I Am A Sellout

Some of you might have noticed something different about the site in the past few days. This probably means you are spending way too much time on the computer looking up useless sites. Anyway, there are now ads on my site. That’s right; I have officially sold out to corporate America and caved in. Of course, it’s not like I had some sort of moral objection to it in the first place. That would require having morals, of which I have very few (none if you don’t consider my hatred of tofu to be a “moral”).

I mean, if I’m going to be writing this stuff and people for some reason keep reading this stuff, I might as well make some money off of it. Sure, it’s not like I’m getting paid a ridiculous amount of money, but seeing as I spend about fifteen minutes on each entry and it requires me to do very little other than sit in front of my computer and spew hateful stereo-types and generalizations, any money I’m making is more than I deserve. I’m pretty sure Bill O’Reilly says this to himself every night before he goes to sleep.

Apparently the way it works is that this program looks at my readers and decides which ads they might be interested in. Now, this worried me, because I’m a little suspicious of the people that read this, and I have a feeling there are going to be some really strange ads popping up on the screen. They also use keywords from my entries to determine which ads they place, which might explain why there have been a lot of ads for cattle prods and Justin Bieber CDs. Then, the more people that see and click on the ads, the more I get paid. But I’m not supposed to tell you to click on the ads. That would be illegal. So definitely don’t click on the ads. (If you could see through my webcam right now you would see my winking very subtly. Then again, you would also see me sitting in an office chair in my underwear, so maybe it’s a good thing you aren’t seeing through my webcam.)

But the good thing is that you don’t have to be worried about me becoming too commercial. You don’t have to worry about me censoring things just because those **ALERT: This portion of the entry has been edited and formatted to fit this site.** And you definitely can count on me to stick to my guns and not over commercialize this site just because all of those **ALERT: It’s time for Music Hour! sponsored by the Disney Channel, with your guest, Joe Jonas!**

But in all seriousness, I’m not one of those guys that think that making lots of money means you’ve sold out. I see this a lot with musical bands. People get all upset with them when they sign a big record contract because they think that all of a sudden they will become too “corporate” and will go away from their roots. If I were these musicians, my response would be something along the lines of “You can kiss my Aston Martin.” Drugs are not free okay? The love of music only goes so far, and integrity doesn’t buy yachts.

Okay, so after that completely random little tangent, let’s get back to ads. As a journalism major, I realize that the media is ruled by the pursuit of advertising revenue. This scares me, because I have met many advertising majors and (while this may be a sort of journalism turf war and I might be biased) ad people have pralines for brains. (By the way, what the hell is a praline? Is it a nut or is like a candy? Somebody should look that up for me.) They rarely come up with good ads, and when they do, they ride them until they are just irritating. Geico is a great example. Sure, maybe the gecko and the caveman and the money with the eyes were funny the first time, but not the next fifty times. The only commercial characters I never get tired of seeing are these guys, this dude, and whatever the hell these are.

But just because I understand my industry is run by ads doesn’t mean I’m happy about it. Do you want proof that ads have a way of ruining even the most pure and sacred things? Read this story. Yeah, so in order to make sure their ratings were good, they let five kids who didn’t even spell a word right into the last round. This is stupid because it takes away from the spirit of the competition; namely watching little kids spell a word wrong and break down into tears as their dreams come crashing down before them and their parents disown them. For all I know one of those kids might not be able to even spell their own name (then again, with so many Indian kids in this competition that is nothing to laugh at).

This all happened because of ads and ratings. ESPN took one of my favorite things in the world (the spelling bee, not Indian kids; not that there is anything wrong with Indian kids) and they’ve twisted it into a money-grubbing death machine. Thankfully, even though I now have ads on my site, I will always serve as the watchdog of justice and corruption. I’m going to give those people at ESPN a piece of my **ALERT: We interrupt this program for a special segment, sponsored by ESPN.**