Posts Tagged ‘ads’
Thinking Things
I hope you don’t mind that I haven’t asked you, dear readers, for money, and I haven’t splashed advertisements all over this virtual space, either. It’s not what I do. I consider myself lucky that I can get away with that. Obviously, asking for money is a reasonable thing to do when you have no other source of funding.
These thoughts have been triggered by two things. First, the multitude of activist organizations that are bombarding my inbox with messages emphatically spelling out all the atrocities occurring in our country that need to be stopped.
“Send us $9 monthly.”
“Donate now.”
It’s hard to argue with the craftily written paragraphs that imply the money I give will stymie all the threats to our democratic freedoms unfolding over the last three months. Alas, they are undone by the repetition of requests and the absolute nothing that happens to stop the horrors piling up by the day.
The second thing that has been irking me is the massively intrusive advertisements that a certain weekly documentary series mashes into its podcast format with overdone hype. I am grateful that this person is traveling far and wide to gather stories and employing a crew of staff to record sound and video, which costs a lot of money, I’m certain, but there must be other ways to finance the project.
The current method they use is making it hard to listen to their otherwise very interesting story.
I had a very interesting –read that “chilly”– bike ride yesterday afternoon. When I finished mucking about with various small projects, I was warm, and the air temperature was almost 60°F. I figured the exercise of cycling would naturally heat me up, so I didn’t put on long sleeves.
From our wonderfully nestled property, I did not perceive much in the way of wind. I also didn’t notice that the brief clearing in the sky we had been enjoying was over, and thick clouds were blocking the warm sunshine.
I soon discovered it was closer to 50 than 60°F and felt more like 30 when creating my own wind chill effect during rapid spurts down hills.
The route I selected was a short square that ended up putting me into a stiff headwind for the last miles to our driveway at a time when my arms were already uncomfortably cold.
Checking the wind speed when I got home verified why the neighbor’s flag was stiffly blowing straight at me as I passed. My weather app indicated a steady 15mph directly out of the north. Yeah, brrr.
I’m thinking I should have worn long sleeves.
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Don’t Click
It’s a game I play with myself almost every day I’m online. Don’t click on that bait. Sure, I’m curious about the 12 most outrageous ways some common thing we are eating/reading/handling/doing leads to these 16 unbelievable/startling/amazing/scary results that some doctor/study/company/environmentalist/yogi has recently revealed/published/announced/proclaimed/guaranteed.
One facet of clickbait-ology I am anxious to find out about is how the “number” is selected for these attention-getting carnival barkings. A quantity of 10 seems like a very dependable collection. It’s an even number. It’s double-digits. If I was making a list, my first inclination would be to shoot for 10. Maybe I just watched too many years of David Letterman and his Top-Ten List.
From that bias, I find myself puzzling over why a title would feature a list with 12 or 13 items, or even bother when there are only 5 or 6. I saw one once that boasted 17, which starts to press the boundaries of believability. I’m skeptical the source was really able to come up with 17 of anything on a topic that worked for a click-baitable headline.
I wonder what I could come up with to entice people to click through to a page of mine that has no redeeming value to offer in return.
“Never ever give in to the urge to read 10 answers to the most essential question ever pondered.”
You know, the number 10 doesn’t seem to work so well, after all.
I get it now. It’s too status quo. It’s ‘ok boomer.’
Instead, the more ridiculous, the better.
“Eleventeen reasons why things you are already doing won’t make enough difference to matter.”
“These 16 ideas never worked before, but they will now after you’ve read this!”
“Take a penny, leave a penny by clicking this article 7 times a day for 13 weeks and feed a hungry kitty that looks exactly like a unicorn.”
For the record, I don’t always win at my own game. One time, I clicked to see the umpteen most amazing images since the beginning of time. Then, I clicked and clicked and clicked about umpteen more times. Each image was on a unique ad-filled page that took a painfully long time to load. Luckily, the first thing to pop into view for each page was the table of new clickbait ads across the bottom with strange quantities of subjects for me to try “ignoring.”
No one said this game was going to be easy.
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Relative Something 