George Parker: Will Work for Fu*k All!

I had to laugh, when I read the piece in the New York Times about how LinkedIn was asking for volunteers to translate their site into dozens of different languages – Right now, it’s only available in English, Spanish, French and German – So they are looking for fucktards willing to do the job in Esperanto and Klingon and whatever else will make them a shitload of money. And they are willing to pay these volunteers… Fuck all! Because one of the reasons given is that it will be a fun thing to do. You have to wonder at the gall of these people. But then, it’s no different from many other sites out there… The most egregious example being the Huffington Post, which pays not one red cent to any of its many columnists… ‘Cos as multi-millionaire owner, Arianna Huffington puts it… “It is a privilege to write for us.” Oh, fucking right. Did you see she won some big time journalism award the other week for being a pioneer in new media and pointing the way for the rest of the press? The total irony of that is she’s putting all the fucktards who gave her the award out of work for the rest of their miserable lives. But then, I suppose they can always fall back to a life of writing for her… For fucking free.

What’s funny is that the translators they were trying to attract started a group (shades of Facebook) who were annoyed by this pathetic attempt to get something for nothing. At the last check-in, the group had swelled to 300 members. Remember the same shit happened in 2007 when Facebook asked volunteers to offer translations of the standard explanatory language throughout the site into more than 20 languages, with translators voting among themselves for preferred verbiage. Again a group was formed that claimed Facebook was taking advantage of translators. And not long ago, Google, the richest fucking company in the universe asked for free artwork to launch Chrome.

But this is one of the major problems with most forms of new media. In the majority of cases virtually all of the content of the sites is derived from either the aggregation of existing news, entertainment, sport, or whatever free content is out there that someone else has originated, or they expect a bunch of numbnuts to do it for free. Either for the privilege, or in the forlorn hope it will sell their books, seminars, or conferences.

Which is another giant scam. Conferences. Did you know that the bulk of the income most publications derive is from hosting conferences? In the ad biz that would include AdAge, AdWeek and all their associated periodicals. In the IT world, most members of senior management spend over twenty percent of their time either attending, or speaking at, various conferences. And most of them deliver little value (except to the organizers of the conferences.) But it does get them out of the office for a few days, and you can’t beat all that valuable networking time on the golf course.

My point is, some very smart people have created a huge secondary economy that engenders big profits to the principals, whilst delivering fuck all to the vast majority of the originators of content. That’s a pretty clever business model, until the day the content providers wise up and demand fair payment for their efforts. Disclaimer… psfk doesn’t pay me for writing this, so I’m a fucktard too… Please buy my books!

George Parker is the perpetrator of adscam.typepad.com, without doubt, one of the most foul and annoying, piss & vinegar ad blogs on the planet. His new book, The Ubiquitous Persuaders, has just been published by Amazon and is currently setting the ether ablaze. He will continue to relentlessly promote the crap out of it until you are forced to stab yourself in the eyes with knitting needles.