The Strange History of Advertising on This Site

This blog has been around for about twenty years at this point. I don’t have an exact date as sometime in late 2012 I nuked every post from before early August that year. There was simply too much debris, too many posts that were in no way worth keeping.

Me being me, rather than sort through them all carefully, keeping the gems I actually liked, I just deleted the lot of them and then proceeded to not really use the site for blogging nearly as much until late 2022.

This entire post refers to events that transpired before the 2012 cut-off so the posts themselves are long gone, and I am working off of memory here.

Around 2007 or so, at a decent guess, I got an email. A very strange email. Some company was offering me money to use my blog to advertise.

Let me back up a second and remind you that blogs were a much bigger deal then, and read much more frequently regardless of size. So when I got the email I didn’t toss it out as a scam. I looked into the company a bit.

They were legit (and no I do not remember their name). They didn’t, mind you, want me to run banner ads or anything. No they wanted to me to write blog posts that would talk about whatever their clients were selling. In return they would pay me.

I remember it being around thirty bucks a post, and I would get one, maybe two a month at most. So not exactly life changing money, but hey it would buy some books, so why the hell not?

This is where it got silly, though. You see they wanted me to write straight, perfectly sincere posts about why Thing X was cool, or why Y Casino (there was a casino one, we’ll get to it trust me) was the best casino to go to.

Well, that didn’t feel like me, it didn’t feel like something I would do. So I wrote them back and said I was interested but with a few catches:

Catch #1 – Even though they said I couldn’t out-right say the blog post was a paid post, I would tag them all in a way that made it clear what was going on.

Catch #2 – I would write whatever my little heart desired, no matter how silly, how non-sensical things might get.

They, I do not know why, agreed to both of my conditions.

I chose to label each post with the category “Sell Out” figuring that was unsubtle. I also made a quick post explaining what the category was for, and hoped no one who wanted to pay me would notice (they did not).

I had a rep who would mail me whenever they had a new post for me to write. He would mail me some product text, along with a few images to use and information about the client. He would also tell me, roughly, what they hoped I would do.

I had to send him the url of my posts as proof I posted the work, and keep the post up for at least a year or I owed them the money back.

Well, out of the 10 or so I did I remember a few. The casino one was a favorite. I wrote a bit of fiction wherein the Justice League discovered Aquaman had a gambling problem, and his favorite casino was  the client in question. He extolled their virtues at length, even while there was an intervention going on.

My contact just accepted that and sent me another thing to work on later. I love the idea this dude was utterly fine with the sheer chaos I was introducing.

I remember, vaguely, a post for some resort, and writing how it was the chosen resort for evil masterminds across the underworld, and if it was good enough for them, why not you?

Stuff like that.

Eventually my contact mailed me to say he was moving on and would team me up with someone else. That new person mailed to say they were reviewing my posts to date and would find clients to fit with what I had done.

I, uhhh, never heard from the company again.

For a few months, maybe a year, me and this chaos gremlin inside the advertising company got away with some strange shit.

Out of that, someone I knew mentioned they had been offered some review items and would I be interested. I agreed, but warned them I would be in total demon mode, reviewing things the way I saw fit.

I got sent a little powered hand saw, a drill, a flashlight, and something else. They all used the same rechargeable battery.

Did I mention this was for a review of a new Black and Decker home power tool system? Yep.

Well. I reviewed them. I lived in a small apartment in Manhattan and had utterly no good use for any of the tools, except the flashlight. So I made a magic trick with paper, and a paper doll, cutting the box in half with hand saw (really dangerous don’t do this) and took pictures, stopping as I went. I actually found the pictures so here they are. Enjoy the madness.

I drilled some holes in random stuff I was going to need to throw out, with the drill.

I also tested the flashlight. It was a flashlight.

But then I included two special tests:

Test #1 – When thrown, would any of the items return to my hand? I felt that if, somehow, they had that ability it would be important to know and a great selling point. I had a 30 ft long hallway in that apartment, and tossed each tool. None of them came back. On the durability side, none of them broke, either.

Test #2 – Did my cat like the tools? I would take the battery out (safety first for the cat, if not for me, no not for me) and see if my cat (Fezzik, back then, my 30lb Jorts of a cat) wanted to sniff (yes) or lick (no) any of the tools.

I made a big post with images and details of all my tests and, as promised, sent the url to my rep at Black & Decker.

Never heard back from them, either.

After that no one paid me to write stuff on this blog. Ever again. The chaos caught up with me, or more realistically, the market for throwing money at tiny blogs dried up.

Still, there was a time when I got paid to be the most chaotic version of myself. And I am still grateful any company was silly enough to spend money thinking that maybe I wouldn’t be.