[humorix] Humorix Unveils New Form Of Intrusive, Annoying Advertising

[James Baughn <jbaughn@ldd.net>]

Humorix Unveils New Form Of Intrusive, Annoying Advertising
Press Release
December 9, 2001

In a last-ditch effort to make money and increase its stock
(Nasdaq: FAUX) above 0.00001 cents, Humorix World
Domination announced today a new Web advertising medium
code-named "Blackmail".

"Banner ads, full screen ads, pop-unders, pop-overs,
pop-arounds, dancing paper clips, and other forms of
advertising have all failed on the Web," explained Mr. Wee
Zell, Humorix's new Chief of Marketing & Getting Rich
Quick.  "But we've designed a new system guaranteed to
increase click-through rates to nearly 100%."

The innovative "Blackmail" system works by presenting
visitors with a simple choice: "Click on this advertisement
OR ELSE!" If the customer refuses, JavaScript code on the
webpage will redirect the browser to "C:\CON\CON" which
will immediately cause a Win9x system to bluescreen.  If
that doesn't work, the Blackmail system will order the
browser to load a page containing 1,000,000 nested tables,
which will likely cause Netscape to crash.  And if that
fails, Blackmail will redirect the browser to a random porn
site, preferably one that automatically plays loud audio
clips not suitable for children _or_ most adults.

"It's just like a hot stove," explained Mr. Zell.  "Once
you burn your hand once, you won't touch a hot stove
again.  And once you get burned by Blackmail, you won't try
to ignore the advertising again.  By guaranteeing that
visitors will click on their advertisments, we can charge
premium rates to our sponsors."

The new advertising system also has another large benefit. 
"When a website unveils a new obnoxious form of
advertising, Slashdot and other high-traffic sites always 
link to them!"[1] boasted Mr. G. E. Trich, Humorix's
Investor Relations Liason & Executive Book Cooker. 
"According to our research, when we launch Blackmail, there
is a 98.3% probability that Slashdot will place a link to
Humorix within 24 hours, boosting our traffic by
100,000%!  

Mr. Trich continued, "We also plan to enforce an
anti-linking policy to increase the number of sites that
link to us.  When KPMG demanded that webmasters obtain
permission to link to them, everybody and their brother
linked to them without permission[2]. We want the same
thing to happen to Humorix.  Hopefully we can convince Taco
Boy over at Slashdot to post two stories about Humorix --
one about Blackmail and one about our anti-link policy."

Humorix plans to launch the Blackmail system on December
15, 2001. If you have questions, concerns, comments, or
flames about the proposed advertising medium, please send
an email to flames@i-want-a-website.com.  We promise not to
sell your name and address to evil spammers in exchange for
desperately needed cash.  We also promise not to send you
an email with a Perl script attachment that silently
changes your browser's configuration file to replace the
line "javascript=disabled" with "javascript=enabled" to
better prepare your browser for the Blackmail experience.

This press release was produced by Say Hi To Hype Media
Relations, your number one source for buzzword-laden
content-free publications this side of Microsoft.


[1] http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/12/08/1424223&mode=thread
[2] http://www.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,48874,00.html
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Archive:      http://mail.nl.linux.org/humorix/
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