After a little bit of investigating, I am of the opinion that the “Emma Watson Is Next” website and indeed the whole story is a contrivance of the marketing company Rantic in conjunction with FoxWeekly. There is evidence that the emmayouarenext.com website is hosted by Rantic and that they have a recent history of inventing stories of this nature, they even reused the 4chan + hacker angle from a previous promotion. It seems the whole point of marketing these days is to sell lies to as many people as possible and this particular campaign appears to have done that very successfully.
My opinion is based on the following things.
[1] These 3 websites are hosted on the same server or share at least one server in common.
www.foxweekly.com
www.rantic.com
www.emmayouarenext.com
This can be seen from the vhost (virtual host) field from the /server-status output from www.emmayouarenext.com. The virtual host is used as a way for a single web server to tell the difference between multiple websites hosted on the SAME server. However since all 3 websites utilise CloudFlare they each appear to have different external IP addresses (owned by CloudFlare) but since CloudFlare operate as a traffic forwarding service each of these servers can direct the traffic to the same server owned by Rantic with a different vhost that determines the website that is displayed.
Supporting:
Image: http://s2.postimg.org/nsvfhb1mh/networkdiagram1.jpg
Image: http://s2.postimg.org/j73wmp5h5/server_status1.jpg
Image: http://s2.postimg.org/51y3kvwft/server_status2.jpg
Image: http://s2.postimg.org/y0dytpnuh/server_status3.jpg
Image: http://s2.postimg.org/8nzbjsdfd/Rantic_Twitter1.jpg
Image: http://s2.postimg.org/xp13uows9/Rantic_Twitter2.jpg
URL: http://www.emmayouarenext.com/server-status (since removed)
Update: The /server-status resource was removed from the server about the same time a series of cryptic tweets were made on the @RanticMarketing Twitter account. Seems like they might suspect something is up.
[2] FoxWeekly is a news outlet while Rantic, is a marketing company that specialises in unconventional vital marketing. On its website Rantic says of itself.
"The primary focus of our company is never to follow any traditional way of marketing, We always have come up with new creative ways to spread the message."
"Some say viral cannot be predicted well we have the recipe."
FoxWeekly and Rantic are linked by their sharing of a common server and by references to each other.
Supporting:
URL: http://www.foxweekly.com/about
URL: http://www.rantic.com/
URL: https://twitter.com/RanticMarketing/with_replies
[3] Rantic and Fox Weekly are tied to a similar story based around hacking and 4chan very recently by spreading a story that GTA V for the PC had been cancelled and claiming the Rantic website had been hacked in protest over the announcement by members of 4chan. Notice the same elements are being reused in the Emma Watson story except this time it’s been tweaked to capitalise upon The Fappening.
Supporting:
URL: http://www.rantic.com/ (Rockstar Games the company behind GTA V are a client)
URL: https://twitter.com/RanticMarketing/with_replies
URL: http://www.foxweekly.com/2014/08/28/buzz/rockstar-employee-says-gta-v-pc-could-be-cancelled.html
URL:http://www.kitguru.net/gaming/matthew-wilson/marketing-firm-rantic-hacked-over-gta-v-pc-cancellation-rumors/
Image: http://s2.postimg.org/8nzbjsdfd/Rantic_Twitter1.jpg
Image: http://s2.postimg.org/z6hysic55/foxweekly_gtav.jpg
Image: http://s2.postimg.org/wqg5enu2h/kitguru_gtav.jpg
What we can see is that there is a connection between FoxWeekly, Rantic and EmmaYouAreNext as they share common web infrastructure, as seen in the server status page. Not unsurprisingly FoxWeekly have reported on the Emma Watson story and they have also referenced Rantic in the GTA V article and in turn Rantic have referenced them back in a tweet from Sep 17th. This was in relation to a story that has near identical plot elements to the one currently being pushed. On top of this Rantic admits it uses unconventional methods to market and an ominous countdown to a celebrity scandal would certainly qualify as that.
I’m sure one could find more to substantiate this position if they started asking the right people the right questions.
-Gammarays
