Mobile game ads: The worst online slop

They’re full of slime, weird crime, and seemingly a lot of fetish stuff. Today, we’re talking about the sloppiest of slop online these days, mobile game ads. An expert on the form, Chelsey Weber-Smith, joins us to talk about the history of the genre, from the earliest games like Evony to today’s prolific Lily’s Game, as well as what psychological tactics are being deployed in these banner ads, what makes anyone play these games, and is anyone? Our guest Chelsey Weber-Smith hosts American Hysteria, a show that explores the fantastical thinking of irrational fears of Americans — so very much aligned with our work here on Panic World. Check it out wherever you get your podcasts, and follow the rest of Chelsey’s work here. Want even more Panic World content? Like ad-free episodes, bonus episodes, and access to our Discord? Sign up for just five bucks a month at: https://www.patreon.com/PanicWorld. And Panic World is now posting episodes to YouTube Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome? That's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration blog, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up require compatibility and availability varies 18 plus.

• 0:26Ryan Broderick?

  I want to start things off with a question that I've been dying to ask other internet professionals for a long time. Have you ever on purpose clicked a banner ad? Like to go do something?

• 0:39Speaker 02

  I can't think of a single time that I have, but I imagine I must have because sometimes they're just so weird, which is really on brand for what we're talking about today. But I can't think of a single one. What about you?

• 0:55Ryan Broderick?

  I was wondering about this. Like, was there ever a moment in internet history where I ever thought like, "That sounds cool. I would like to learn more about that."

• 1:03Speaker 02

  That's probably real. Yeah.

• 1:05Ryan Broderick?

  The only thing I can think of is like, I was a really big web comics person, like before a lot of them radicalized during Gamergate. And I remember like a lot of web comics advertising each other.

• 1:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:17Ryan Broderick?

  In banner ads. And I feel like as a teenager, I would be reading like Penny Arcade, and then I would like click a banner ad to like read another web comic I'd never heard of. And I feel like for a brief moment, that is how I learned about other websites. But accessing that memory took like all of my mental energy. Like I, I'm struggling now. Like that's deep in there somewhere.

• 1:37Speaker 02

  Well, and now they're kind of more like, "What kind of illness does Ryan Reynolds have?" And then some like horrifying image of it.

• 1:45Ryan Broderick?

  Right. Which I do want to see. I want to see what's wrong with Ryan Reynolds. That's true.

• 1:50Speaker 02

  I feel like maybe I have clicked it because I know it goes somewhere. That's bullshit. Like a totally different thing. That's just like 800 more ads because they're just getting paid per, per little look you take, a little gander.

• 2:19Ryan Broderick?

  Well, I ask that because today's episode is about banner ads. With the onslaught of AI slop, there's a big conversation right now about, you know, all of the other dumb garbage that's been on the internet since time immemorial. And I was thinking about, you know, the background radiation of internet slop that we've just sort of accepted as normal. The dumb, misleading, not infrequently gross stuff that's just part of our lives now, that we, you know, as people with computers in our hands, constantly just sort of deal with. So today, we want to talk about the sloppiest of slops, how it evolved, why it thrives in our world, and let's just have fun and talk about awful mobile game ads, the most awful ads of all.

• 3:01Ryan Broderick?

  This is Panic World, a show about how the internet warps our minds, our culture, and reality. I'm Ryan Broderick, and joining us sometimes is our producer Grant, if I can just get him off that dang phone. He's always looking at those apps, doesn't want to actively produce the show because he's always playing Mafia Wars. Joining us, according to analytics, they are already your favorite podcaster, the foremost expert on cultural slop from American hysteria, Chelsea Weber-Smith. Hello, welcome to the show.

• 3:33Speaker 02

  Hi, Ryan. I am very excited to be here and share with you some of the weirdest shit that I have ever encountered, and my ideas on why it exists and why it does well, apparently. So yeah, I've got a real cornucopia of outrageous shit for you today. And I just, I'm honored to get to share it with you.

• 3:55Ryan Broderick?

  I love looking at content, and I especially love looking at bad content. So this is very exciting for me.

• 4:02Speaker 02

  You know, a lot of these ads are working on a subconscious level, which is kind of how advertisement, advertising's always worked, but we're just seeing like the weirdest iteration. The first, maybe...

• 4:14Speaker 02

  Three to five seconds of the ad is something that you're just like, what in the fuck am I looking at? And then the rest of it is the same thing over and over again, where it's this like, poor girl who never wins the game and always gets her head shaved at the end for some reason. Can imagine that it like, for certain people, triggers a response that maybe they wouldn't fully even be aware of. Many people would be fully aware of it.

• 4:37Ryan Broderick?

  You're kind of arguing like, these ads are trying to maybe not awaken fetishes in people, but like, tap into like a, like a sensory sort of state that like powers fetish content. Like, I, I don't want to get too far ahead of ourselves, but like, I have a theory. I don't even know if it's like a theory. I think it just is true. I just can't really remember it, like how the order went, but like, AS, the first ASMR content like I ever came across was fetish content.

• 5:08Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 5:09Ryan Broderick?

  And it has become now like a mainstream type of content that like even AI can produce. And like that to me is really interesting where it's like, the internet and fetishism have like been so intertwined for so many years that like, fetishists are developing specific kinds of media content for that. And now like mobile games are taking that and like, like one-shotting unsuspecting internet users.

• 5:31Speaker 02

  Hundred percent. I think that's a very good analysis. And I think we see it more and more because advertisers are figuring out and we're getting desensitized to what kind of content is really like triggering our primordial Freudian, you know, whatever.

• 5:51Ryan Broderick?

  The inner foot fetishist in all of us. That's right.

• 5:56Speaker 03

  Kids are playing mobile dumb games like that. Like this is available. These are the ads for all any demographic.

• 6:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, these ads are playing everywhere. And that relates.

• 6:08Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah. And all of these have like a cartoon aesthetic, like we should say, like this is, this is clearly like trying to capture the image, like the attention spans of like very young people. So I think we're going to start with you, you with your slop fest. So, so, so I'm going to let you take the reins of the show. We'll pick up hosting after the ad break and let me into the dark heart of what you've, you've brought for us today.

• 6:31Speaker 02

  Wonderful. Okay. So.

• 6:35Speaker 02

  Amongst the slop we are talking about in the great trough of the internet, I have found that the strangest thing are these mobile game ads. And I think that probably most people listening have come across them in some form, right? Sometimes it's like you see those games where you have to rescue a character as the water is filling like different chambers of the screen. You know that one, right? Sometimes it's like those ones where there's a human hand reaching onto a puzzle. And it's like only someone with a 250 IQ could solve this. And you, you know, you see them fail again and again.

• 7:15Ryan Broderick?

  Have you seen the one of like a man holding a woman? And like a jester is throwing knives at the man's back, like the man's back to protect the woman? I really like those.

• 7:25Speaker 02

  Great. I have not seen that one, but this is right in line with the things we will be looking at today. So those are like, kind of the typical ones you see that aren't so like they're slop and they're terrible. But I want to bring you some like darker, freakier, weirder stuff.

• 7:43Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah. I want our listeners to know you just had this collection. You were like, hey, guys, I got this great folder I want to show you. I guess we could turn it into an episode. Yeah, yeah.

• 7:50Speaker 02

  Yes. Uh huh. Uh huh. So, so this is like a really great day for me. So maybe we should dive in. And I thought that what would make the most sense would be to have you describe what you're seeing.

• 8:06Ryan Broderick?

  So it's a baby on a tree. And now like a dinosaur has knocked the baby and the tree into the water. And there's like a, there's like a chieftain kind of man. And you have to choose between the beast and the baby. And now he's pulling the baby out of the water. Now he's going to walk into the water and he's picked up a, there was a shark in the water the whole time. Now the baby is eating the shark and has become a beautiful woman. And now he's taking the woman back to his castle, which is now filling up as like a fortress. And that is, that is the game. So, okay, I'm imagining.

