teedy

BigPond ad directs Idol fans to porn Web site
By Jamie Duncan, AAP
22 November 2004
AAP

Newspaper advertisements congratulating Australian Idol winner Casey Donovan today mistakenly directed fans to a gay porn Web site.

The half-page ads, placed by Telstra's Internet arm BigPond today in Melbourne's Herald Sun and Sydney's Daily Telegraph newspapers, direct readers to caseydonovan.com.

But anyone calling up the website will be confronted by a full frontal nude picture of American porn star, Casey Donovan, and links to sales of his gay porn DVDs and videotapes.

Australia's Donovan, a 16-year-old who won a lucrative record deal with the BMG label when she won Australian Idol last night, has a personal Web site under construction at www.caseydonovan.com.au and a Web site set up by fans at www.caseydonovan.org.

BigPond corporate affairs manager Craig Middleton put the gaffe down to "simple human error in the last-minute preparation of the ad".

"Obviously everything was put together last night after the winner was announced and unfortunately, the `au' dropped off the address," he said.

BigPond had alerted web filters to add the porn Website to its databases to prevent children unwittingly viewing pornography.

"We have spoken to the Australian Broadcasting Authority about having the other site taken down or blocked but because it's rated R, not X, we have no option there," Middleton said.

Sydney Web designer Jared Fusedale set up the fan Web site at www.caseydonovan.org through his company, Fusedmedia Australia Pty Ltd.

Fusedale, a fan of Donovan's, set up the Web site for fans to run as Donovan made her way through the competition.

The Web site has already received more than 270,000 hits, and features a picture gallery and a message board for fans.

Fusedale said the porn movie Web site was "dodgy" but there was little he could do to avoid the problem of fans mistakenly clicking through to the Web site.

"Once you have a domain name, you can do anything you like with it, but we've had a lot of people (trying to find caseydonovan.org) say they can't look at the Web site because it's dirty," Fusedale said.

"The thing is every name relating to `Casey Donovan' or `Casey' has been taken up so there's not much we can do about it... but it has been pretty well marketed with the fans.

"Obviously this is a fan Web site we're providing for Casey and it's worked pretty well because of the result last night."

A spokesman for BMG, which manages Donovan and produces her official Web site, could not be contacted.

The American porn star's Website is connected with www.hisxpress.com, the online arm of Massachusetts production company Falcon Video, which offers for sale hundreds of movie titles and full frontal nude pictures of dozens of male models.