September 18, 2002
Wednesday September 18, 2002 • Howard Tayler

Finally, somebody is noticing Keenspot for the advertising potential it represents. This is, for you the reader, excellent news. Naturally it's good news for me, too.

Here's the scoop: Comedy Central (the cable channel) looked at Keenspot and recognized that we share a common demographic. They want to advertise one of their programs with Keenspot, and considering that the program they want to push is one of the most successful animated series of the last decade, the whole deal is both flattering and encouraging.

There are only two drawbacks.

  1. The ads will be "eyeblaster" ads, which are the animations that appear within the page you are viewing, in many cases obscuring content you're interested in (until you dismiss the ad with the close-box).
  2. The animated series is South Park
Now before you start flaming me for selling out, please read on: these ads pay us one hundred times the going rate for web-based advertising. Now if it were just about the money for this campaign, Keenspot would likely not consider it. But since we are being noticed by Comedy Central, and since they picked Keenspot for this exclusive promotion, we're pretty excited. It's one small step in the right direction (just so you know, that direction is "advertisers who want to brand products my readers might be interested in, rather than trying to get them to punch the monkey or take out a second mortgage.")

The deal is not yet inked, but before it is I wanted to warn you all. You should only see the South Park ads once per day, regardless of how many KeenSpot comics you read. The ads only generate revenue if they are allowed to run to completion, but since it's extremely likely that they'll be FUNNY, it's probably worth your time to let the ad run to completion.

If you love South Park, then let the ad run because you'll enjoy it. If you despise South Park, then let the ad run because you'll enjoy knowing that you're taking ad money from the South Park franchise, and handing that money to me. If you despise South Park AND me, then go ahead and close the ad early (but I have to ask why you're here in the first place. Who let you in?)

And now, the obligatory "rant-in-advance-of-the-flames," which I will set apart from the rest of this entry with a nice <INDENTRANT> tag.

In spite of the fact that Schlock Mercenary readers tend to be significantly more intelligent and better paid than the average person, some readers may object to ads getting in the way of their free entertainment. Frankly, I have as close to zero sympathy for that anomalous group as makes no difference. TANSTAAFL (There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch). Somebody has to pay for this stuff, and advertising appears to be one of only two ways to regularly meet the bandwidth bill. There is still the subscription model, in which readers pay for Keenspot PREMIUM (which pays us about 100 times better than the South Park ads will) and see no ads at all, plus some cool bonus content, but I'm sure some folk out there are just morally opposed to paying for something that they mistakenly think should be free. Oh well. I'll regret losing audience members over something so trivial as me trying to get paid for this work, but I won't regret it enough to stop trying to get paid for this.

Usually the entry is funny -- at least a little bit. The obligatory stab of humor in this installment is implicit in its serially positioned (and therefore juxtapositional) relationship with Monday's Letter, in which I asked your opinion on the charity work I've been doing. "Humorous irony:" a distinguishing hallmark of fine entertainment (which we should all be willing to pay for.)