• 8:45Ryan Broderick?

  So this is a game like Mafia, you know, where like it's like level one thug, level 100 Yakuza boss, but it's for your wife, which is interesting. So you can capture your wife as a baby and then make her an adult woman by feeding her a shark, which I think, you know, that is how marriage works. I think that is true. Yeah.

• 9:07Speaker 02

  Any good marriage starts out like that, I think. Um, yes. So like you said, this is a game that is pretty much a basic kingdom building game, like the ones we see advertised all the time. And this is just the ad that they do and has almost nothing to do with the game itself, which is something we'll see.

• 9:28Ryan Broderick?

  That's important to set up here, which is that like these trailers do not connect to the game in terms of gameplay in any way ever, usually.

• 9:36Speaker 02

  No.

• 9:37Ryan Broderick?

  Okay. What do we got next? Well, this is called Lily's Garden, it seems?

• 9:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, Lily's Garden, I think is probably like the most famous of the mobile game. So they kind of have what they have done that is a little bit unique is have an ongoing storyline throughout their ads. And people get really obsessed with them and like catalog the characters, arcs and everything. And some of them are really normal. And then some of them are like this, hit it.

• 10:05Ryan Broderick?

  A woman and she's opened, oh, it's like a washing machine. She's sitting in the, oh, she's sitting on the washing machine. I know where that's headed. She's looking very excited to be sitting on the washing machine. And now she's, oh, now she's entering a laundromat with her female friends and they're pouring wine and lighting candles. And they're all sitting on the washing machines now, or the dryers, I guess you should say. And that's it. That's the game is that you sit on the washing machines and do big comes with your besties, I guess. That's the game.

• 10:40Speaker 02

  That's it. But it's not.

• 10:44Ryan Broderick?

  Interesting.

• 10:44Speaker 02

  It's not the game. No, the game's-

• 10:46Ryan Broderick?

  I don't think that is the game, right? Isn't it like a garden simulator?

• 10:49Speaker 02

  It's a garden building game.

• 10:52Ryan Broderick?

  Well, apparently, hold on, wait. The two other characters in this are named Penny and Flo, and they're from a sister game that's a home renovation game. I just looked this up. So there's a cinematic universe of-

• 11:04Speaker 02

  Crossover.

• 11:05Ryan Broderick?

  Of horny laundromat women here at play, yeah. This is Avengers Endgame for mobile game ads, I think.

• 11:12Speaker 03

  To be fair, when you garden and also when you do home reno, you have to do a lot of laundry.

• 11:19Speaker 02

  You do.

• 11:19Speaker 03

  You do get very dirty.

• 11:20Ryan Broderick?

  That's true, yeah.

• 11:21Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 11:22Ryan Broderick?

  My theory is, knowing the internet and knowing video games and like how culture works now, my guess is they released Lily's Garden, and they're like, "We made this character too hot." And a normal game company be like, "This is just gonna be a problem that we're gonna have to manage for the rest of the time that we have this intellectual property." But for mobile games, I think they're like, "We should just really lean into this."

• 11:48Speaker 02

  Absolutely, absolutely. Yeah, oh yeah, and we'll definitely get into the kind of underlying psychological mechanisms that are at play here.

• 11:57Ryan Broderick?

  Seems like they've done a redesign to Lily recently. I liked the old Lily better. I wanna be on record there. I'm looking at-

• 12:03Speaker 03

  How much did you like the old Lily better, right?

• 12:06Ryan Broderick?

  Uh, let's just say, uh... Well, no, so they went from 2D to 3D. You know, it's the typical story. You know, I was happy with the 2D Lily. I think she had more-

• 12:18Speaker 03

  Interesting. Interesting that you like your women two-dimensional.

• 12:20Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 12:21Speaker 03

  That's fascinating to learn.

• 12:22Ryan Broderick?

  I just... Yeah, I don't know what to say. Although I guess now that she's 3D, you can download a model and put it in your Blender and you can do whatever you want with her. So like, that's great, um, you know, fine.

• 12:34Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 12:34Ryan Broderick?

  All right.

• 12:35Speaker 02

  Great.

• 12:36Ryan Broderick?

  Not that I would do that, that didn't come out-

• 12:39Speaker 02

  I'm learning so much.

• 12:40Ryan Broderick?

  I didn't say that-

• 12:41Speaker 02

  I'm learning so much.

• 12:42Ryan Broderick?

  To say that I was gonna do that, um-

• 12:44Speaker 02

  No, no, no, no, no, never.

• 12:46Ryan Broderick?

  I tried to learn Blender and I had a freakout and I couldn't do it. Anyways, all right, continue.

• 12:50Speaker 02

  Okay, so I wanted to now bring to you kind of what I consider to be the- Let's see, top tier outrageous, insane content that I have found. And yeah, Project Makeover. Have you ever heard of this game?

• 13:09Ryan Broderick?

  Oh, yes.

• 13:12Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 13:13Ryan Broderick?

  Grant, could you remove the not safe for work content warning on this video, please?

• 13:18Speaker 03

  Our last, our last guest asked me if I get hazard pay for the show and we're really, we're really adding a

• 13:24Ryan Broderick?

  No, no, it's the opposite. Grant's part of a work release program where I find, I like to hire like tech literate perverts to do work for me. And I have a great deal with the state of New York, so.

• 13:34Speaker 02

  Cancels it out.

• 13:36Ryan Broderick?

  If he, if he goes to, if he goes too far off the rails, he goes back to pervert jail. All right, here we go. Okay, so it's some kind of cop or a pilot, maybe smelling this woman's stinky feet. Now another woman's sad because she saw it. She's walking in the rain and she needs a makeover. What are we, how are we gonna, are we gonna cover in slime? A bunch of slime. Yeah, of course. You gotta cover her in slime. And now she has hairy feet. What are we gonna do? We're gonna tape her feet and we're gonna wax her. Cool. Yeah, this is fetish shit. This is just pure, unadulterated fetish stuff. We're shaving her head now. Yeah. And she's crying and she'd go, I would cry too if I was covered in slime and then shaved against my will.

• 14:19Ryan Broderick?

  I feel like

• 14:19Speaker 02

  Let's hear it.

• 14:20Ryan Broderick?

  This is, how do I say this? Okay, so like if you, I feel, okay, I feel like if you've been around on the internet long enough, like you just sort of get a sense that you're staring at fetish art. Like there's just, there's just a certain,

• 14:37Ryan Broderick?

  there's like certain logic jumps in it where you're like, that's not, like that's, that's not a normal thing. It's like a fetish thing.

• 14:43Speaker 02

  Definitely. And they're also trying to attract like, well, actually I'm gonna hold off on that because I'm gonna kind of explain the business side of this too eventually here. But let's, let's, let's go on to one. I want to show you one more Project Makeover video that you can let me know what you think.

• 15:03Ryan Broderick?

  It's a chicken laying eggs. There's a couple in bed. The man says, "Bae, I missed you." Now he's angry and he's cutting the bed in half because her Uh, her nightgown was full of eggs that the chicken laid.

• 15:18Speaker 02

  Yeah. So now she's gonna go get her, her project makeover after that humiliation. That makes very little sense to me.

• 15:25Speaker 03

  What are you both not following about this? What's not clear about that plot?

• 15:31Speaker 02

  Come on, Grant. What do you think?

• 15:32Ryan Broderick?

  A weird thing I kind of love about these videos that I've also seen in like a lot of the home renovation videos that went viral on TikTok last year is like telltale signs that they were not made by Americans.

• 15:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 15:49Ryan Broderick?

