People who are used to getting their daily news from online news sources and blogs have finally given up on reading anything on the web, as the yearly trend to post fake stories to the internet on April 1st continues. The online statistics service AdNumbers stated today that ad revenue from online marketing and banner ads, as of 8:00 AM EST, was down nearly 80% as workers across the country resorted to getting some work done rather than be duped by mischievous journalists and bloggers. ADNumbers representative Nick O’Parkman stated, “Everyone is just fed up. They go to the internet to read news on April 1st and they don’t know what to believe anymore, so now they don’t bother! It is really cutting into our bottom line.”
Medical health journalist, Dr. Eugene Simmons suggests that in the past this trend has been dangerous to unsuspecting news readers, in particular investors and individuals with large stock portfolios, who might read that Apple Inc. is producing a line of computers with no keyboard, Tonk Hawk is promoting a working hoverboard, or that Apple plans to acquire iFixit.* Past hoaxes included rumors that Steve Ballmer was going to become CEO of Microsoft.** “Such outrageous stories have been know to cause heart-attacks, nervous break-downs, and unwarranted stock sellouts, which could hurt our already fragile economy”, says Simmons.
In a related story, the Onion News Network posted a TRUE news story today….and nobody noticed.
*Touché iFixit, touché
**oh right, that one was real, it just sounded far-fetched
[Re-posted with permission from myself who originally wrote a version of this for April 1st 2009]
3 replies on “Internet News Reading Down 80% Due to Unreliable April 1st Trends”
Tom, I agree with you I long for the old days in which it took two days to get around and you did some heavy damage to the credit cards.
For me personally I thought this year’s MacWorld was not very good. Coming from Washington D.C. it’s a bit of an expense but I have found even the last couple of MacWorlds worth going. You find lot’s of new products and fresh faces, what excited me was how the conference would stimulate me in thinking better.
But Tom, I got no stimulation from this year. I got off the D.C. plane and was at the show Thursday just after lunch. It took me only two hours to hit all of the booths and even though they had two stages, the three presentations I saw were terrible. In the last one they had five new products and the first person up couldn’t get his product to work.
I was stunned at how bad the conference was because it really didn’t have many new, fresh products. Guess how much money I spent? Zero, a big goose-egg and a first there wasn’t one product that I wanted. Matter of fact I wanted to buy something out of principle and couldn’t find a product to buy.
Tom, I agree with you I long for the old days in which it took two days to get around and you did some heavy damage to the credit cards.
For me personally I thought this year’s MacWorld was not very good. Coming from Washington D.C. it’s a bit of an expense but I have found even the last couple of MacWorlds worth going. You find lot’s of new products and fresh faces, what excited me was how the conference would stimulate me in thinking better.
But Tom, I got no stimulation from this year. I got off the D.C. plane and was at the show Thursday just after lunch. It took me only two hours to hit all of the booths and even though they had two stages, the three presentations I saw were terrible. In the last one they had five new products and the first person up couldn’t get his product to work.
I was stunned at how bad the conference was because it really didn’t have many new, fresh products. Guess how much money I spent? Zero, a big goose-egg and a first there wasn’t one product that I wanted. Matter of fact I wanted to buy something out of principle and couldn’t find a product to buy.
I am sorry but the folks that run the conference needs to figure out were all of the folks that use to exhibit products have gone. They need to lower the prices so that these folks come back and go back to there January/February dates which are cheaper times to travel than the end of March.
Right now it will take a miracle for me to come next year. I hate to say this, but if I lived just down the block from Moscoe Center I would probably not go.
I think that a lot of folks that I talked with felt the same way, MacWorld was dead, dead and dead this year hate to say.
Internet News Reading Down 80% Due to Unreliable April 1st Trends: http://t.co/ecaf5bYMui
It’s April Fools Day – don’t believe everything you read. Of course that same advice applies to every day.