Not too long ago I complained about TV commercials. What form of advertising am I going to complain about today? Internet advertising. Except this time I’m not just the embittered consumer sick of ads ruining his television-viewing experience. This time I’m also the greedy capitalist looking for a few dollars.
When I first moved this blog from wordpress.com to its own domain, I thought, hey, there’s a chance I could make some money on this. Maybe not a lot of money, but hopefully enough to cover the $20 a year I pay for the domain name. (Fortunately, the hosting is free; thanks again to Rob Heath for the help.) And who knows, maybe it’ll be like the lottery, except with a lot more work involved.
But that’s not how it works. The Internet is made for niches. Find a niche, cover it in detail: obsessively catalog everything about your favorite TV show or sports team or video game. Then watch the search engines direct the traffic to you. I get a fair amount of search traffic (compared to what I get from direct traffic and links from facebook, twitter, and other blogs), but it’s an interesting, very scattered mix. Continue reading ‘internet advertising’
Television is a business. I get that. But I’m sick of commercials. I’m especially frustrated by commercials now that I have a DVR, and now that I watch so many of my favorite shows online with limited or no commercial interruption—after that, watching regular TV that you can’t fast forward through is immensely frustrating.
It’s pretty ridiculous how much of an average TV show is advertising. According to Wikipedia, commercials used to take up nine minutes of an hour-long program in the 1960s. Now they take up roughly eighteen minutes an hour. That’s almost a third of the show. Since modern TV shows are written to fit into the contours of commercial breaks, watching them isn’t usually too annoying; sure, it’s nicer to fast-forward through the commercials if you can, but I can stomach sitting through the commercials. What annoys the crap out of me is having to watch a sporting event or movie that gets interrupted every ten minutes for a commercial. Many movies feel completely disjointed when they’re edited and cut up for television. And besides, I have an extremely short attention span, so I usually change the channel, watch something else until a commercial comes on, then flip back to the movie to find I’ve missed some major plot point. Whoops. I love watching a movie on TCM or Fox Movie Channel or HBO or whatever, where I get to see the whole thing straight through. But AMC or some other commercial-laden network? Forget it. Continue reading ‘tv commercials’
I don’t remember exactly why I started this blog six months ago. It probably had something to do with the fact that I’m a total show-off attention whore despite my introverted personality. (When I was in elementary school and I won any sort of award for making the honor roll or whatever, I’d high-step up the aisle, Deion Sanders style, to accept my award.) And it’s because I think I’m funny. Not life-of-the-party funny, but at least clever/erudite/witty/profane when I have the time to write and edit my material. And because I want to show the world that I’m right. About everything. Whether it’s grammar or football. I like to think I can make the world a better place by convincing people that they should hate what I hate.
Now, that’s why I started out. I had a little tiny wordpress.com site. Then a friend of mine from high school showed it to one of his co-worker who said he could host it for me (that co-worker is the man behind Movie Crematorium). So I bought the thingskevinhates.com domain name and started dreaming of fame and fortune. I imagined myself raking in the dough from a few ads on my page.* Of being a media pundit. Of holding court on various issues, with my opinion well respected by thousands of followers all over the world. And most of all, I dreamed of…a book deal.
Now, I suppose one could argue that a magazine column would be more plausible, but I don’t think you could get advances or royalty checks for those. So fuck that. I want a book deal. So many fucking blogs have book deals it’s ridiculous. This 2004—holy crap that’s a long time ago in the online world—New Yorker article details the start of the blogs-to-book movement, with an enterprising 27-year-old agent-in-waiting named Kate Lee working at International Creative Management and scouring the web for bloggers who could become the next best-selling author. This trend exploded, to the point where stuffwhitepeoplelike.com could get a $300,000 book deal. Six motherfucking figures. It’s funny stuff, don’t get me wrong, but $300k? The anti-hipster brigade is raking in the book deals left and right. LATFH has one. Stuff Hipsters Hate has one. I’ve done the whole anti-hipster thing, but there are so many other things in the world to hate: why should I limit myself? Continue reading ‘that i don’t have a book deal yet’
In case you hadn’t heard, there’s been some sort of recession or financial crisis or something. I mean, I didn’t notice because I have a humanities degree (two of them, actually), so I wasn’t planning on having, like, an actual job or anything—I fully expected to be underemployed. Now, no one really knows how the economy works. It’s kind of like the weather—a lot of people make predictions, they’re usually wrong, but they still manage to keep their jobs. The only difference is that people who predict what the economy is going to do usually make a lot more money than the meteorologists. But a lot of individuals and corporations did horrendously stupid things and then wondered why they ended up in a huge gigantic mess. Now, you, dear reader, are probably not running a corporation, so I’m not going to bother with much advice there. But I will point out some of the stupid things people have done so that hopefully you won’t make the same mistakes. Continue reading ‘stupid things people do with their money’
If you were to make a list of the most evil corporations ever, I think it’s safe to say Ticketmaster would be at the top of the list. They are truly, truly, horrendous. Just about everything they do inspires hatred. The customer service sucks, the fees are outrageous, they send me annoying e-mails every damn week, they poison cute little animals. (Okay, they probably don’t poison cute little animals.) Every time I do business with them I get the nauseating feeling of being shockingly, unavoidably screwed. I detest them. Continue reading ‘ticketmaster’