The World's 7 Sleaziest Jobs (Didn't Exist A Decade Ago)

Producing factory-line erotic eBooks is a disturbingly lucrative business, but you have to write a lot of them if you want to pay the rent $1 at a time. Also, writing is hard, even when it's about lesbian werewolf twins. That's why there's an entire underground industry of "writers" who just download a bunch of other people's stories, change a few words around here and insert some anal there, slap on a new title, and commence rolling around in that dirty (in more ways than one) money. Some successful e-smut authors are literally copying and pasting from free sites like Literotica:

Possibly the most absurd victim of this scam is Rachel Ann Nunes, a Mormon writer who was horrified to find that her "Christian romance novel," A Bid for Love, appeared to have been repurposed and resold as a popular eBook ... with some very un-Christlike action thrown in. She's asking for $150,000 in damages from Tiffanie Rushton, who is herself a Mormon grade-school teacher. OK, forget about romance stories, we want a novel set in the seedy world of Mormon writer ladies.

Rushton's scam came to light because Nunes' associates recognized the story that they accidentally clicked on, they swear, they had no idea they were reading porn. But most writers aren't so lucky. The industry is allowed to thrive because nobody wants to be the one to report that they're sure they've read Centaur Studs somewhere else before. Even when you're writing a less-backroom book, though, there are ways to avoid detection. According to one successful self-help eBook author, Filipino ghostwriters come awful cheap. It turns out that even outside the content of its wares, the Kindle Store is one big hotbed of exploitation.

You see, the terms and conditions that you definitely didn't read when you signed up for Instagram included a clause stating that, although your painstakingly filtered glamour shots belong to you, they kinda belong to everyone else, too. These kinds of clauses are presumably only meant to cover that handy little "share" button, but according to one intellectual property lawyer, it could mean that Prince's generous personal definition of the word is legal. He also makes sure that the prints technically count as "original pieces" by adding his own comments at the bottom -- as in, a literal Instagram comment written by him. He truly is the ultimate shitty Internet commenter.

Fittingly, his victims are fighting loopholes with loopholes. When the purveyors of tattooed nipples known as Suicide Girls noticed that several of "Prince's" works featured their models, they decided to sell copies of his copies, sort of like a mise en abyme of porn and plagiarism. The difference is that they're giving the proceeds to charity, so it's not entirely a petty gesture; only mostly.

Thanks to these "freebooters," as they're oh-so-cleverly called, more and more people are experiencing the hollow victory of watching their work blow up in a format from which they'll never receive a penny. Comedy sketch group SheSketch, for example, saw a stolen copy of their most popular videos -- sitting at 29 million views on YouTube -- get shared over 200 million times. Another video by YouTube science guy Destin Sandlin, which had been edited to remove any reference to Sandlin and credited to some British Maxim copycat, got 18 million views in two days. We can't put it better / more infuriated than Sandlin himself did in this video:

See? We shared it without stealing. That wasn't so hard.

Hank Green, the other half of YA author John Green's surprisingly entertaining and unsappy YouTube enterprise VlogBrothers, is a little unhappy about this. He tracked down the numbers and found that almost 75 percent of the most popular videos on Facebook in the first quarter of 2015 were rip-offs, accounting for 17 billion views stolen from their creators. This is a sweet deal for Facebook, which gets to put its ads on the side of these viral hits, so they've made sure that you're more likely to see a ripped-off video than a link to the original as you scroll down your feed.

And you know what? It's our own fault. When you see a video you like, you need to find out who made it, go to their YouTube channel, click a button, sit through an ad, and ensure that British dudebros never run out of content to steal.

It was a rare act of justice from the Internet outrage machine, but Ostrovsky is far from the only one doing this and making shitloads of money off of it. Elliot Tebele -- "the man behind Instagram's funniest feed," @fuckjerry -- is one of a multitude of users whose strategy consists of cropping the names out of other people's tweets and reposting them. "It's really hard to find out who was the original creator when pictures go viral on Tumblr or whatever," explained the Internet sensation who doesn't know how to use Google.

Some of these human aggregators are taking the audience they've gained on the backs of other people's jokes and straight-up selling it. Jon King, who runs a plethora of "parody" Twitter accounts that in his own estimation are only about 30 percent his own work, openly admits to sharing links for money, explaining "I'm always on Twitter, it seems like; so I figured, why not try to make a little money off of it?" Oh, let's see, Jon, how about your dignity? Integrity? Your immortal soul?

If your budget is a bit higher, some websites offer one million fake followers for only $600. You can get 1,000 Instagram followers for $12 and 1,000 SoundCloud plays for $9, creating this weird reverse "Emperor's New Clothes" situation in which everybody but your sponsors knows that you're playing to an empty arena.

And for a mere $50, you can get a six-month license for software that lets you create a practically infinite number of Twitter accounts, which you can program to tweet, retweet, and follow others just like real friends. (You cannot, sadly, make them love you.) You can then turn around and sell these fake friends to other users, creating a pyramid scheme of untold numbers of fake people interacting with other fake people in a fake environment. We did it, everyone. We built the Matrix.

If our calculations are correct, 68 million views comes to about $136,000 in revenue, possibly more. Now you know why we suddenly have teasers for the teasers (preceded by teasers for other movies' teasers). Everyone loves trailers and movie snippets, but we love them more when they're posted not by the greedy studio trying to sell you something, but by passionate fans sharing the thing they love. That's where professional "passionate fans" come in.

A YouTube channel called Movieclips -- which is devoted, surprisingly, to movie clips -- generates over 600 million views a month and over $1 million in ad revenue. For uploading parts of movies. Not only that, but they've posted so many cinematic bits over the years that they now have the ability to identify other fan-posted movie clips as soon as they're uploaded on YouTube. That scene from Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot you thought you got away with posting? They probably saw that.

But rather than getting the clips deleted, Movieclips simply helps the studio claim the revenue -- and the stats, which are almost as valuable. If clips from a movie that tanked suddenly start getting tons of views, that tells the studio that the audience is there, opening the door for sequels. That used to be measured in DVD sales, which is what allowed the Austin Powers franchise to flourish. OK, maybe that's not such a good thing.

The point is, it's an industry that thrives on sharing content created by other people, who have no problem with you sharing it. Not only do you never have to create a single thing, you never have to feel bad about it.

Um, excuse us, we need to go have a talk with HR.

Manna's Tweets are 100 percent original, for now.

Also be sure to check out 5 Jobs You Think Are For Losers (That Pay Six Figures) and 7 Horrifying Lessons Learned Directing a Porno.

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