Telstra directs Idol fans to porn site
13:11 AEDT Mon Nov 22 2004
Newspaper advertisements congratulating Australian Idol winner Casey Donovan mistakenly directed fans to a gay porn website.
The half-page ads, placed by Telstra's internet arm BigPond on Monday 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 on Sunday, has a personal website under construction at
www.caseydonovan.com.au and a website 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," Mr Middleton said.
Sydney web designer Jared Fusedale set up the fan website at
www.caseydonovan.org through his company, Fusedmedia Australia Pty Ltd.
Mr Fusedale, a fan of Donovan's, set up the website for fans to run as Donovan made her way through the competition.
The website has already received more than 270,000 hits, and features a picture gallery and a message board for fans.
Mr Fusedale said the porn movie website was "dodgy" but there was little he could do to avoid the problem of fans mistakenly clicking through to the website.
"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 website because it's dirty," Mr 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 website 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 website, 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.
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