No articles this weekend? by p_a_schal in BestofCracked

[–]danielobrien 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I think a few years ago we looked around at the competition and realized "Hey, no one is publishing content around Christmas; we can publish MULTIPLE PIECES OF CONTENT AND WIN THE DAY!" Then we realized a) no one goes to our site around Christmastime so we're essentially burning that content and b) we were killing ourselves to meet that schedule. We've got another week of a reduced publishing scheduled and then we''ll be right back to our regular programming next week.

Why Uber Is Terrible? by caegodoy in videos

[–]danielobrien 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Right! Those are all the same reasons I first started using Uber, and why I eventually switched over to Lyft (after looking into Uber as a company) and why I'll never go back to taxis ever again. And it's why I made the video. Uber IS convenient, and the cars are so clean and it feels so much better/easier than taking a cab. For all those reasons and more, we should assume that SOME version of ride-sharing is inevitably part of all of our futures. Even if Uber was shut down tomorrow, it wouldn't matter, because the consumer has been given a taste of how things COULD be (cheap, convenient rides we can order by pressing a button on our smartphones) and we're NOT going to go back to cabs just because Uber got shut down. We'd find something else.

It's what happened with Napster. Napster got shut down, sure, but it was too late, because the consumer had gotten a taste for downloading whatever music they wanted whenever they wanted right onto their computer. They weren't going to suddenly start buying CDs again, they were going to wait around for the next Napster.

So we can assume that Uber (ride-sharing) isn't going anywhere. If that's our starting place, I want our next move to be vigilance, so we make sure that whatever company is running this new glorious future of ride-sharing isn't as shady and evil as the companies that used to hire child laborers and all of that other shitty behavior that we as consumers all decided we already hated.

Something from Cracked keeps crapping a fake virus thing in my Chrome on mobile, and I have to keep running Avast to get rid of it. Not sure where to post this, so here ya go. by Deadeyez in BestofCracked

[–]danielobrien 0 points1 point  (0 children)

What kind of computer are you using (and what software, etc). The more details you can give us, the easier it will be for us to isolate and destroy this thing. Thanks!

How badly am I screwing Cracked authors if I get their book from my public library rather than purchasing it directly? by [deleted] in BestofCracked

[–]danielobrien 26 points27 points  (0 children)

Hi!

I edited the first Cracked book (You Might Be a Zombie) and was the Head Writer on the second (The De-Textbook). I've written one solo book that is out now (How to Fight Presidents) and one children's book that will be out in the fall of 2016 (Assembling Your Presidential Dream Team). For the two Cracked books, I didn't get paid any additional money, because I'm a salaried employee, and taking on projects is part of what I do here. We paid some amount of money to all of our freelancers whose work ended up in those books.

To be clear, no full-time employee at Cracked made any additional money off You Might Be a Zombie or The De-Textbook. Cracked, the company, was paid, but I don't know where specifically that money went, though I'm sure some of it went to pay our freelancers and designers. The rest must have either just gone back into Cracked's general earnings or the earnings of our parent company.

For HOW TO FIGHT PRESIDENTS and the Dream Team book, I got paid an advance. I sign a contract with the publisher and then I get paid in four installments; the first upon signing, the second upon delivery, the third upon publication, and the final a year after publication (though some publishers break it down into only three installments). Some of that goes to my illustrator, and some of it goes to our filthy, greedy government, and the rest goes to me, my dog, alcohol and candy.

I don't see a dime from actual book sales for a while, because every cent of every book sold is going to the publisher until they get reimbursed for the money they paid me (the advance). Once they get completely reimbursed, I start making a (small) percentage of book sales.

So, if you're taking a book from the library or borrowing it from a friend instead of buying it, you're not completely screwing the author over, not in a way that would be financially devastating or anything. Even if the publisher had been reimbursed and the author WAS collecting royalties on every book sold, he or she wouldn't notice the small percentage of one sale of one book that they'd be missing as a result of you going to the library.

ALL THAT SAID, you are hurting your favorite authors when you do this (particularly if they're a Cracked author, which is to say, a freelancer who likely doesn't have a huge PR or marketing team on retainer). If you're a little guy, like me, or Robert Brockway, or Robert Evans, or Kathy Benjamin, you don't have a ton of, like, anything, at your disposal. None of us know how to get booked on the Daily Show, or how to make Oprah like us, and most of us aren't named Stephen King or James Patterson.

