How's that going? Has Sylvia been stopped? Slowed down?
Just curious.
Good question.
I would say she has definitely been slowed down.
The most obvious evidence of that: She was on the Montel Williams Show promoting her nonsense once a week for (I believe it was) seventeen years.
That exposure slowed down in the final weeks and months of Montel's show, and of course stopped totally when the show went off the air,
That lack of a weekly national exposure had to have hit her in the pocketbook.
I think (but am not sure) that although she continues to crank out her books, she cranks out fewer per year now. (It could be that I have a distorted view of that though, since I am not as "on her case" all the time as I once was.
Did the StopSylvia web site have anything to do with the Montel Williams Show going off the air? That's impossible to say. I would guess not much if any, but the site got Montel, and his show, clearly associated in many places (including tghe Anderson Cooper 360 Show) with Browne's hurting the families of missing children, and there were also articles calling Montel's honor into question, and highlighting his threatening a high school student after she interviewed him for her school newspaper, so the site did not help him.
It's anecdotal, but I have been told, by people with direct contacts into Browne's headquarters, that phone calls for "readings" had dropped so dramatically that people working there feared the place was going to close.
Even assuming all of this is true, and she HAS slowed down, how much can my site take credit for that? All? Most? Some? Little? None?
JREF Forum member Brattus once stated here that most if not all of any decline in Browne's popularity was just part of the natural arc of a celebrity's fame, and that my site had nothing to do with it.
I'd like to think that he was wrong about that, but I don't think that either of us has any real evidence, nor do i know how evidence one way or the other could be found.
I can comfortably say that the site has spread the news of many of Browne's most egregious gaffes pretty effectively.
The first article I wrote about her involvement in the Shawn Hornbeck case went up on the site the same day that Shawn was found alive., and was promptly indexed into Google, where it showed up on the first page when people all over the world were hungry for more information about Shawn. This resulted in the number of page requests to my site going from (IIRC) around 80,000 per month to over two million per month for the next two months.
It also resulted in that article, and Browne's telling the Akers that Shawn was dead, being discussed on The Howard Stern Show, The New York Post, Fox News and CNN's Anderson Cooper 360 (among others). None of this could have done Browne any good.
One thing which I take pride in, and which is a decent barometer of the site's impact on public discourse about Browne, is the fact that for a few years now it has been difficult to find an online discussion of Browne's "abilities" where at least one person does not add a link to my site into the discussion.
