And the only substantial sums going into is pocket come from the newspapers he belittles.

Well, if they’re that comfortable with my revelation about their unprofessional conduct, they’ll have no objections with my publishing the recording of the event.

Unless their CIO Jag Singh would care to state otherwise.

(Jag… if you’re out there and finally back from your two-day lunch, then now’s the time to speak up.)

I also have Alex Hilton, one of their shareholders, on record confirming that I’m free to discuss anything we have discussed by email to do with shareholders and who may or may not be making a profit just yet.

So here goes:

[Note - I acknowledge that this shareholder might be prone to confusion. At one stage he was clearly under the impression that he had allowed himself to be partially bought out by Paul Staines, who MessageSpace have reminded us in the past "is neither a shareholder, director or employee of MessageSpace and never has been." This shareholder is also trying very hard to stay away from the day-to-day business and get out of the picture and so on and so forth, but we are talking profits to shareholders here, so if there are profits going to shareholders, he's in a position to know about it, what with being a shareholder and all.]

ANYway… what he told me in February 2008 was that MessageSpace was paying out to publishers, but not making any money for shareholders… which is more or less what I said above, but now with a named source.

Obviously, that was over a year ago and something may have changed since then, but Alex Hilton did not volunteer any information about the profit status at present when giving me permission to quote him on his earlier statement

I tried to have a sensible conversation with someone at MessageSpace again today, but reached the same person as yesterday, who refused to take the matter seriously. Jag Singh could not be reached for comment, and appears to have been ‘out to lunch’ for most of the day of not all day.

To repeat; any profit Staines is talking about was and is more likely to be about what he’s earning as a publisher or, by his own account, by selling stories to newspapers.

I wouldn’t want to go off half-cocked in a Sunday newspaper or anything like that.

(waits)

Out of curiosity, what were you wearing?

(Seriously. I have a recording of the entire exchange if MessageSpace wish to contest my account. If they wish to contest my account while refusing to allow me to publish that recording, then I wish them all the luck in the world.)

)

Last I heard from one of their shareholders*, while MessageSpace was paying publishers, it wasn’t making any money for them.

(*This was a year ago now, but Staines was peddling the ‘more profit than’ line long before this.)

Any heavily-spun profit Staines is talking about was and is more likely to be about what he’s earning as a publisher or, by his own account, by selling stories to newspapers.

You may recall that Staines was equally misleading about his traffic figures that – with the assistance of the MSM channels he claims to out-perform – finally/temporarily risen almost but not quite to the level of his earlier fantasies.

(This time last year, Staines was claiming 350,000 unique visitors a month, when in reality it was closer to 75,000)