The old lady who used to own the paper was very supportive of me and the changes I had made to improve the paper. I was running the show, and she told the others to listen to what I was saying.
But the lawyer had no clue about the newspaper industry and why there even had to be a deadline at all. He told the lady who was in charge of taking ads not to turn away any ads, no matter how late they came in, even if it was past the deadline.
I started to hate my job. I tried to explain to him why a deadline is important. I can't put the paper together if all of a sudden there's a new ad that needs to be created, and then placed onto a page that is already full. So now I have to tear that whole page apart again, and I might have to re-arrange other pages to make room for whatever important information or ad was on the page I had to re-do to make room for the new ad. There's only so many hours in a day, and when a few unexpected ads come in past the deadline, there is just no way to put the paper together in time.
But this lawyer just didn't get it. He kept giving these arrogant speeches. I guess in his mind they were supposed to be motivational. He would say things like: "I am fine without this newspaper, but you folks need this job. So you better do whatever it takes to make it happen. This newspaper is like a boat. If it sinks, you all drown. I am the only one here who can swim."
He was such a fucking douchebag.
Everyone else nodded politely and went back to work. Nothing he said made any difference to them, because they all went home at 5 pm. I was the one who always ended up getting stuck with the extra work if the paper wasn't ready by the 5 pm deadline. So I was the only one who stood up to him and tried to tell him why it couldn't go on like this.
He pacified me and pretended to take what I say to heart. But then he went behind my back and told Carol, the lady who was in charge of taking the ads, to ignore me and keep on taking ads past the deadline anyway, even if I tell her not to. He was just a greedy bastard who figured every ad is more money in his pocket.
One day an advertiser called way past the deadline and wanted to have a full-page, full-color ad in that week's issue. Carol took the ad but didn't tell me about it. She asked Kenny, one of the other guys in the graphic department, to make the ad, but not tell me about it, and then give it to her, so she could sneak it into the paper without me even knowing about it until the next day, when the paper appears at the newsstand.
Before I took over as production manager, the paper had always been black and white. One of the improvements I brought in was a full color front and back cover, and a full color middle insert. It allowed us to charge a lot more money for ads when people wanted their ad to be the one in full color in the middle. But I was the only one who knew how to make full color pages.
In order to print a newspaper page in full color, you actually have to break it down into four color separated templates. Each template has one of four colors. And when all four colors are overlayed on top of each other during printing, they create the full spectrum of every color there is. Similar to the way a TV screen has only three different colored pixels, but the TV mixes those three different colors to create every other color.
So Carol had Kenny make the ad in full color, even though he didn't know what he was doing, and after I proof-read the final draft of the complete issue and it was about to be sent off to the printer, she removed one of the pages and replaced it with the full color ad, without me knowing about it.
The next morning the paper appeared on the newsstands, and the advertiser was livid, because his expensive full color, full page ad was a complete mess. Kenny had completely screwed up the color separation process, and some things that were supposed to stand out in bold colors, like the advertiser's phone number and address, weren't even there at all.
When the lawyer came into work later that day, he called me into his office. He told me that since I am the production manager, and I am responsible for every aspect of the paper, I should have caught and corrected any mistake before it went to print. He said he would deduct $500 from my next paycheck to make up for the loss in ad revenue, because he had to refund the price of the ad to the advertiser.
I was SO pissed, because this whole clusterfuck clearly wasn't my fault. This was exactly the kind of thing I had always warned him about, if he kept telling the girls to ignore the deadline and keep taking ads. And because of his instructions to ignore me, Carol took it upon herself to put an ad into the paper behind my back, without me proof-reading it or even knowing about it. He was the worst fucking boss ever!
After work, I googled labor law. I found out that legally he was not allowed to just take any money out of my paycheck without my permission. I knew that during any legal conflict, you have to do everything in writing, so I wrote him a letter and explained to him that he had no right to dock my pay, and I quoted the exact paragraph of the labor law that said so.
When he came to work the next morning, I handed him the letter without saying anything. He went into his office, read my letter, and left without saying a word. He probably felt pretty stupid that I suddenly knew more about labor law than he did. The day after that, he came into the office and greeted me way too cheerfully, as if the whole thing had never even happened. But I knew that I was a thorn in his side now, and he was going to fire me sooner or later.
Sure enough, when I put together the classified section for the upcoming issue, there was an ad for my job in it. He tried to disguise it, by using the phone number of his silent partner, an accountant. But the job description was clearly for a newspaper production manager. I pretended not to notice, and when the paper came out, I asked Donna to call the number and apply for the job. My job.
