6 Ways To Make Money Off The Internet (If You're An Asshole)

Strangely, this isn't a new phenomenon. It's hard to believe, but spiteful people could log into their AOL accounts and send each other smelly fish, pubic lice, an adorably quaint rude letter, and of course, poop (a timeless classic). The only thing that's changed is that we've moved from "small-scale harassment" to "hilarious pranks."

Just to rub salt in the wound even more, it also turns out that the first glitter website wasn't some crazy spontaneous viral hit. It was a coldly calculated marketing stunt. And as if we needed any more reasons to despise the guy behind it, the world fell for it. Because the Internet craves novelty during those scant few seconds a day that it's not declaring itself introverted or downloading the latest Paul Blart hentai.

For instance, following Indiana's passing of the Religious Freedom Restoration (a.k.a "It's OK To Discriminate Against Gay People") Act, a pizzeria bravely came out and said they'd refuse to cater any gay weddings, because homosexuality is a sin. An even bigger one than serving pizza at a wedding, apparently.

After people began leaving negative reviews of the pizzeria online, a reporter from the far-right bullshit monger The Blaze created a fundraiser to help the poor owners recover from the damage wrought by free speech. Within days, they'd raised a total of $847,387, becoming the second most successful campaign at the GoFundMe site, beating out unworthy causes like saving a woman with a rare cancer and helping Boston Marathon victims. And that's the touching story of how nearly 30,000 people united to prove that ... they have money and hate gays? We did learn one important lesson from all this: Even shitheads like pizza.

And with that, it's time to bring up The Sarkeesian Effect. Concocted by bathtub owner Jordan Owen and skull fetishist Davis Aurini, TSE is a documentary examining how progressive types have forever ruined video games with their uppity demands that not every protagonist be a chiseled, white, heterosexual studmuffin. To fund this masterpiece, Owen and Aurini turned to the crowdfunding site Patreon, through which hilariously bearded dudes who want to see feminists put in their place have been giving them over $7,500 per month. Since last August.

So where's the movie? Well, there's an unintentionally amusing trailer, but according to their own Patreon page, they're going to start filming only after they start receiving $15k a month. In any case, a group of a few hundred extremely angry, extremely dumb guys have been paying two assclowns to sit in front of a webcam and record half-assed "updates" with the occasional broken audio. Yeah, that'll show those feminists who's smarter.

It could be worse, believe it or not. They could be willingly throwing money at a murderer, as some people did in April when crowdfunding campaigns opened to support the cop who killed Walter Scott. Fortunately, both Indiegogo and GoFundMe had the sense to close these fundraisers down for violating their terms and conditions, one of which evidently is "don't be a racist monster."

The Food Babe is an authority on healthy food the same way 9/11 truthers are authorities on engineering. Among her creeds is that there's "no acceptable level of any chemical to ingest, ever" (a real quote). But it's hard to follow her advice when she's been breathing copious amounts of oxygen for years, the big hypocrite. Her entire shtick consists of finding a weird-sounding chemical in a popular product, breathlessly pointing out a non-edible thing that apparently has the same chemical, and profoundly misunderstanding how chemistry works. And yet she has enough lobbying power to convince Kraft to change the ingredients (and color) of their macaroni and cheese, not to mention a veritable army of social media followers who'll start sending us death threats right about ... now.

And if your favorite food is declared unhealthy by the Food Babe, fret not; between her eating guide, official shop, and sponsored Amazon links, she has plenty of alternatives that will help your body almost as much as they'll help her bank account. However, the Food Babe probably won't fuck up anyone's general health -- unlike Natural News, the popular health news / conspiracy theory site responsible for stories like "McDonald's is force-vaccinating kids" and "AIDS isn't real."

Rallying against Big Government, Big Pharma, and Big Logic, they promote bullshit stories about how everyone is trying to kill you. That is, when they aren't claiming that you can cure Ebola with homeopathy. Or advocating the murder of a whole bunch of scientists and journalists for the crime of not being morons, because that's the bullshit you can expect from a site where the head editor believes that Sandy Hook was a government operation.

Sadly, however, a fascinating amount of people are falling for this bullshit. According to figures, the site receives 1.7 million views a month, making it a more popular health resource than the Mayo Clinic or Cancer.org. Of course, we shouldn't be surprised that a site spreading blatant lies on the Internet is doing so well, since ...

The business model is pretty simple: 1) lie, 2) make the world a shittier place, 3) profit. First, they come up with a headline that's realistic-sounding enough to fool someone, and then ... actually, that's the only thing they have to do, because most people won't read past the headline before sharing the article on Facebook.

Sites like these -- with authoritative names such as National Report, Empire Sports News, and The Lightly Braised Turnip -- are spreading misinformation intended to get the reader angry enough to share the article across social media. That's not a happy accident; it's the entire reason they exist. And if they're ever called out on their bullshit, they can point to the impossibly tiny or well-hidden disclaimer stating it was satire all along, like the digital equivalent of that asshole kid from school who told you that kick in the nuts was a joke.

And yep, this works. The three most high-profile offenders -- The Daily Currant, Huzlers, and Mediamass -- make anywhere from $40-150k per year. Meanwhile, the National Report clocked an astounding two million visitors' worth of ad revenue in only 24 hours after publishing an article about how a town in Texas was quarantined with Ebola. Get it? Because causing mass panic is funny? Ah, stick to poop jokes, you unsophisticated ruffian.

To give Brown some credit, he donated a significant proportion of the money raised to charity. It wasn't his fault that the Internet decided this dumb project was weird enough to become the next big thing among people who confuse "being wacky" with "having a personality."

After this, it was the NoPhone, a piece of plastic shaped like an iPhone that was supposed to help people get over their smartphone addiction, presumably by replacing it with an addiction to spending money on useless shit. Then it was a project to create the world's biggest photo mosaic of Nicholas Cage's face. Somehow, that one failed.

Then ... you know, we give up. There's just too many.

"But Cracked," you say, in an attempt to cleanse your soul of the shame of having donated to one of these campaigns, "it's all for fun, so what's the problem?" Well, it's the same problem that we have with celebrities using these sites: These campaigns soak up donations and media attention that could be spent highlighting projects that legitimately deserve funding (see: "saving cancer victims" above). There are projects that could better the world in an insurmountable number of ways, but nowadays, they need to register at least 0.7 on the LOL scale in order to have the barest chance of making it. And we know that we're right on this issue because Archer agrees with us.

However, AdBlock doesn't have anything on the revenue stream that WikiLeaks is currently drinking from: celebrity gossip. Whereas the site once prided itself on bringing us state secrets and evidence of corruption, it's taken to exploiting the Sony hack in the same way that TMZ exploits, well, everything. People can now go to WikiLeaks to read such tidbits as what albums Cameron Crowe listens to, how the backstage of Dr. Oz is run, and whether or not a bromance is developing between two television chiefs.

That is, of course, when they're not selling T-shirts for $21 and insisting that people refer to them as "open government activists" or "technologists." We don't know about you guys, but we're starting to suspect that Julian Assange might have an ego.

CORRECTION: A previous version of this article stated that filming had not begun on "The Sarkeesian Effect", one of the producers has contacted us to say that in fact production has begun and pointed to the existence of a trailer as proof of that fact. We have updated the text to reflect this. The trailer is well worth a watch.

With special thanks to David C. Bell. For more from Adam, check out his article on why conspiracies are ruining the world. You can also contact him at adamwearscracked@gmail.com with comments/questions/caring loudly.

Also check out If The Internet Was a High School and The 6 Most Terrifying Sex Illustrations on Wikipedia.