  Like, there's something really interesting there, like little things where you're like, that's not an American house. Like, this isn't like an American idea. I assume most of these animations are being made in like content farms in the global south. Like, I assume that's where, like, people on Fiverr or something. Like, I have to imagine that's where a lot of this comes from.

• 16:05Speaker 02

  And I think that's true. I think that there are, um, a handful of American companies that are also making these ads. And there's even one that I read an interview from. They do a lot of mobile game ad blog posts where they talk about how these ads work and they do talk about the really weird ones. And they talk about how they actually do create these ads because they know that people will, they called it like the what the fuck factor, you know, that like, basically, you know, you're scrolling, you're scrolling. Everything's kind of the same, or at least in the same like universe of things.

• 16:46Speaker 02

  And then all of a sudden, the only thing that's gonna stop you in your kind of mindless algorithmic scroll is something that shocks you out of your kind of coma.

• 16:57Ryan Broderick?

  Of course.

• 16:58Speaker 02

  That some of them are made and there is this like lost in translation thing that happens that makes it a little more uncanny.

• 17:06Ryan Broderick?

  It's, it is kind of fascinating that this is like not totally dissimilar from like how. Video games like Sonic the Hedgehog got lore. Old video games were limited by what you could show on screen, so they'd come up with like all this crazy backstory stuff that like never appeared in the game. As like a marketing tool. And it is funny that mobile games are effectively doing the same thing, but like with fetish slop.

• 17:31Speaker 03

  What's like Sonic lore that was used as marketing?

• 17:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, I don't know.

• 17:36Ryan Broderick?

  Oh, like the entire, the entire thing, like there, like Sonic didn't really have, like, there's no story in the game. Sega America like made up a whole backstory that isn't the same as Sega Japan's backstory because there was no, there's no, like no one paying attention. So like a lot of your games in the 90s, they'd come up with this like crazy ridiculous story that you'd read about in the back of the game and you play it as like just a pixel jumping up and down, like it was very common in the 80s.

• 18:02Speaker 02

  Okay, interesting. And did that have to do with like users? Like, did they, did people create the story and then it was pulled from like fanfiction or was it just a totally original?

• 18:13Ryan Broderick?

  No, no, no, like in, in very old video games like this, you would sort of try to like encode a bit of a vibe into the very simple platformer games, but the, most of the story was invented by the marketing department. So, and especially if you were localizing a game from Japan, you, you'd oftentimes just like make a totally new character out of it. That, that's why there's so much weird inconsistent stuff between like, Mario in the US, Mario in Japan, or Sonic in the US, Sonic Japan. So this is not totally unheard of. It's like, but they're just like these mobile game company marketing teams are pulling from a very different well of culture. They're pulling from like, how to catch your eye online rather than how to catch like a little kid's eye in a video game store.

• 18:53Speaker 02

  That makes sense.

• 18:53Ryan Broderick?

  But the, the, the thought process is the same.

• 18:56Speaker 03

  Got it.

• 18:56Ryan Broderick?

  Or even in the, uh, in the advertisement on TV. Uh, I'm saying this as someone who watched, uh, several nine hour videos about the history of Sonic Spinball for the Sega Genesis. So, yeah. So what I'm saying is it would have been great if like Sonic had stinky feet or was breastfeeding somebody or stealing chicken eggs.

• 19:14Speaker 02

  That would have been great.

• 19:15Ryan Broderick?

  Which, all of which you can find online these days if you go to DeviantArt. So like that's all there. Yeah. If you want it.

• 19:21Speaker 02

  I wonder if the fanfiction universe did influence this, or like, you know, the porny fanfiction influenced these ads as well because there is a lot in common with those two worlds.

• 19:34Ryan Broderick?

  We are now slowly kind of getting to a strange place with internet content where there are just.

• 19:42Ryan Broderick?

  There's like core viral content storylines, you know, like someone's cheating or someone loses all their money, or someone's out on the street giving you money. Like if you go and watch any random video on Instagram or Facebook, there are just like skit storylines that everybody does. It's like very vaudeville in that way. Like there's just like these, and, and a lot of them have porny undertones. I think largely because you're dealing with the same kind of people. Like, the people that make viral content for Facebook are making it up on the fly to get your attention in the same way that like porn actors are trying to like slap a plot onto something to get your attention. It's the same mentality. And

• 20:27Ryan Broderick?

  so, mobile game marketing teams, I think are probably operating under the same logic. And they're just like taking, someone gets stuck in the dryer, and then you've got to play Solitaire to get them out. You know, your stepsister stole your breast milk, or whatever, like that, that is, it's the same thing across the web, whether it's porn or not porn.

• 20:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's a template. The next one, King's Choice, is gonna get into another uh, really popular trope in mobile game ads.

• 20:57Ryan Broderick?

  Okay, so, woman's like, wants to get pregnant, and so she goes into a bush, and has sex with a man to get pregnant.

• 21:08Speaker 02

  Because she saw the king having sex with someone else.

• 21:12Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, and now she...

• 21:15Ryan Broderick?

  Oh, okay, so the baby is a different race than the father, and the father's mad, yeah.

• 21:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, so it's basically, yeah, a woman who appears to be maybe the princess, or maybe not. She sees the king, the king is getting a different woman pregnant, so then she thinks, oh, I'll, I'll get, I'll have the king's fake baby with this gardener in the bush, and then the baby turns out to, as you said, be a different race. And, uh, it doesn't really make that much sense, since the race of the gardener was white, and so... The whole thing really is kind of incongruent. The storyline doesn't really make sense, but it ends with a

• 21:57Ryan Broderick?

  She was busy. She was busy in the bushes. Yeah.

• 22:01Speaker 02

  Weird, healthy dose at the end there of confusing, very confusing racism. But this is kind of a theme in this world. We're gonna move on to something now. Let's see Happy Hospital ASMR.

• 22:18Ryan Broderick?

  Okay, so it's marked as not safe for work again, and it's gross. So they're scrubbing, they're shaving, like lungs or feet.

• 22:26Speaker 02

  It's an ass.

• 22:27Speaker 03

  It's a butt.

• 22:27Ryan Broderick?

  Oh, a butt. It's a butt. It's a butt. They're, they're, and now they're popping the pimples in the butt. It's a woman's butt. Oh, this is awful. This is just awful. There's like maggots coming out of the butt, or like a blackhead coming out of the butt. You get to like pull stuff.

• 22:42Speaker 03

  Choose the tweezers.

• 22:44Ryan Broderick?

  Yep, okay.

• 22:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think this ad ended early, but I think we can imagine where it goes. So yeah, that's kind of your classic, like disgusting pimple popper content that we see a lot.

• 22:57Ryan Broderick?

  I watch a lot of pimple popping videos.

• 22:59Speaker 02

  Tell me about that.

• 23:00Ryan Broderick?

  I do. As a stress release, I go to r-popping on Reddit.

• 23:05Speaker 02

  Do you like the other stuff, like the bigger, like boils and? Okay, so bigger the better.

• 23:11Ryan Broderick?

  Cist removal, if they get, if they get the whole sack of the cyst, because a lot of times they don't get the whole sack, so there's stuff still in there. I also really enjoy septoplasty, which is the, is an operation where you remove like impacted mucus from someone's nasal cavity.

• 23:27Speaker 02

  I mean, I can, it's not for me, but I can understand the, uh, this enjoying the success of the moment and something that's completed.

• 23:36Ryan Broderick?

  You guys wanna, you guys wanna watch some pimple pop videos? Should we just like change the, the topic of today's episode and just like watch some pimple pop videos?

• 23:42Speaker 02

  Maybe next time.

• 23:45Speaker 03

  Next summer, when we, when we all take a real week off with an episode.

