December 7, 2015 andrewmangan

How to make money online from death and tragedy

When something bad or sad happens, it’s now really important that websites provide us with social media round-ups so we can know how to feel about it.

Please note: we’re using sports merely as an example – these methods can be applied to politics, acting, arts, entertainment, music, or any other area in which famous people die.

The death of a sportsperson, or somebody related to sport in some vague way, is something the general public would not be able to understand or consider properly if it weren’t for a) celebrities Tweeting about it and b) websites handily rounding up these Tweets to put on web pages which are covered with ads. It teaches them how to deal with death, loss and grief properly because these are things that none of them will ever have experienced before in their own lives.

Accusations that such educational material is merely a way of generating cheap hits, page views, ad impressions and clicks are simply misguided.

If you are a website owner, you should maximise the potential of people’s deaths by utilising popular advertising formats such as: pop-ups, pop-unders, interstitials, auto-playing videos, and malware which will allow you to hijack people’s computers, appropriate their identity and drain their bank accounts.

This isn’t just some kind of snake oil though, see these amazing stats for proof. In Figure 1, we see how many people are looking at your website when somebody is alive:

Screen-Shot-2015-05-06-at-10.37.11

However, in figure 2, we can see the benefit to website owners of somebody’s death (or the death of many people at once):

Screen-Shot-2015-05-06-at-10.37.36

When collating these posts, simply wait for the tragic event to occur, then screenshot some Tweets from the usual suspects – along with a few randomers to make it seem like you’re down with the people, then just publish them on your advertising-laden webpage, like so:

tweet1

tweet2_new

tweet3

tweet5

tweet7

Note: When choosing which sportsperson to feature, analytics show that the end-user responds best to the one with the most exclamation marks. This may take you some time to count, but it’s almost certainly worth it.

tweet4

Don’t forget your gracious ‘randomer’!

tweet6

By presenting these Tweets, not only is the website in question helping the general public come to terms with their grief over a person 99.99999999% of them have never met, it allows them to tap into something much more fundamental than that.

A recent discovery in a science lab by some scientists identified Gene CD82b_alone – known as the Grief Junkie gene. It’s believed that mobile phone use has altered human DNA and it’s now hugely important to people that other people know how deeply empathic they are towards others, but only from the comfort of their own keyboard. Those who feel the most can be identified by their use of multiple hashtags.

There are those who would have you believe that using the death of others in order to generate revenue is somehow morally shady, but the reality is everyone else is doing it, and if everyone is doing something, it can’t be all bad. And now that quality broadsheet newspaper websites are in on the act, it provides even more legitimacy, so don’t let some people who think these kind of posts are cheap and exploitative put you off.

For those websites who operate on a larger scale, outside identifiable niches, these methods can be applied to world events like natural disasters, plagues, human suffering on a grand scale, wars and conflicts, fatal malfunctions, and crashes of all kinds.

SEXY

Remember, this is the new age of digital. Content is everywhere, and everything is content.

Dead kids = content. Reaction to dead kids = content. Outrage to the reaction to dead kids = content. Outrage to the outrage to the reaction of dead kids = content.

Then something else will happen, somebody else dies, and the cycle moves on providing other great opportunities to quickly slap together a few Tweets dressed up as a story.

As a website owner, you have to synergise your content strategy because big data is in the cloud now. Without the millenials on your phablet, how are your children going to become thought leaders in the Internet of things?

If people want standards, they should go live in the past where we also had things like TB, smallpox and slavery. Do you want your website to espouse the benefits of human trafficking?* Of course not, so make sure when you have a chance to produce content off the back of other people’s grief, heartache and misery, you don’t think twice.

final_tweet

*unless the trafficked people die in the process, at which point they become content.

CONTACT ME

If you think we can work together, we probably can. Get in touch and let's talk about it. Fill out the form below or just email andrewmangan at gmail dot com.