Blog Readers Love Their Soap Operas, Too (mild NSFW language)

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Everyone loves their soap operas. A bit of drama seems to fill a need that people have for some excitement in their lives. From a marketing perspective, the answer to how to attract a spike in readership is: just get a shitfight started.

There may be no simple explanation for the human love of the shitfight: boredom, malice, and an appreciation of the lived poetry of human existence may be three of the leading factors. What can be relied upon is a powerful urge to pay attention to the source of it, whether this be a person or a medium. If you make any money out of people paying attention to you (and many of us do, including me), then putting on a show in the form of a vindictive tantrum may be just the thing to increase the ratings.

The first thing you need is some kind of ideological divide, whether this be in terms of vision or practice. Arguably every group of individuals will have within them the potential for some sort of division, even if this is merely a matter of opportunity.

Whether its idealism vs. pragmatism, traditionalism vs. progressivism, or the classic masculine vs. feminine, any collective consciousness that isn't some kind of Borg will have at least one dimension along which its members will be spread as if along a spectrum, and the halfway point of that spectrum is therefore a potential conflict point for most groups.

An excellent example of the power of the shitfight to increase traffic is on popular websites like the news aggregator Fark.com, in which many articles are hand-picked specifically because of the likelihood that the discussion about the article will inevitably descend into passionate verbal abuse. To add more power to this circus-mongering, professional troll accounts such as Thunderpipes take money to wind up the others, either by means of an individual troll selling their services or by a team who uses the account to troll around the clock.

Care must be taken that the shitfight does not become so vicious that it creates a general unwillingness to engage on the site. Generally speaking, the more lurkers you have the more profit there will be, as the greater the number of hours spent reading the site the more potential exposure there is to being sucked in.

Given my indepth knowledge of both human psychology and trolling, you might expect that I'd be renting out my services as a paid troll. You'd be right - my rates start at ten dollars per twenty posts (PayPal preferred) and you can email me for more information at thepitchman@whoresandgangsters.com.

- See more at: Blog Readers Love Their Soap Operas, Too | Whores and Gangsters
#blog #language #love #mild #nsfw #operas #readers #soap
  • Profile picture of the author writeaway
    Provocative blogging is great but for it TO CATCH FIRE, you really need to have a short list of influential bloggers to notify about the 'drama.' Of course, you can't do it in a spammy way. Thankfully, social media channels are deemed 'safe' enough to reach influential people that can truly EXPLODE the reach of your content.
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