• 23:49Speaker 02

  There we go. All right. This last one, I just wanted to end on a positive note, since we've seen a lot of intense stuff. So this is for a game called Chapters.

• 23:58Ryan Broderick?

  Here we go. So it's like sexy men in suits, mafia boss. Okay, like a sexy mafia boss. And now it's like two girls kissing in a hot tub. Good for them. So I guess they're secretly together, and now they can't tell the mafia boss. But the mafia boss says, "Long live the LGBTQ."

• 24:22Speaker 02

  And then he gets rewarded with a threesome. Everybody wins.

• 24:26Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, you're given the option of a threesome or to call 911, which is funny.

• 24:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I just, I love "long live LGBTQ." And then, uh, so that is my collection for you and our dear audiences.

• 24:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 24:41Ryan Broderick?

  That was great. I'm gonna sit and think about that when I listen to our wonderful, probably very, very upset sponsors. Uh, and we're gonna come back from the break and we're gonna talk all about how the world of digital advertising evolved into something this vibrant and amazing. So once again, dear advertisers, I'm sorry. I hope someone told you about this show before you put your hat down.

• 25:05Speaker 03

  Why are you apologizing? We can just run mobile ads now. This is, that we.

• 25:09Ryan Broderick?

  That's true. I, I would love an advertiser to talk about stinky feet. Uh, that would be great.

• 25:19Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome, that's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required. Compatibility and availability varies 18 plus.

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• 26:08Speaker 06

  Learn more at Farmers.com. Underwritten by Farmers Truck or Fire Insurance Exchanges or Affiliate. Products not available in every state.

• 26:16Ryan Broderick?

  So, we want to try to figure out like, how do we get to a world of like, Elsagate culture, where everything kind of looks just like insane internet garbage? And dear listener, don't worry. If you don't know what that is, we're gonna get to it in just a minute.

• 26:33Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 26:34Ryan Broderick?

  Really, sort of like, the way we think about like, modern video game advertising started in the late 80s, 88 to 91. You start to see like hobbyist magazines for your games arriving, you know, Electronic Gaming Monthly, Nintendo Power, GamePro. Were you ever like a reader of like, early 90s video game magazines?

• 26:52Speaker 02

  I was only a reader of them so that I could get cheat codes.

• 26:57Ryan Broderick?

  Sure. I was really into like, stuff like Wizard Magazine, which was like for comic books, and then, which like, sometimes overlap with video games a bit. And then, I was subscribed to Dreamcast Magazine, because they would put free demos of Dreamcast games in the magazine. I was aware of like, the very outrageous, very sexual video game ads in these magazines, which has kind of been in the industry since the beginning. There's like, a lot of like 90s like PlayStation ads that are like, "Stop kissing girls, and start playing PlayStation", or like, "Your PlayStation will suck your dick off", like, stuff like that. In terms of like, internet advertising, the very first banner ad, like, the thing you could sort of imagine as a banner ad,

• 27:40Ryan Broderick?

  launched in 1994 on Wired, of course. And, you can look at it right here. It says "Hot Wired", and then it's like a bunch of symbols on it, and you can like, click it, I guess. Very, very cool. By the mid 90s, early 2000s, we're now getting interactive ones, so they're moving around. Alright, so, these are like animated GIFs, which, you know, would take like 25 minutes to load on DSL, load on non DSL internet. But, this is also where flash ads start to sort of become important. How would you sort of describe the difference between like the ads that you're looking at right now, which are like animated GIFs of like a monkey running around or whatever,

• 28:26Ryan Broderick?

  to like ads you see on the internet now? Like, how would you sort of describe the difference in aesthetics?

• 28:30Speaker 02

  Well, I think it's just very, very, very simple, obviously, as Flash animation was back then. These look like you can actually play them in the banner. Is that true? Because it looks like if...

• 28:44Ryan Broderick?

  They want you to think so.

• 28:46Speaker 02

  They want you to think that you can. Okay, okay. So they got me.

• 28:48Ryan Broderick?

  So if you were to like throw the rock at the monkey, it would activate the ad and then you'd be brought over to the website.

• 28:53Speaker 02

  Right, so it's a trick. It's a trick click. And, you know, there's no storyline. I don't think that they have the time for such a thing. So it's really basic. Monkey's running back and forth.

• 29:06Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, when you're talking, when you're sort of talking about like the interactive ads, so those are, they sort of start to pop up in what you would call like the Java era. Tree Loot is like the first company to figure this out, and they're giving away coupons and discounts. And it's an animated monkey with boxing gloves, and then you're supposed to like punch the monkey and you win $20. It's done entirely in Java. It gets eventually replaced with Flash. And here's how they make their money, according to the Wall Street Journal at the time. "By offering free gifts, prizes, coupons, or big cash winnings, gaming, and sweepstakes sites are able to sign up players and get them to divulge their names, addresses, and in some cases hobbies, interests, and buying patterns.

• 29:52Ryan Broderick?

  The sites then use the information to sell advertisers targeted email lists or space in a daily email message to players. It's market research disguised as a game, and the information they are getting is very valuable." Yeah, I mean, that's basically how I make money with garbage things. I trick people into thinking lyrics and then I steal their information. So yeah, you basically, you see a ton of these in the early 2000s. If you go down one, Grant, you look at this one, which is, "Three ads for 'Tickle the Fat Kid Till He Barfs' and Win Two Free iPod Nanos." Grant, does this ad still work? I'd love to play this game. It does not. I want to tickle the fatigued hearts. I want an iPad Nano. I want to win a free iPad Nano.

• 30:33Speaker 02

  Oh god. Okay, so we've already got a little bit of gross out content here.

• 30:38Ryan Broderick?

  No, we are, we are fully in sort of a, like, it, it, uh, just to keep track at home here, dear listener. The first ad was in 1994, and by like, 2002 or 2003, we are now like, fully in slop world. Uh, so that's how quickly this stuff has devolved. By the mid 2000s to like, early 2010s, we're now seeing tons of flash games. They're the stuff that's crashing everybody's browsers. This also starts kind of like the browser advertising war. You know, the ad blockers versus the browsers that sort of like make them faster. This is sort of why Google Chrome like becomes like an early popular favorite for people who are using the internet all the time. Uh, because these ads are gigantic and they are also full of slop.

• 31:22Ryan Broderick?

  So like, this is a McDonald's ad where you click to play and then you... You're like fishing for a Filet-O-Fish, basically, right?

• 31:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's like you're supposed to tap the reel and then avoid the obstacles, which is kind of odd. Like, those two things aren't really working together, but there's like a shark, a submarine, and uh, some sort of mine. And then you, if you get past that, you get to catch your own Filet-O-Fish. And that is the, there's like a real picture of the Filet-O-Fish in the animation, which I always love.

• 31:57Ryan Broderick?

  And I had totally forgotten, like, this weird moment online where brands had just turned ads into video games and vice versa, effectively. So if you go down one, Grant, we're now looking at, uh, this is Postopia Games. You can play a fruity Pebbles themed...

• 32:19Speaker 02

  Yes, like, yeah, Flintstone fruity Pebbles game. Interesting. It's much more complicated. There's a lot going on. Yeah.

• 32:28Ryan Broderick?

  Lot more going on. And if you look closely, there's an ad inside the branded game for a sleepover at the Smithsonian. So it's an ad within an ad.

• 32:37Speaker 02

  What?

• 32:38Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 32:39Speaker 02

  That's really strange. Okay, so yeah, they're just kind of throwing a bunch of shit at you, trying probably to get you to be attracted to one of the things in the group, whether that be fruity pebbles or a sleepover at the Smithsonian, which does sound really fun.

