Freeeeeeeeee!! (Part II)

By
eric
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So the other day I got another one.

This time, instead of “inviting” me to work for freeeeeeeeeee!! the person wants me to give her space (and publicity) for freeeeeeeee!! Check it out:

 

Hilarious. She can’t even get the first sentence grammatically correct (so much for “native English speaker”) and then has the gall to present her dreck – her shilling – as something I ought to provide a freeeeeeeeeee!! forum for!
So she can get “clicks” for her “links”… for her “SEO friendly” … “content.”
All for freeeeeeeeee!!!!
Except, of course, she’ll be making money off me.
Such a deal! I pay for the servers; provide a web site and an audience… for her to exploit … and “Mr. Eric” gets “multiple well-researched topics.”
My teeth ache…
PS: The audio clip of my appearance the other day on Tom Woods’ show is here. I was on Bill Meyers’ show this morning; the audio of that will be on site soon!
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21 COMMENTS

  1. SEOs much like LEOs seem universally to be something to despise and evade, wherever possible. Better keep this brief though, keyboard cat is up on the desk, and trying mightily to hijack this comment.

    • One of my cats jumps on my desk throughout the day – leaping onto the right side of my desk only and just stands there looking at me. If I ignore him, he will then splay himself on the desk, part of him on the keyboard so I can’t type. The other part of him on my yellow legal pad, so I can’t see what I wrote. If I try to move him to the left side of my desk – where there is not only space for him but also a nice soft cat bed – he will get huffy and jump down and make aggrieved noises. A few minutes later, he will try again – leaping back onto the right side of my desk.

      Lately, he has also been sitting on my chair the moment I get up to get coffee or some such. I have almost squashed him several times because he is all black and totally blends in.

  2. Hahaha…I’ve seen this con before…let me translate it for you:

    “Hi. I’m a paid AD writer working with a variety of clients who doesn’t want my work to count as “paid advertisement”. You know, those “articles” about health care that conveniently only talks about one particular diet plan, or articles about “prepping” that only talk about a certain way to trade cash for gold. The kind of articles that are SO obviously ads, but in an article form trying to pretend it’s just an impartial opinion piece? Those kind.”

    “Now if I just wrote glowing praise for a product, that’s an obvious ad, and I have to pay for it and identify it as such, to show the bias. HOWEVER if I can trick YOU into posting my work as a “unique article relating to your website”, then my ads slip through, AND your website’s reputation tricks the readers into not seeing my work as a paid commercial…well then I can be doubly-sneaky on behalf of my client, can’t I? I can tailor my article to sound like it belongs in ANY topic so I don’t really care what your website’s talking about. Odds are I never even read it yet, but I’ll make some connection to whatever topic before I tell your readers why they need to buy my client’s stuff, so I don’t really care. If your website’s quality goes down, well I don’t really care either…that’s why it’s free to you. I got my money already.”

    “EVERYONE wins! Well, *I* win anyway…and my millionaire client’s win…and you get an obnoxious shill-filled commercial disguised as an ad to fill some space while your readers get tricked and start blaming you for ruining your website’s feel and trust…but you’re expendable and screw your site, ’cause I write for anyone who’s willing to post and take money from any unscrupulous client like any good finger-whore!”

    “So join this wonderful business venture, I’m running out of suckers who’s willing to let me peddle my client’s shit, and I can make it smell like anything you want. It’ll still be shit, but at least it’ll be disguised shit!”

    Gee. how can you refuse such a good offer? (laugh)

    • Right on the money, Mamba!

      The part that slays me the most is these “writers” can’t.

      Write, that is.

      I guess you get what you don’t pay for!

  3. The fact that you can’t make money doing this is really disillusioning me.

    I understand you are the one feeling the pain; not me. I appreciate what you do.

    What upsets me is… I am really wondering if the people who claim to be Libertarian are really, truly, principled Libertarians.

    If Libertarians backed their words with actions you would have a nice income right now.

    Sorry…

    But I also need to rethink my association with a movement whose people claim to be free-market.

    • Thanks, Bryan –

      I sometimes feel the same way.

      Of course, most of us (probably) are feeling this pressure to be ever-more-“productive” (that is do much more work for less money) as a result of various factors. “Joe” has less money, so he feels pinched and that encourages him to penny-pinch others… and so on down the line.

      I often feel like I must have been hallucinating when I look back on the days when I was getting $2,000 for a magazine article (about the same word count as a car review here). That same article today gets you perhaps $150.

      All because freeeeeeeeeeeee!!

      The magazines can’t pay because their advertising revenue is crashed and it’s crashed because of digital media, which has made it almost impossible to get people to pay for written content, which is easily reproduced and distributed and viewed for freeeeeeee!!

      I do radio appearances about once a week, too. Guess what they pay?

  4. She can’t punctuate correctly, either. There should be a semi-colon before “however” and a comma after it. There should be two spaces between each sentence and after a colon. She’s right there with the run-on sentences, though: The word “audience” should be followed by a semi-colon or a period to make it recognizably a sentence written by someone whose first language is English, or who reads more than menus.

    • Maybe she gets punctuated often enough she doesn’t see the need in her ramblings. I don’t cut her so much for bad punctuation since that seems to be a thing of the past, esp. when so many can’t understand cursive. But her intent is easily caught.

      On that subject, does anyone require my services? I kin right reel gud. Karl dun learnd me up on potted meet…..mmmmmm……see, I thank that’s a little pecker thar…

      • Although, I do not always write well, even I know that punctuation is important.

