Monetizing The Base!

If Canter and Segal were Republican consultants ... well, they were almost certainly Republicans.

GOP.am is brought to you from the dim and shameless corner of the Republican tent, the one where all the grafters and fast buck artists congregate to discuss the profit-making opportunities of various Multi-Level Marketing schemes and the various "can't fail" make money fast schemes they are marketing for a new, low, low price.

The problem is that if you spend most of your day pandering to the magical thinking and  bases instincts of the lowest-information consumption units, you might find yourself slipping into the unintentional hilarity zone.

I can almost visualize the thought process - if I may cheapen the term for the sake of irony. It goes something like this:

1. Target a group that wants a "seal of approval" before they read anything.
   
2. Tell everyone in that group that they can use this logo-attaching service to make it easy to pass around The "RIGHT" sort of links in their tweets and chain emails.
3. Take up 20 percent of the screen for ads and a "donation" button that probably skims a healthy "service fee"
4. PROFIT!
   

 The magical thinking part comes in here. You see, for this - scheme - to work, it would have to somehow be entirely different from most other URL shorteners, ...it would have to have a massive overhead of People Who Make Sure That The Link Is Really Conservative.

No computer can do that reliably - it requires extremely sophisticated software and remarkable, Google-scale computational power to even make a reliable guess.

So that would get rid of the PROFIT part. But wait, we are magical thinkers. We don't need to really do that - we just need to make it look like we did! And that will work because only Real Conservatives would WANT to use a gop.am url!

Now, if there were any lights on over at the GOP - and by lights, I mean organic computational facilities capable of passing a Touring Test.

But if they were such facilities - someone like this would likely deactivate them before they could do anything.


 Yep. The stupid has gone viral - and the stupid won't take their shots.

The Stupid, It Burns!