• 32:53Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, so like during this period, like early 2010s, like mobile internet hadn't overtaken desktop just yet. It's like this really weird moment between like 2009, 2012, where people are still investing in websites, even advertisers. So you get stuff like the Muppets, like doing like an entire website full of, I don't know, just like Muppet shit, just like branded Muppet slop. And this is like ads within ads within ads within an entirely branded takeover of the site. Yeah.

• 33:24Speaker 02

  It's chaos, man.

• 33:25Ryan Broderick?

  And this leads us directly to Sivony. So have you ever heard of Sivony? Okay, I hadn't remembered this at all. I totally forgot about this. So it was a browser-based strategy game on Flash that launched in 2009. And it's basically like a strategy game, sort of like Civilization or Age of Empires. It is a very early example of what we would now regularly call freemium. So you've definitely seen the ads because there's a lot of like hot chainmail babes and stuff. It used to be also be called, it used to be called Evony.

• 34:00Speaker 02

  Okay, interesting.

• 34:02Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, I definitely have seen these games. They were everywhere.

• 34:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, this is very, I very much remember this. Yeah.

• 34:09Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah. The, the banner ads went very viral. They even got like written up by The Guardian at the time. Friend of Garbage Day, Jeff Atwood, even like did a great timeline of these weird ads. He wrote about it back in 2009 in a post titled, "How to Not, How Not to Advertise on the Internet," which is great. And this is sort of like the last big moment of this style of mobile game advertising that you're gonna see, possibly because people were so...

• 34:46Ryan Broderick?

  So mad at Ebony that the creators started suing bloggers.

• 34:51Speaker 02

  Whoa.

• 34:52Ryan Broderick?

  And then the like head of Ebony, Eric Lamb, was sued by Microsoft for click fraud before the game launch. So like he was already kind of like not a good guy, you know? Um, so yeah, anyways, this is all to say that like this is the last kind of browser game style advertiser you're gonna see. Because from then on, it becomes like the mobile era. And you're getting Plants vs Zombies, Temple Run. Then you're also getting the stuff that like lives inside of Facebook, like Mafia Wars, Candy Crush. Um, did you ever play any of those games?

• 35:32Speaker 02

  Not really. I've never been a mobile game person. I've definitely slang them on my show, so don't tell anyone. But, um, no, just hasn't been my thing. I like to play crosswords. Yeah.

• 35:43Ryan Broderick?

  That's cool. I, I once found out my mom, I think beat Candy Crush.

• 35:49Speaker 02

  Wow. I didn't know you could beat it. That's cool.

• 35:52Ryan Broderick?

  She like got really far and was spending real money on it. And I couldn't yell at her about that because I spent a lot of real money on Pokemon Go during the pandemic.

• 36:02Speaker 02

  Well, that's fair. At least you're getting some exercise.

• 36:05Ryan Broderick?

  I wasn't. I was paying to not go outside.

• 36:08Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 36:08Ryan Broderick?

  You could pay money, you could pay money during the pandemic to increase the radius so I could do it from my couch.

• 36:14Speaker 02

  Wow. Okay. Great. Well, at least you're honest.

• 36:17Ryan Broderick?

  Um, yeah.

• 36:18Speaker 02

  Yeah. I think my, my analog example I'm gonna give, since I'm not as into the mobile games, is I did beat Bop It alone, which you can do if you get to the end.

• 36:30Ryan Broderick?

  I didn't know you could beat Bop It.

• 36:31Speaker 02

  I didn't know either.

• 36:32Ryan Broderick?

  I thought it was just go on indefinitely.

• 36:33Speaker 02

  Imagine my surprise and excitement. It threw like, it threw me a little party.

• 36:37Speaker 03

  Did that, did that instill you with any skill?

• 36:40Speaker 02

  I got fast hands. I can catch softball really fast. I was always a sporty kid, so I think it was, you know, I enjoyed it because it was like a tiny sport that you could play, which I guess mobile games are too, but.

• 36:52Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, they are. I would say they're dexterity. Um, let's, uh, let's take a little look at, uh, like what the early, early to mid 2010s mobile game landscape looked like. I assume most people are kind of familiar, but like, uh, Grant, if you could just click the first link there, fortify yourself with an army. Uh, this is, I think, very indicative of like what mobile game ads look like, which is that, you know, in, you know, about 10 years ago, 15 years ago, which is a lot of just like clicking stuff, big armies fighting, like no real emphasis on story. You're just, you're just clicking, you know, and like the, the, the industry wasn't, you know, super mature yet. Not, not mature in the sense that like they're doing, they're mature now, but like hadn't matured, you know, it hadn't been around for a long time.

• 37:35Ryan Broderick?

  They're also using a lot of like flash animation still.

• 37:38Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 37:40Ryan Broderick?

  Um, it seems like though they pretty quickly realized what everyone else realized. And this, that sex sells. So Grant, if you could go down to the link titled cartoon bosomy woman doing dance.

• 37:54Speaker 02

  All right. Yeah. We've got like a scantily clad woman in kind of a loincloth. She's doing a very suggestive dance, uh, with, yeah, big cleavage. And, uh, yeah, she's just kind of like looking at the player, which I think is key. There's like, uh, uh, attention to you, the potential person who I imagine will save her. I don't know. And it's called brutal age, which is a little unnerving. Yeah.

• 38:21Ryan Broderick?

  And then let's click the next link down there, uh, cause I want to show you what happens when we get a bunch of different marketing genres all coming together for one video.

• 38:30Speaker 02

  Okay. So we've got like a, a pretty blonde woman and a devil woman and their mouths are huge and open and a little guy went in them and now everyone's kicking the little guy. And now there's a woman with a green face who's giant and her tongue is out and she is eating these little guys, uh, that are presumably you, the player. Oh, now, uh, one of them's pulling something out of a statue's ear. Oh, now she sucked him up. Now he's bones in her stomach that you can see. Um, now he's pulling a sword out of a golden kind of Mary-esque woman. Oh, a skeleton hand came out of the hole in her chest.

• 39:04Ryan Broderick?

  Grant, could you pause for a second? Something's important here to point out. And I think this, I think for listeners, this is important to know. If you ever see anything on the internet that depicts like a giant woman or a giant woman like thing, eating a man who's small, and you can see inside of her stomach as he's digested and dies, you're looking at fetish content. That is like straight up, that is giantess fetish content and like that is just classic. And the giveaway is you can see inside the belly. That's, that's, that's, that's the real secret.

• 39:40Speaker 02

  That's the giveaway, really?

• 39:41Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 39:41Speaker 02

  Cool.

• 39:42Ryan Broderick?

  In my experience.

• 39:42Speaker 02

  Okay, okay. Yeah, no, I was gonna include this one just to put forward the giantess fetish. So I'm glad that you brought it. We're on the same wavelength.

• 39:51Speaker 03

  It is remarkable that none of the ads have overlapped so far. Just like it speaks to how many of these there are that, that we both went into separate corners to research this and there's been zero overlap. That is impressive. Also, I just, your ability to narrate what was happening there. Play, you could do play by play of.

• 40:13Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, that was pretty good.

• 40:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, that was very impressive.

• 40:15Speaker 02

  It's my bop it, my bop it hands. I'm quick.

• 40:20Ryan Broderick?

  As we sort of head towards the pandemic, we get to the modern era, or at least the most modern era so far of mobile games, you know? And this is what we sort of talked about in the first act, which are these bizarre ads that sort of are psychosexual in nature. I feel like people started to notice them around 2018, 2019. Does that sort of gel with you as well? Yeah. I do wonder if part of it was TikTok. Like, cause TikTok launches in 2017 and all of a sudden now we have like people watching more video content than ever before. And TikTok just like kind of opens the floodgates on digital, digital video advertising in a way that we hadn't seen before.

• 40:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 40:59Ryan Broderick?

  But there definitely is like a renewed sense of like, oh, these are weird and people are noticing.

