Wednesday, August 20, 2008

The Empire Of Cuteness

The New York Times: Cute Overload "is like taking a happy pill," says the tech blog BoingBoing. The Web site featuring snapshots of cute, cuddly little animals has become a surprising success, generating over 800,000 page views per day, according to The New York Times. And why shouldn't it be a success? Cuteness, after all, is the perfect antidote to the pervasive nastiness of bitter bloggers, gossip rags, pornography and spam on the Web.

But Cute Overload is also making real money. Not bad for a niche site. As BlogAds founder Henry Copeland says, it's all about niches and demographics. On Cute Overload, the audience is overwhelming female and between the ages of 18 and 34. "For these women," he said, "recently graduated from college and sitting in grim corporate America, Cute puts them in touch with their nonwork selves. It's escapism."

Oh God. Someone, please shoot me in the head
Thank you Henry Copeland for being so overwhelmingly insulting to your prime audience. It's good that you think women 18-34 are miserable and need some sort of escapism. Well positive- you've just managed to eclipse the nastiness of bitter bloggers and spam.

It's great it's making ad dollars, but are those ads really having any impact? We're still talking the 0.2% CTR, aren't we? And frankly, that isn't really good enough. Perhaps if they included some type of car being cute with another car (like Herbie), we'd get some marketing traction. But right now, it's a whole lot of cute crap disappearing into the cute ether.
It's so painfully boring anyway- I hate that cute nonsense. I realise now it must be because I don't require escapism and I don't sit in grim corporate America.

And since we're here and I'm mentioning my hatred of cute content, including cute forwards - I also hate pro-women's fluffy forwards, any form of lame jew humour I have to often tell people not to send me those things. They pain me.
It's not because I don't appreciate a good joke or something that truly is adorable- I just have a higher appreciation and that makes all the difference.

And as an FYI, if you want to kill something cute, you sandwich it between heavy Jamie Oliver books

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