Red Herring awards: a scam?

&#62; When I attended the first time to present, I found a nearly empty room with five or six people and another entrepreneur presenting on stage. Next up, was me. Before I started, I just asked, “Who were the actual Red Herring judges?” No one raised their hands. Since it was only five others, I asked who they were with. They were all entrepreneurs waiting to present next. We then realized, there were NO judges and NO “esteemed panel.”<p>I expected the "conference" to be lackluster and crappy, but I didn't expect that they would literally not even bother setting anything up for the awards. Amazing.

TIL that Red Herring still exists. As an aside, the blog that's the source for this article (<a href="http://www.techinasia.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.techinasia.com/</a>) is a fantastic English language source for what's going on in the Asian tech startup scene. Lots of coverage of big companies like Sina Weibo, Baidu, Renren, etc. Also coverage of smaller stuff. There's a lot of innovation happening in Asia, particularly in China, and this is one of the few English language sources doing detailed reporting that I know of.

I'm amused by the irony of the name "Red Herring". Perhaps the idiom isn't familiar to non-native English speakers?<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_herring" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_herring</a>

Back in the late nineties a variation on this was for the scammer to call and say you'd be featured on some cable business show hosted by a big shot ex-politician. When they called me it was Casper Weinberger, but I remember hearing about other names too. The catch was that you had to pay the production costs of $15-25k.<p>More info: <a href="http://800notes.com/Phone.aspx/1-954-461-2100/2" rel="nofollow">http://800notes.com/Phone.aspx/1-954-461-2100/2</a><p>This is also a common charity tactic. They throw a big dinner party honoring some rich guy, then shake down all his friends to pay for tables at dinner.

They contacted me before saying if I'm willing to pay for the $3,000, I will get the top 100 award. It's a joke. But there are still so many companies willing to pay them every year in Asia. So sad.

The Red Herring magazine and brand was bought years ago. The brand was whored out to promote Dasar conferences. If you want some sad entertainment, read through any Valleywag/Gawker articles about working at Red Herring. Sad thing is all the stories are easily verifiable - just talk to any ex-employee.

I used to work in a "multi-award winning" agency. They would pay extortionate amounts to win these awards given by people with absolutely no credibility in the industry. It wasn't an award, so much as an endorsement. The sad thing is, it used to work, clients lapped it up.

I heard this about the Webby Awards as well...<p><a href="https://www.google.com/search?q=webby+awards+scam" rel="nofollow">https://www.google.com/search?q=webby+awards+scam</a>

Why would anyone pay $3000 to attend a conference to receive an award, which in reality amounts to nothing?<p>Your users don't care about some stupid online award they've never heard of. If the investors you're talking to care about it then it's time to find new investors.

The name isn't enough of a clue?

Hmm. I recently saw a company advertize their Red Herring award, and my scam-sense was tingling. I did a little looking and decided the whole thing was a bit of a scam, but targeted at me, the potential impressee.<p>I never considered the possibility of the company itself having been scammed.

JD Power isn't much better. Supposedly they really do select based on quality, but it's setup so you have to pay MASSIVE fees if you ever want to acknowledge publicly that you've won.

I googled "web awards" and all the top links required you to pay a "participation fee".

For what it's worth the US stage this year was a pretty professional production. Just viewing the pitches was worth the money. Notably, many of those that pitched -- including some competitors of ours, did not receive the award.