As soon as I went on my lunch break, Carol called Donna and asked her to come in for an interview. Carol didn't know that she was actually talking to my wife. Donna didn't go in, and the ad for my job ran for several weeks, and they obviously could not find a replacement for me. Ha!
Then the lawyer called Kenny into his office and secretly asked him if he wanted my job, without getting a pay raise. Kenny declined and told me all about the lawyer's schemes to replace me. Kenny and I had become pretty close friends, and he dreaded the thought of having to work there after I leave, because he knew how stressful my job was and that all that stress would fall in his lap once I'm gone.
So he looked for a new job and gave his two week notice. He was my right hand man, and without him things were going to be even harder on me, so we decided to both quit on the same day. Only I was not going to give them any notice, just like the lawyer had not given me any notice and he was scheming behind my back. And we tried to convince another guy in the graphic department to quit with us, but he didn't, until about a week after we had left.
I'M AN INTERNET MILLIONAIRE, SO FUCK YOU
"Formal education will make you a living; self-education will make you a fortune."
Jim Rohn
"Money, it turned out, was exactly like sex, you thought of nothing else if you didn't have it and thought of other things if you did."
James A. Baldwin
I used to draw cartoons all the time, even when I drove a cab at night. But this job as production manager was so stressful, I had no energy left when I came home at night. There was no way I could be creative after work and come up with new cartoons.
For the first five years I had lived in the States, I did not even have a computer at home. Hacking is addicting, and now that I was over the age of 18, and I would be tried as an adult if I got caught, and law enforcement had finally caught up with hackers, I was scared to get in trouble again, because I knew this time I would really go to jail.
The best way to avoid the temptation of doing something with a computer that I shouldn't be doing, was not to have one. But after five years of living in the States, and not having had any contact whatsoever with the hacking scene for that whole time, I figured I was ready to own a computer again. So while I was the production manager at the newspaper in Brooklyn, I finally bought a PC.
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br /> This was during the early days of the Internet revolution. My hacker friends and I had grown up on the Internet. To us it was an old hat. It was our home. But now finally the rest of the world realized that there was a virtual online world. All these huge corporations wanted a piece of the pie and they all tried to figure out how to make money on the Internet. They knew there was money to be made, they just couldn't figure out how. They spent billions of dollars on Internet start-ups that really had no business plan, and who were bleeding cash like crazy, instead of making a profit, until they all ended up crashing and burning. All these huge companies lost billions of dollars during the days of the Internet bubble.
Meanwhile I had been playing around with my new computer at home, and I figured out how to put my cartoons online, by building a very primitive little website. I hadn't drawn any new cartoons in months, but I put my old cartoons on the web.
Up until then I had relied on sending my cartoons to publishing houses, hoping that an editor would pick some of my cartoons for a new book or the next issue of some tabloid. And many did. I had a whole bunch of cartoons published in all kinds of magazines, and in over a dozen different books. Some of my cartoons were even hanging in museums for cartoon art or modern art. I was making a name for myself as a cartoonist, just like I had made a name for myself as a hacker a few years earlier.
But as a freelance cartoonist, you never know how much money you are going to make next week or next month. Some magazines, like the New Yorker, were paying $500 for a cartoon back then. Other papers, like the SUN supermarket tabloid with all the crazy headlines, only paid $5.
So if a couple of editors at well-paying magazines bought a bunch of your cartoons, you could make a lot of money that week. But if nobody bought anything, or you just made a sale to a paper that paid next to nothing, you'd go hungry. Being a starving artist was not exactly a glorious lifestyle. That's why I had to take that day job at the newspaper.
I discovered that there was a webmaster scene online, similar to the hacking scene I used to be a part of. A bunch of guys like me had their own websites and were trying to figure out ways to make money online. I picked up on what they were doing pretty quickly and surpassed them not much later, blazing my own path into unknown territory, and learning more and more about the ways of the web as I went along. I was now an online entrepreneur! A guerilla marketer! An Internet ninja! A lot of the ideas I came up with had never been done by anyone else before me.
Suddenly my cartoon website was making money. Not much at first, but then the next month my site earned about $1000. Simply by being there. I wasn't even doing anything. I had just uploaded a bunch of my old cartoons, and now people were finding my cartoons in Google, came to my site, saw the banner ads on my site, and I was earning money.
I literally didn't have to do anything at all. The way my website made money was similar to a TV station. When you watch CBS or NBC, you don't buy anything from them. But big corporations pay TV stations a lot of money to show you ads during the commercial breaks. Whether you actually get your ass off the couch after seeing that commercial and going out to buy a new car from Ford or the latest hamburger at McDonald's doesn't matter. NBC gets money from their advertisers, simply for showing you an ad for those products.
