points , and Vobile . If we had been mentioned, we would have sued TechCrunch immediately.
Ceartas, like us at leakshield, offers a solution to remove brand safety issues and leaks of paid content from the internet, including deindexing such infringements from search engines. Google publishes an up-to-date and public Transparency Report which provides details about every company's reports and success rates.
In his article, Mike Butcher ?? writes about Ceartas in almost promotional tones, praising them highly. My article, however, focuses not on Ceartas' abilities but on TechCrunch's inaccuracies.
In one of the last paragraphs, Mike mentions that Ceartas has a delisting rate of 90% to 100% for links submitted to Google for removal, according to Google’s Transparency Report.
He then compares this to the delisting rates of Rulta at 63%, BranditScan at 54%, Red Points at 31%, and Vobile at 42%.
At a first glance, it seems these companies are utterly incompetent at helping their clients protect their rights. In reality though, it’s quite the opposite:
The Google Transparency Report actually provides five data points for each copyright reporter's pie chart: Removed Links, Not Removed Links, Pending Links, Duplicates, and "Not in Index".?
Obviously, Google has not (yet) indexed all links available on the internet and states:
“Sometimes requests identify URLs that are not currently in our Search index. As a matter of policy, Google accepts and processes DMCA notices for any URL, even those that are not in our Search index. We may crawl the page at a later date so by processing URLs not in our index, we avoid a situation where a page appears in Search results in the future despite having a DMCA notice filed against it.“
Consequently, reporting links that are no in index is beneficial for rights holders, as it prevents search engines from indexing infringements in the first place. Therefore, the correct success rates are: Rulta at 95.7%, BranditScan (listed under DMCA Piracy Prevention Inc) at 98.9%, Red Points at 90%, Vobile at 87%, and leakshield at 96.9%.?
Perhaps Ceartas wanted to appear better than they are, or TechCrunch was sloppy in their research without consulting Google for clarification. What matters is that in the end, the article makes it seem like our competitors (except Ceartas) mess up roughly half of all cases they handle.
Which is absurdly wrong.
I informed Mike Butcher of these false facts by email on 30 April 2024, but Mike has not yet replied.
Don't believe everything you read in magazines, especially when an article is overwhelmingly positive for one side while disparaging many others.
Here you can find the version of the article that was visible when I wrote it (and currently still is): https://web.archive.org/web/20240516183503/https://techcrunch.com/2024/04/30/devastated-by-his-image-being-posted-to-a-porn-site-this-founder-hit-on-an-ai-startup-idea/