Question: if a famous celebrity kills himself, how quickly can it be turned into ad-revenue? It blows my mind how quickly this story has been plastered all across the internet, Facebook being the nexus, where hundreds of articles are shared and re-shared at an awe-inspiring rate. Ive never been a big fan of buzzfeed and the other click-bait web pages, but they have been exceptionally shameless this time around. An article I saw this morning was top 10 Robin William quotes, already bumped to the top of my FB feed as well as other sites I frequent. Shameless. Of course, a lot of the blame falls to Facebook itself. The absolute bombardment of posts related to this tragedy is partially because Facebook puts ad money before all else, shamelessly spamming ad upon ad. Remember, just 4 years ago, when the status to ad ratio was like 4:1? Now its closer to 1:4; and no, somebody liking 10 gifs about whatever is not a status update, its an ad for the website. And finally, I think a lot of the blame falls on us, the consumer. We share, we like, we click and click and click. I will admit that I do it; I shared the article that broke the news, not because I give a shit, but because I saw it when it went up and wanted to be the first to break it within my circles. These days, we dont read the news; we make the news. Why follow a story, when everything *important* will be posted, shared, liked, and re-posted? Who needs articles when you have tweets? Who needs facts when you have opinions? Who needs accuracy when you have speed? And as always, the clicks keep piling up. Pennies turn to dimes, dimes turn to dollars. The internet brings us together, but it also lets some people profit extensively off of others tragedies. I fail to see how the previously mentioned top 10 list is any different from people selling I survived 9/11 t-shirts on 9/12, and we as consumers should be ashamed that we allow and perpetuate this rampant profiteering. This entire event has really made me question how social media plays us, plays with us, and plays with our perception of reality. To quote Charlie Chaplain, we have developed speed, but we have shut ourselves in. ... More than machinery, we need humanity I guess I challenge everybody to really begin to critically examine the shit they read/follow on this website. Im not against anybody trying to make a living, nor am I the fun police trying to take away the top ten reasons being 20 is awesome. But we, collectively, took a mans suicide and turned it into a national spectacle, and some of us profited immensely from said show. If anybody has actually read this far I would love to hear your opinion, hopefully this was all coherent, its late, sue me. Note: made some minor edits, basically just spelling/grammar plus I fixed my point about the ratio of ads to updates (had the numbers backwards) as well as integrated the CC quote better
Posted on: Wed, 13 Aug 2014 05:31:54 +0000
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