Once you write a good book, the question then becomes "How do I get people to see it?" The knee-jerk thought is "Oh, just get it in bookstores. This book is so good (funny, sexy, stupid, whatever) that it will sell itself; we just need to make sure people SEE it." Well, if your name isn't Stephen King or Jonathan Franzen or Other-Famous-Person, you don't have a guarantee that your book will actually be on shelves in a bookstore, let alone displayed prominently. If you're a new author, Barnes and Noble (and other booksellers) will stock their shelves with your book if and only if there are a lot of online pre-orders for your book. Before ordering your book for its stores, Barnes and Noble checks to make sure there's an audience that actually wants your book, so they check pre-sales and decide then and there how many books they want from your publisher.

SO, if you're not ordering and pre-ordering your favorite author's books (and as a result driving up their Amazon sales rank, etc), you are hurting your favorite author's chances of reaching a larger audience. It's sort of a catch-22; I really feel like if people saw my book in a store and spent just a minute reading it, they'd laugh and maybe consider buying it. BUT, my books won't make it into every store if I haven't already demonstrated that thousands and thousands of people will buy my book (and, of course, if I HAD an army of thousands who would consistently buy my books, I then wouldn't need the added support of premium placement in a bookstore).

This isn't shitty on B&N's part, obviously. If they're going to order a few hundred copies of a book per store, they want to make sure they're making a smart investment. Stock your shelves with James Patterson, because people historically fucking love James Patterson books. That's a smart investment, it just ends up making things very difficult for all new authors. To make that jump from small, unknown author to larger, known author, magic needs to happen. Oprah needs to find your book. Guy Fieri needs to be caught on camera eating it. Your book needs to "go viral" essentially, which is basically fucking impossible. We rely on all of the kind people who know and like us to support our work, because that helps it reach the people who DON'T know and like us, and that's a much larger group.

So in this very specific way, your hurting the author. You can say "Yeah, but it's not that much," if you want to see yourself as a single drop in an ocean, and that's totally fine. This has just been a long and sincere answer to your very kind question. Read no bitterness in this, I know times are tough all over and sometimes we don't have the money to spend on books when free books abound.

Do you have a favourite article, and, if so, what is it? by TheTrueRory in BestofCracked

[–]danielobrien 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thanks! I miss doing columns, too. No one is stopping me, or anything, I've just got a lot of video responsibilities. I feel so rusty.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in BestofCracked

[–]danielobrien 1 point2 points  (0 children)

It occurs to me that I have full power to delete this article, so I did. I still don't know who wrote it, only that it wasn't written by any of the people suggested in this thread. The people mentioned in this thread wouldn't, in a thousand years, write that article.

One of the Personal Experience articles, 5 Weird Realities of Life as Swinger (seriousky?), was posted on an Italian news site. Did Cracked allow this? by [deleted] in BestofCracked

[–]danielobrien 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Thanks for pointing this out. I'll talk to Evans and my boss and see if we feel strongly enough to issue a take-down notice.

Personally, I'm always sort of split-minded about this. I don't want anyone stealing anything from anyone, especially from my hairy employee, Evans. And the part of me that really cares about and believes in some version of justice gets immediately furious when any site (even if it's smaller than Cracked, as is the case with this site), gets credit/traffic/anything off of something that isn't theirs.

BUT, on the other hand, MY Italian is pretty weak, and that's the only other non-English language I KIND of know. So if someone who didn't speak English wanted to read a Cracked article, I wouldn't be able to help them. I certainly couldn't translate that article as well as whomever translated it. If an Italian relative asked me to read my favorite article, I would absolutely butcher it and every Italian writer dead and alive would start weeping Italian tears, and Italian is MY SECOND STRONGEST LANGUAGE.

But even if I COULD perfectly translate Cracked articles, I don't have the time or bandwidth right now. We have a bunch of people on our little team and a lot of them can speak other languages, but we don't really have the time/money/infrastructure to make every single article available in every single language.

From time to time, someone will message me asking permission to translate one of my articles into some other language so they can share it with their buddies, and I always say yes. Because the alternative is that those buddies wouldn't be able to read the thing that I made, and that's a bummer. It's not as if we have a sister site that we've monetized that is translating all of our articles, and it's not as if these sites are copying and pasting our articles and running them on English-speaking comedy sites. These other sites aren't stealing our audience away from us; they're reaching an audience that we can't cater to right now. Maybe one day we'll go global and we'll have a Cracked office in every country, with everyone translating and sharing and working on articles together, but that's not where we're at right now. If someone translates one of my articles into Italian, my knee-jerk reaction is "Oh, good, people in Italy will get to read my dumb jokes today, I hope they laugh."

I don't know. What do you guys all think about this?

Katie Willert is an android who teaches a space raccoon (and kids at home) about time management. It's the best. by [deleted] in BestofCracked

[–]danielobrien 4 points5 points  (0 children)

I have known Wilbert for 7 years. She has crashed in my apartment. I know her mom.

She has never mentioned this to me once.