• 41:04Speaker 02

  Yes, definitely, definitely. And I mean, do you guys want to talk about Elsa Gate at any point? Because it does feel connected.

• 41:12Ryan Broderick?

  Well, I think we should. Before we go to the break, I do, I do think we should touch on it. So just for people who aren't familiar, let me just, just get the broad strokes down so we can talk about it. So if you've ever heard the term Elsa Gate, it refers to a controversy where there were a few different YouTube channels making like very disturbing children's content by slamming together, uh, things like Elsa from Frozen, Spider-Man. They're doing different costumes. It was very sexual, a lot of goo's, a lot of slimes. It felt very algorithmically generated and YouTube eventually had to start cracking down on it after like a bunch of different publications started writing about like how disturbing these things were. So what's the connection? Like, how do you see the connection there? Because I agree with you, there is one, but I'm having trouble articulating it.

• 41:56Speaker 02

  Here's what I think. So, I mean, I think it's important to point out that, yeah, it's like all these characters, all this like private IP. And they're doing things like eating shit and burying each other alive and like getting abortions and getting hypodermic needle injections from like a hairy hand, like a real hand coming into the cartoon and like injecting Peppa Pig or like pulling her teeth out. It's like really dark stuff, like violent eye surgeries, right? Just like these things that should not be in a kid's thing, right? And the whole point, I think, is that when you slam together, like the titles of all of these are like, Peppa Pig Paw Patrol Goes to the Bathroom and like, you know, just like these really weird but long titles

• 42:42Speaker 02

  that will, in the same way that a mobile game ad kind of makes you pause, like it's going to attract the attention of anyone who is on YouTube. If, if someone's shown this, it's kind of, and whether you're, you know, people act like kids wouldn't be, would never, ever click on such a thing, right? But it's like, we remember being kids, like we were, we're going to click on the weirdest thing.

• 43:04Ryan Broderick?

  I'm absolutely going to click on it, for sure.

• 43:06Speaker 02

  You know, it's, it's just works, right? So it's just, again, this. This shock gross out novelty. I think novelty is kind of the key here. And if you're jamming together all of this, these IP names in the algorithm, it's obviously going to show up. It's going to keep your attention longer. Because the continuing storyline is very, very strange. You're going to watch it longer. Then it's going to get pushed farther up the algorithm and then it'll just do better. Get more clicks and more views and that's what they want. And then kids are also way less likely to skip commercials. And I think that's kind of a big part of why this worked so well was like kids are pretty passive viewers.

• 43:48Speaker 02

  So whether it's a toddler that has no idea what's going on, or it's a kid that's, you know, morbidly interested in whatever weird thing is happening. It's going to get a lot more engagement and I think it's just pretty basic, right? It's like fucked up and gross and it's not made by people who care about kids, obviously. But it's just, yet again, capitalism influencing our subconscious and vice versa. And it's very, very weird. Yeah.

• 44:17Ryan Broderick?

  I think that's right. I do think it's like important to point out that like, like the algorithms for different platforms work differently. And then we can, and we, and they don't really want us to know how they work, but like, we kind of know, right? So on YouTube, like Elsa Gate is a really good example of like, at the time in the late 2010s, YouTube was really prioritizing like, like pop culture topics, like search terms. So like, so if you could just jam a million search terms into a video, it would do really well. And YouTube was at the time, I believe, just starting sort of siloing off children's content. So like, if you could be like safe for children, or you could be popular children, you could like, get a bigger audience. So like, it was like hijacking the platform.

• 44:59Speaker 02

  Totally.

• 44:59Ryan Broderick?

  And then with like TikTok, TikTok is way more trend focused. So it's like more interested, but it's also trying to sell you stuff. The most viral things on TikTok you're ever going to see are like people, like, okay, water talk. Do you remember that trend?

• 45:12Speaker 02

  No.

• 45:14Ryan Broderick?

  So it's like a perfect example of like what TikTok is designed to do, which is like, it's people being like, the hot trend right now is like putting different flavor packets in my water. And then you like show off your flavor packets because like TikTok wants a trend that involves products.

• 45:30Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 45:31Ryan Broderick?

  Like, like 90% of the most viral TikTok content on there is just like, I bought this product and now I can do this trend. So it doesn't sort of shock me that like the, the big kind of outcry about mobile game ads being weird and salacious happens with like the advent of TikTok. All of these things are basically just like, you're trying to capture people's attention and but, but doing it through an algorithm not like, I don't think that these are meant to be looked at by humans first. I think they're be, they're meant to be looked at by a machine first.

• 46:04Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 46:04Ryan Broderick?

  And then the machine goes like, ooh, this is like weird. Like, I'll promote this.

• 46:08Speaker 02

  Mm hmm. Yeah.

• 46:09Ryan Broderick?

  That's my, that's my theory.

• 46:10Speaker 02

  I think that's a good theory. Yeah.

• 46:12Ryan Broderick?

  But we're going to be talking about how you crack down on something like this and why it's so difficult after a word from our very, very, very, very regretful sponsors.

• 46:22Speaker 02

  Sorry, y'all.

• 46:27Speaker 00

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• 47:16Speaker 00

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• 47:23Ryan Broderick?

  How big do you think this problem is? Like, you've done, you've done a lot of sort of investigations into this world. Like, do you feel like there's like something that can even be done here to like, crack down on this stuff?

• 47:32Speaker 02

  So I just, I didn't really get into any of the ideas of how to make this stop, because I was looking at it more as a sociological phenomenon, not as a, as a moral problem. But it is obviously showing up on the feeds of anyone and everyone. I do think that it's like, kind of slowed down, at least in my experience. I used to get them all the time, and now, I just don't see them as often. And I don't know if that has anything to do with the mobile game industry. I don't really know how it's doing right now, but I know it's been really profitable, right? Because all people need to do is get someone to click the game. Then the advertiser gets the credit for the click-through rate.

• 48:17Speaker 02

  And then the gameplay, that's a whole different set of people. So the advertisers, all they are trying to do is get you to click into the game. If you download the game, you're gonna immediately get ads. They're gonna make money that way, or they're gonna try to sell you, like, you know, whatever. They're gonna sell you things within the game that you need to progress in the game. So really, it's just an advertising issue that obviously is gonna be hard to solve. I guess there would have to be new laws about what you can put in an ad, but you know, it just feels like this is everywhere on the internet. It's kind of just the way things are now. So I think it'd be really hard to try to crack down on that.

• 49:02Speaker 02

  And as we know, when, when people try to crack down on things like this, they usually sneak in some insidious censorship. So I don't have a good solution, but I do know that it works really well. This type of ad does work really well.

• 49:17Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, I mean, the, the reason we focused specifically on mobile game ads this week, not just because they're weird and funny and fucked up, but also because digital advertising...

• 49:29Ryan Broderick?

  Like, doesn't work and is essentially like mass scale fraud and we would need hours to talk about like why it doesn't work.

• 49:35Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 49:36Ryan Broderick?

  I have friends who work in it and like it is not.

• 49:39Speaker 02

  It's not working.

• 49:39Ryan Broderick?

  It's not real.

• 49:40Speaker 02

  Really?

• 49:41Ryan Broderick?

  It is, yeah, like it's, sorry, sorry to be the bearer of bad news for anybody working digital advertising, but like it's, it's, it is very, it is, I have a friend who, who works digital advertising, he's just like, it's broken on a scale that like if people knew would crash like the economy.

• 49:55Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 49:56Ryan Broderick?

  Like it doesn't really work.

• 49:56Speaker 02

  Great.

• 49:57Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 49:57Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 49:58Ryan Broderick?

  Like, cause like the click is effectively a meaningless metric now.

• 50:01Speaker 02

  Do you think it was less meaningless like five years ago?

• 50:05Ryan Broderick?