        Some fun examples:

        Let’s eat Grandma.
        vs.
        Let’s eat, Grandma.
        ——————————————————————————————-
        A woman, without her man, is nothing.
        vs.
        A woman: without her, man is nothing.
        ——————————————————————————————-
        The example below is from http://joek.com/jokes/joke_115.shtml

        Good Version

        Dear John:

        I want a man who knows what love is all about. You are generous, kind, thoughtful. People who are not like you admit to being useless and inferior. You have ruined me for other men. I yearn for you. I have no feelings whatsoever when we’re apart. I can be forever happy—will you let me be yours?

        Gloria

        Bad Version

        Dear John:

        I want a man who knows what love is. All about you are generous, kind, thoughtful people, who are not like you. Admit to being useless and inferior. You have ruined me. For other men, I yearn. For you, I have no feelings whatsoever. When we’re apart, I can be forever happy. Will you let me be?

        Yours,

        Gloria

    • Two spaces between sentences and after a colon was how I learned it too, back when we were still using typewriters. But it’s really not necessary with the kerned fonts used by computers.

  5. It’s a strange new world out there for those of us who did not grow up with the Internet. With all these ‘free’ services out there, who is really making any money?

      • My impression was that seo friendly just meant that her content she writes for you won’t offend advertisers.

        I really don’t understand the monetary aspects of running a site, but listening to Tom woods, he advertised a hosting company that seems quite inexpensive. I am sure there are other costs based on traffic.

        People expect to get things for free over the internet. That is why People install adblocker s, and throw hissyfits when God forbid there is an ad during a tv show or YouTube video.

    • The catchphrase often used for this stuff is:

      “If it’s free, you’re not the customer, you’re the product.”

      Google (and Doubleclick, etc.) monitor your every click in order to sell that data to product marketers. Do a Google search for Cat Toys and suddenly all the ads you see are for … cat toys.

      • It’s the tracking, autoplay, popups, and so on that drive ad blockers. It’s funny what tracker blocking and private browsing does BTW. The automated systems get desperate. On the book of face I start getting ads that apply to people in my feed. So when something I can’t assign to someone I get to guess who it applies to.

      • I’ve noticed more and more sites now either ask you to disable Adblocker software or demand it. As if forcing us to see these got-damned ads will get us to “click” on them!

        • eric, It depends on whether the ad is germane to the site or subject as some often are. Now and again I hear somebody speak of all the flashy ads and remember not everybody has the good sense to use Firefox and their great add-ons of which AdBlocker+ is just one.

          A bit off-subject, but Thumbnail Zoom+ is a great one. Nearly every thumbnail has a description or caption on it but you’ll never see it until it’s blown up page size.

          Something that seems to be fairly recent is articles(happened to me recently on LRC…..linked article)with a big ad for signing up for their services, eletters, etc. If you don’t sign up, you can’t close it. Not sure why they have the circled X if it can’t be closed.

          It’s like my saying “Hey, come see us.” Someone shows up and I tell them they owe me money. That’s the way some states are when you truck. Pull up on their scales, go inside and ask to purchase their blood money permission. They write you a ticket instead and refuse to sell you the stamp for the bingo card. You shouldn’t have pulled up on the scales. Ok, I’ll back off and then buy the stamp. No, it’s just a fine. OK, so how do I purchase it? You don’t. Catch 22.

        • I still don’t run a true ad-blocker. I have blocking for popups, tracking, and autoplay media. I was a late adopter but it became absolutely necessary to run these things. Especially when some will bring in malware. The scheme works well enough to keep things usable which means it isn’t perfect at blocking all of those things. If an ad just sits there quietly no problem. What I am finding though is that my system is blocking more and more ads. Why? Because they’ve decided to become intrusive and tracking.

          One website I visit now and then where an ad should be says ‘please turn off your ad blocker’. So I viewed it with it turned off. Guess… tracking data ads. At least it was quiet. But damn… just don’t try to track me or take over my machine, speakers, screen, or otherwise and I wouldn’t have to do this.

          • Brent, as far as I can tell, AdBlocker+ just gets the obnoxious ones, trackers and the like but allows what I term as benign ads. I can turn it off and epa stays the same. Every now and then I have a site ask me to turn off my adblocker but it’s mostly legitimate ads it blocks, not ones with tracking cookies and such spyware. I used to use a cookie blocker but it was a pain deciding what cookies on what sites to block. I don’t want to block simple, legitimate ads since the sites depend on them for revenue.

          • Ghostery (https://www.ghostery.com/) is relatively easy to use. One is able whitelist specific sites easily. One can also pick and choose which trackers to accept.

            I have found it tricky at times to figure out which trackers affect the usability of the features of certain sites. (Disqus needed to commenting on certain sites.)

        • I ran into the first one of those the other day. There wasn’t any way to dismiss the dialog. I decided I didn’t need their info all that much and went on to an alternate site.

          It’s like they are oblivious that their offensive ads (sometimes I now have to dismiss two floating windows) are just getting people upset enough to install a blocker. Their problems are entirely self-inflicted.

          Something I’ve seen recently and I don’t know if you explored is a site called Patreon. It handles recurring billing for you. It’s being used by a number of youtube channels I follow (but isn’t limited to that platform):

          https://www.patreon.com/CandRsenal?ty=h
          https://www.patreon.com/thegreatwar?ty=h
          https://www.patreon.com/user?u=401656&ty=h&u=401656 (Chris Harris)

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