Wherein I Help a Friend

I can't believe nobody commented on the (non)cute kidney in my last post. The comments all turned towards internet marketing and advertising, which was a spillover effect from Seet's blog (which, if you're reading, links to the wrong site for the million-dollar homepage - should be www.milliondollarhomepage.com - on which he should spend some of that million upgrading bandwidth).

Now, I never really believed in making money this way - Mother always told me the way to make money was through blood, sweat and tears (depending on profession, gender and virginity) and that getting it any other way would amount to some-form-of-reckoning later in life, though she never complained when she won at 4D (local sweepstakes) so I guess the reckoning comes in the form of being happier and cheerful. However, my formative years were spent with the belief that credit cards were the invention of the devil (which is why I don't really want to work in a bank), loans had to be repaid as soon as possible (easy advice to keep to when you don't borrow money) and that heng cai (striking it rich suddenly) was something that happened to other people who did good things in their previous lives ( I was ME - must have been really bad in previous lives).

Despite my nonchalance towards making a quick buck, I can't help but keep hearing news of that million dollar webpage which has become something of a legend in the circles I frequent, although for so many different reasons. I am still undecided if it is a stroke of genius, a symbol of originality and creativity, a display of the faith in internet advertising, a new record for the power of virals or just another way to prove that humans are stupid.

Of course, there'll always be some johnny-come-latelys, like Take, who has set up a blog containing some pithy articles about handling stress which he hopes I will link to in mine, so that my 30-odd pokemon-hentai-seeking readers will follow it (I expect you guys get stressed whenever you come here only to find there's no pokemon, and no hentai) and can earn him some passive income.

In case you missed it up there, it's here at http://getincharge.blogspot.com/.

Story's not over just yet, kids - it turns out that people such as Take have anticipated the low traffic their sites generate, and have come up with a brilliant counter-measure: creating dozens of these sites.

It's the internet equivalent of a fake Gucci from China.

Of course, instead of filling the internet with more spam, there are those who take a little time and effort to learn some HTML (or hire a designer to do it for $10) and create porn blogs (WORK UNSAFE). The phenomenon seems to be largely limited to gay porn at the moment, though the one I linked to is dedicated to heterosexual woman-degradation (my guess is hetero-porn is so easily available it's stupid to restrict it). Pornographic (or at least extremely raunchy) images are easily available these days and legislative action is less likely (I'm guessing here) than if you hawk mp3s. In fact, from observation of several of these, it would appear there is money to be made advertising porn sites on a popular porn blog, in some kind of sick symbiotic existence.

POKEMON HENTAI gets me 45% of my traffic. Can you imagine if I actually DID have pokemon hentai here?

Considering that Xiaxue is Singapore's top blogger and that Singapore's prettiest blogger and MissIzzy of SarongPartyGirl fame managed to garner entire-page photo features on local newspapers, I'd say we have a pretty good consumer base. You think Xiaxue's 20,000 visitors are there for her writing?

Of course, it might be argued that there is a large moral gulf between earning a bit of money by innocently (ie. I don't care how I inconvenience others as long as I'm not there to see it happen) creating spam sites compared to offering porn, but personally I think it's larger crime - you act against taste and fashion, waste internet-space, and reduce search-engine-efficiency. Isn't that worse?

I have hopes that, following my little tirade, my friends will go down the porn-path instead of ads in one-post blogs. If it comes down to spammer vs porn baron, I know which one my lesser evil is.

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Xiaxue compares herself to Kottke. I laughed so hard. I wonder if he knows.