  My understanding is that like the minute advertising went online, like advertising, which was never really.

• 50:10Speaker 02

  Uh huh.

• 50:11Ryan Broderick?

  A thing like was broken permanently.

• 50:14Speaker 02

  Okay, got it.

• 50:15Ryan Broderick?

  That's what I've heard from people who work in digital advertising. The, in terms of like how you crack down on this stuff, like, America's not going to because we, we don't have, we're not gonna have any new laws or regulations ever again, but other countries are trying.

• 50:29Speaker 02

  Oh, really?

• 50:30Ryan Broderick?

  The UK loves cracking down on internet content and they, what they would call like a, like a media watchdog, which is kind of like a non-official kind of group, they found eight frightening adverts that depicted women in bad ways that they want to address.

• 50:48Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 50:48Ryan Broderick?

  And they want them banned. One of the games is an interactive romance story game called My Fantasy, which according to The Guardian, featured an animation of a woman being approached by another woman and being pushed onto a desk and the options appeared asking what she should do. Enjoy it, push her away, please continue and stop it. And this advertising watchdog said that the animations were strongly suggestive and implied the sexual encounters were not consensual.

• 51:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, I've seen a lot of that as well.

• 51:17Ryan Broderick?

  Lot of that.

• 51:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 51:18Ryan Broderick?

  And so like, there are like some places on earth that like want to figure out how to deal with this stuff, but. I agree that it is systemic and ultimately, the only way to fix it is to fix the platforms that we're using and what they incentivize. Like, they're looking for specific, and it's sort of what I was talking about in the second section, is like, they're looking for specific content, and as long as they're trying to make you outraged, or catch your attention, without caring how they're catching your attention, and these algorithms aren't thinking, they're just like, they just know, like, okay, like, this content shape produces this user behavior. And advertisers, or shady weird fiber groups with Blender skills can figure out how to

• 52:03Ryan Broderick?

  do that. And so, yeah, I agree with you that like, it's, it's just like a thing that I think is gonna be around until people stop getting, like, pulled into looking at it.

• 52:13Speaker 02

  And I guess it's like, you could say, like, don't click on it, right? Or like, don't watch it for very long, but it's pretty hard to do, when you're seeing, like, you wanna know how this outrageous thing you're watching resolves, and then it doesn't resolve, and then you're just watching this stupid-ass game.

• 52:31Ryan Broderick?

  Especially because, like, because the click is meaningless, and has been increasingly meaningless for like, 15 years, the eyeball is becoming more meaningful.

• 52:41Speaker 02

  So it's like, don't hover? Like, is that what you mean?

• 52:44Ryan Broderick?

  I mean, this is true, so you can do this test at home if you want, like, go on TikTok, find like, a video in your feed that you like, watch it, and then refresh the feed, and I guarantee you, like, if you look at like, a video of a dog for too long, your feed will refresh, and it'll be almost all dogs. And it's doing that in real time.

• 53:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, that makes sense.

• 53:03Ryan Broderick?

  So, like, the platforms know that the click doesn't work anymore, and they know that advertisers know. And they're just waiting for like, the weird shady ad firms. If you wanna read more about this, by the way, I recommend like, 404 Media, they're very good at sort of like, talking about the rot at the heart of digital advertising, but like, the eyeball is the view, the sort of like, momentary hesitation is replacing the click. And all of this is, of course, leading to the AI version of it, where like, your weird fetish game is built into an AI bot, or whatever, but like, it's all going the same place, which is like, trying to... Just monetized your attention spans. That way, even if you don't like what you're looking at, they can still say, well, you looked at it.

• 53:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. And that's the thing is like, you're not just gonna look at things you like. You're gonna look at the novelty. And that's what mobile game ads hit on and knew. Whether or not, you know, they were successful in the way we're talking about remains to be seen, maybe, but it still gets you, right?

• 54:00Ryan Broderick?

  Maybe the solution is we've got to sit down like everyone, like everyone on Earth, and just show them the worst content imaginable for hours, like Clockwork Orange style. So that they're completely and totally, yeah, and they're completely and totally desensitized. And then we can crash the digital advertising economy and be free. Because you will no longer be interested in looking at Pregnant Elsa or Sonic with stinky feet. Or like a woman eat shark and then become a baby or whatever, because you won't, you won't, your brain will be so used to it.

• 54:36Speaker 02

  You're killing the novelty. That's what we're saying.

• 54:38Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, listener, you gotta kill any sense of novelty in yourself before you can use the internet. And then you'll finally be free.

• 54:45Speaker 03

  This is how Zuckerberg's actually gonna connect us all.

• 54:47Ryan Broderick?

  There's a term that the users of the R Drugs subreddit use called Kill Your Eagle. And they use the term Kill Your Eagle to sort of mean like you ego death kind of, but your eagle inside of you. And what you do is you gotta kill your eagle before you go online.

• 55:03Speaker 02

  If you do that, if you kind of take in the worst content that you can, then the novelty will become something nice. So we'll get nice content again. So then the cycle will kind of continue, though.

• 55:15Speaker 03

  Have either of you just hovered visually over something too long that you never, like you're like, I don't want my feed to become this, but I, but I looked at, and now like I've betrayed myself. And you know, that's the only way. And then you're like inundated inundated with a type of content.

• 55:32Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, I've been keeping track of the sites that can do it now. So Reddit on mobile can definitely do it to a degree. It's not as sophisticated, it's a little more complicated. TikTok can definitely do it. Instagram can certainly do it, but not with story content, it seems. X can do it now, but X has a really bad algorithm, so it like does it too much. So like if you hover over something on X, you're gonna get nothing but that on the mobile app.

• 55:59Speaker 03

  Watch one pro wrestling video and god, just watch 10 seconds of The Rock making an eyebrow and like, I'm only seeing stunners now.

• 56:08Ryan Broderick?

  It seems to like, yeah, it seems to have like the autoplay feature tied to the algorithmic recommendation system somehow. But TikTok is the one that has the best version of this. Also Netflix.

• 56:20Ryan Broderick?

  They never get talked about, but they have something called a bucket system where you're in a bucket and like the other, another user is in a bucket and it's constantly moving you between buckets based on what you watch or what you hover over. So that's happening. YouTube doesn't seem to do it weirdly enough because like YouTube wants you to watch the video. So they're much more interested in like you clicking in and watching.

• 56:42Speaker 03

  I, uh, um, we're all friends here.

• 56:46Speaker 02

  We are.

• 56:48Ryan Broderick?

  I don't like where this is headed, wherever this is headed.

• 56:50Speaker 03

  I've, I've one dark thing and one.

• 56:52Ryan Broderick?

  I don't know why you need to bring that up before you're gonna say whatever you're gonna say.

• 56:55Speaker 03

  Cause it might not make it into the episode. I, I was once listening to a Savage Love, the, the Dan Savage sex advice podcast. And somebody's girlfriend called him was like, I went to my boyfriend's Instagram and like the search feature was all just like women with big boobs.

• 57:13Speaker 02

  Oh yeah, I remember this.

• 57:14Speaker 03

  And he swears to god, he never clicks this content. And everyone was like, bro, that's bullshit. I must have just hesitated on like some all they them for like two seconds too long. Cause I never, I like, I'm like, I don't want this in my feed. I never clicked it. But now when I go to my search, it's only people that look like my wife.

• 57:34Speaker 02

  It is like. It's like just me over and over again.

• 57:40Speaker 03

  I'm like, I'm like, it looks so incriminating if anyone had my phone. And I'm like, I. I barely click on tattoo content for this reason. Like, I really didn't want this.

• 57:52Ryan Broderick?