Online ad agencies, who manage and distribute online advertising for their clients, call that kind of banner a CPM ad, or Cost Per 1000 impressions. If one thousand people visited my site and saw a CPM banner advertisement on my website, I earned $4, or whatever the current rate was for that particular ad campaign. My visitors didn't even have to click on the banner ad. Just the fact that they were looking at it was enough for me to get paid.
Then there were CPC banners, or Cost Per Click. Those ads only paid money, if one of my visitors clicked on the banner. And then there were CPA banners, or Cost Per Action. Those only paid something, if one of my visitors clicked on the ad, went to the advertiser's website, and bought something there. Then I got a sales commission. My favorite were the CPM banners.
The next month my cartoon site earned $3000. Without me lifting a finger! $3000 was the same amount I made as production manager at the newspaper, being totally stressed out, overworked, and miserable.
I decided to build a few more websites, about embarrassing true stories, the secrets behind magic tricks, funny video clips, weird news, celebrity gossip, optical illusions, and a few other popular topics, using the same basic recipe for make-money-in-your-sleep riches.
The next month my sites earned $5000. The month after that $7000. Then $15,000. And I still wasn't doing anything to maintain my websites on a daily basis. I just built them and then basically forgot about them, while they took on a life of their own.
Thanks to my hacking background and my intimate knowledge of computers and the Internet, and my knack for cocky self promotion, and the things I had learned about advertising and catchy writing through my two newspaper jobs and my scene mag, and having learned how to get publicity by provoking people with my incendiary rants, I intuitively did everything just right, to make my websites a success.
Back then there was no word for what I was doing yet. But a few years later, after the Internet bubble had burst and the dust had settled (What a horrible mixed metaphor. I probably just made an English lit major turn in his grave.) colleges started to teach classes on how to make money online. Today that is called "affiliate marketing."
The funny thing is, when I started thinking about ever new ways to make money with CPM, CPC or CPA ads, I figured that I could make a lot more money with CPA ads, if I posted my advertiser's links directly into search engines, instead of on my own sites. Think about it: How many people who came to my cartoon site were actually looking to buy a new car at that moment? Not too many. They were just there to look at my funny pictures.
So if I placed ads for a new car next to my cartoons, the chances of actually making a sale were next to zero. But when someone googles the nearest car dealership, he's obviously thinking about buying a new car. So I placed CPA ads directly into a bunch of search engines. The advertising companies I was working with told me I couldn't do that. They had never seen anyone do that before, and they felt it wasn't kosher. They felt that somehow I was cheating the system and they told me to stop.
I had been ahead of my time again when I did that back then. But nowadays, placing CPA ads in search engines is the backbone of affiliate marketing. Nowadays everyone does it. Go figure.
Ironically, a lot of hackers make money with affiliate marketing these days. Why bother hacking into a bank or credit card company, and risk going to prison, if you can hack into a search engine instead, and put a bunch of your own websites at the top of the search results, and make money with the banner ads on your sites? That way it's perfectly legal to make millions of dollars with your hacking skills.
Anyway, my Embarrassing Moments website became so popular back then, that a Canadian TV production company took notice. They were going to produce a new show about awkward true stories, for The Learning Channel in America, and they contacted me to ask for my permission to reenact some of the stories on my website for their show. The show was going to have a few regular commentators who would introduce the next clip and put their two cents in afterwards. A little bit like the judges on Americal Idol, I guess. So I coulda been the next Simon Cowell! I coulda been somebody! But I declined. I was too shy to be on TV.
I did give them permission to use some of the stories on my site though and helped them get in touch with the actual people those embarrassing true stories happened to. A few of those awkward moments really did end up on the new TV show.
That Canadian production crew wasn't the only media company who took notice to my sites. A Japanese entertainment news show featured a segment about my Embarrassing Moments site and suddenly I had hundreds of new users from Japan on my forum, sharing their most intimate sushi-regurgitating mishaps and sake-soaked blunders.
A lot of newspapers and news websites liked my site a
bout magic tricks. There was really no other site like it at the time.
I was in the right place at the right time and knew exactly the right thing to do to take advantage of a unique opportunity with these websites during the early days of the Internet. I felt like I was winning the lottery every day. It was crazy. My sites ended up making $1000 a day, $30,000 a month. I was making all this money without even really trying all that hard.
I think Bill Gates said something along the lines of: "Always choose the laziest person in the office to do a difficult job, because he will find the easiest way to do it." That was me. I always figured out the simplest, shortest route to my goal.
I designed and programmed all my websites myself. But I was by no means a good HTML programmer. I had taught myself the bare basics. Just enough to scrape by by the seat of my pants and get to my destination on the path of least resistance.
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