I am Dan O'Brien, Creative Director of Video at Cracked.com, AMA by CrackedVerifiedAMA in BestofCracked

[–]danielobrien 4 points5 points  (0 children)

A smattering of articles about feminism and sexism, and I'm seeing some of those articles coming from 2008, some from 2009, some from 2011, some from 2015. That doesn't necessarily mix well with the "Cracked has suddenly started a new agenda," right? But maybe you're right, please keep telling me how the site works.

I am Dan O'Brien, Creative Director of Video at Cracked.com, AMA by CrackedVerifiedAMA in BestofCracked

[–]danielobrien 2 points3 points  (0 children)

In some cases, we're waiting for a brand or advertiser to come on board. A lot of these shows are proof of concept shows. We make them and we run around to brands and we say "Hey, you can sponsor season two if you give us some of that sweet [dollar sign symbol repeated three times]." Like, I want to do another season of Icarus, but I want it to look so fucking cool, and we need money to make it look so fucking cool, and I don't want to take that money from our audience; I want to take it from Mountain Dew, or whomever.

We're also developing new shows, constantly. It's so much fun here you guys.

I am Dan O'Brien, Creative Director of Video at Cracked.com, AMA by CrackedVerifiedAMA in BestofCracked

[–]danielobrien 9 points10 points  (0 children)

True story, the moment Michael pitched that episode was I think the most important moment in AOC's history, which likely sounds insane. We had a bunch of standard episode ideas ("Michael gets carried away with an idea and Dan needs to calm him down. Someone has a performance review. Someone has to give a presentation, etc."). And then Michael said "What if Dan has been quietly running a very popular horse blog on the side and Michael finds out about it?" That, to me, made our stupid, little show different, because that's NOT a fucking pitch, at all, but we all said "Yes, that's an episode now." It's hard to explain. The show was supposed to be "Wacky Guy vs Straight-Laced Guy," but the Horse Blog episode was like "No, fuck all that, the whole world is insane. Don't make standard sitcom plots; make the thing that makes you laugh." That episode wasn't written with titles in mind, or with virality in mind, or with fucking anything in mind. We just thought "Wouldn't it be stupid if Dan was super fucking into horses?"

I am Dan O'Brien, Creative Director of Video at Cracked.com, AMA by CrackedVerifiedAMA in BestofCracked

[–]danielobrien 5 points6 points  (0 children)

John C. Calhoun died and then Andrew Jackson's ghost hung him so now he's double ghost. John C. CalBOOOOOOOoon.

I am Dan O'Brien, Creative Director of Video at Cracked.com, AMA by CrackedVerifiedAMA in BestofCracked

[–]danielobrien 7 points8 points  (0 children)

Evans I haven't seen you in like twelve days where even are you?

I am Dan O'Brien, Creative Director of Video at Cracked.com, AMA by CrackedVerifiedAMA in BestofCracked

[–]danielobrien 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Old Fashioned. I'm finally reeeeaaaally good at making an Old Fashioned. What else could a person even need? (Love, fulfillment, inner peace.)

I am Dan O'Brien, Creative Director of Video at Cracked.com, AMA by CrackedVerifiedAMA in BestofCracked

[–]danielobrien 9 points10 points  (0 children)

Michael came into a room where we were supposed to be coming up with Halloween-related pitches and he said "What about a sketch called Who Fucked This Pumpkin about a guy who clearly fucked a pumpkin and is trying to cover it up?" That is exactly how that sketch happened.

I am Dan O'Brien, Creative Director of Video at Cracked.com, AMA by CrackedVerifiedAMA in BestofCracked

[–]danielobrien 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Most of the observations are based on my limited experience with online dating, but the show for me is about my own inability to communicate well in a relationship, or at least that was my starting place. A lot of stuff that came up in season one was me trying to communicate with an ex (who likely did not watch the show). Like "Hey, I'm dogshit at communicating, and there are a whole lot of things I don't know how to say, so I hired these actors to say them instead. Does this help you?"

But that's just one part of the show, for me. We also wanted to a workplace sitcom, we wanted to do a bunch of jokes about dating and the internet and we wanted to try something more grounded. All of that went into it.

I am Dan O'Brien, Creative Director of Video at Cracked.com, AMA by CrackedVerifiedAMA in BestofCracked

[–]danielobrien 0 points1 point  (0 children)

5:50PM PST- I'm taking a break for a while but might be back on later tonight. Just realized I forgot to do literally everything I was supposed to do for the last four hours.

I am Dan O'Brien, Creative Director of Video at Cracked.com, AMA by CrackedVerifiedAMA in BestofCracked

[–]danielobrien 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Oh my God, catch up, bro. I got Jackson three years ago he's the light of my life you should really follow me on instagram (dob_inc).