  I was talking to a friend about this actually last night. Because like I recently started using Instagram more, although I kind of lost interest again, but I go through phases. And when I was using it in the winter, it my explore page was like nothing but like alt women with tattoos. And I don't like follow any celebrities. I don't really follow any meme pages. I just like follow my friends. What I suspect is happening is that Instagram is using a hybrid system where it's it's showing you content based on what you're looking at like TikTok. But it's also probably being influenced by the social graph, which is what it has across Facebook and Instagram. That that meta is like very proud of maintaining. So it's not just you.

• 58:37Ryan Broderick?

  It's like if you also follow people who are also interested in that. And then

• 58:42Speaker 03

  So I don't need to be a pervert. It's just that I'm friends with perverts.

• 58:46Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 58:46Ryan Broderick?

  Well, you're also unfortunately a man and the platform knows you're a man. Yeah, but the platform knows you're a man. And so it like, there seems to be definitely like a button. It presses when it knows you're a man and just starts blasting you with like your woman type of choice.

• 59:06Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 59:07Speaker 02

  Makes sense.

• 59:07Ryan Broderick?

  That's like a thing that like all like, I know a lot of male users that complain about it.

• 59:12Speaker 03

  Fascinating.

• 59:13Speaker 02

  Very interesting. I don't have TikTok. I know it's really brave of me. But I have YouTube, obviously. And so my algorithm, because of the show that I make, is completely insane. Like, and it will depend on the episode. But like when I did the Elsie Gate episode, which I'd love to push here for anyone who wants to know more about Elsie Gate. You'll like kind of hear me go completely insane on the episode. But that was a really dark time. And so I my algorithms are always corresponding with the the episodes. And it can be really, really fun sometimes when it's like just a nice history story. But then it can get really strange. Like when we did our skibitty toilet episode, another one I'll push.

• 59:56Speaker 02

  Things definitely got really weird on my algorithm. So I feel like mine is really based on my work.

• 1:00:03Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, I've been watching a lot of Andrew Tate videos recently.

• 1:00:06Speaker 02

  Oh, good.

• 1:00:07Ryan Broderick?

  For work. For work. And so now I'm getting all kinds of weird YouTube stuff.

• 1:00:13Speaker 03

  YouTube thinks I'm a 35-year-old man who's obsessed with Radiohead half the time, and the other half the time it thinks I'm a 14-year-old who really needs to learn more about NoFap. And it's just really uncertain what to do.

• 1:00:25Ryan Broderick?

  It doesn't know that you're both. That's so crazy that it doesn't know that you love NoFap and Radiohead. I bet there's a lot of crossover, actually.

• 1:00:32Speaker 03

  Let's not do this.

• 1:00:33Ryan Broderick?

  And people who have addictions to pornography. I bet there's like a lot of overlap.

• 1:00:40Speaker 02

  Oh, but I'm a creep.

• 1:00:44Ryan Broderick?

  But, yeah, exactly. Grant, any pickups before we bounce?

• 1:00:49Speaker 03

  I got, I got one. I've been, I've been sitting.

• 1:00:51Ryan Broderick?

  Just one.

• 1:00:52Speaker 03

  I've been sitting on this idea.

• 1:00:53Ryan Broderick?

  Just one.

• 1:00:54Speaker 03

  Just one, but it's an idea. And it might, and, and.

• 1:00:56Ryan Broderick?

  Oh, those are the worst, because it's, it's, it's, oh, okay, fine.

• 1:01:01Speaker 03

  This might not, we, we can pass. Like, we can, we can, we might be able to hold this.

• 1:01:05Speaker 02

  Let's hear it.

• 1:01:05Speaker 03

  Something I've been thinking about for a long time. You look at this, and this is slop generated by people. And when you look at the trajectory of content, all influencers have trained themselves to think algorithmically and have been, and TikTok has trained us to be just shilling products and basically making ads and pretending that it's a take. And so we've trained the human experience to be sloppy slop slop.

• 1:01:34Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 1:01:34Speaker 03

  And, and, and that is what feeds us most of the time. And we're all very worried, and rightfully so, about AI slop.

• 1:01:47Speaker 03

  But I'm starting to feel more and more nihilistic about like, when we've trained ourselves as people to just think like algorithms and to just make things with must get click, must put word here. And I think these like, kind of ads, like, like, really. Are like the true essence of like the way that we've like warped our brains to try to like make human eye hover. Like I kinda like just wanna throw out my hands and be like, what the fuck's the difference between like, if this is what we're doing with the human mind, then like, who gives a shit what we do with the like, the computer mind, besides the like, water waste, which is real.

• 1:02:22Speaker 02

  That's really real. Yeah, I mean, that's a good, that's a good point. And I guess I also think of the algorithm as kind of like our subconscious, right? So it's kind of like, it's not just a computer affecting us, it's us affecting a computer. And I think what the hover is, has a lot to do with not even our conscious mind, but really just, that's why these, these places put forward things like sex, violence, gross out content, the things that bring our attention to them. I mean, the algorithm's being created and we're creating it and it's creating us. And it's getting weird.

• 1:02:59Ryan Broderick?

  But yeah, this is kind of what always happens when people can make their own media. Like there was, there was a slop, quote unquote, like equivalent for like newsletters when they got really cheap to make in the 1800s. Like, this is a thing that happens. And I, I don't feel very nihilistic about this. This is just sort of like what the end of an era looks like. Whether or not you feel good about this is up to you, but like, it's very clear to me that the, the transition that we're going through right now is very similar to the like independent publishing boom of the late 1800s, early 1900s into like, radio and TV. And the equivalent would be the user generated internet to an AI powered internet. And obviously, there are all kinds of problems there, but like, that's, that's

• 1:03:44Ryan Broderick?

  clearly what's happening right now. The, the stuff that you're seeing around the internet like fall apart and like turn into slop. Is just what that looks like. Like, we are, we are moving on and we're gonna have new problems to deal with, but like, this is all, I think, already in the rearview mirror in a lot of ways. Like, I, I was talking to someone else this week, a friend, a not, very not internet friend, who was just like, "I don't know what to do online anymore." Yeah. So like, this is already happening, and the fact that like, it's like falling into disrepair is like, very sad, and there's like, lots of problems, like I said there, but like, this is already kind of ending, in a way, I think.

• 1:04:22Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:04:22Ryan Broderick?

  Chelsea, I want to thank you for coming on the show. This was great.

• 1:04:24Speaker 02

  This was so fun.

• 1:04:25Ryan Broderick?

  Thank you for, for coming. Uh, this is a silly question, but I ask it to all of our guests. Where can people follow you on the internet? I'm sure people already know, but where can they follow you if they don't know?

• 1:04:32Speaker 02

  Uh, you, we have Instagram. That's the only one we got, and it's @AmericanHysteriaPodcast. Uh, we also have a website, and that's AmericanHysteria.com, and you can find some other stuff there that we do.

• 1:04:43Ryan Broderick?

  Thank you so much. This was a delightful conversation about the worst stuff on the internet.

• 1:04:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, thank you both. Thank you, Grant. Thank you, Ryan, for letting me bring this presentation to you. Uh, really was an honor to talk about this shit with both of you, so, thank you very much.

• 1:05:00Ryan Broderick?

  Panic World is a production of Courier. It is written and produced by Grant Irving and hosted by me, Ryan Broderick. Josh Fielstedt is our production coordinator, and our amazing researcher is Adam Bumis. From Courier is Shane Verkest, who edits our video episodes, along with our producer, Kevin Maroney, and National Managing Director and Executive Producer, Kevin Dreyfus. RC DeMezzo is their VP of Brand and Social. Charlotte Robinson is their Deputy Director of Brand and Social. Mary Ann Kuga is their Director of Marketing, and Tracy Kaplan is the Senior Vice President of Sales and Distribution. If you want to sponsor the show, or give us products to sell, she's the one to talk to. You can email her at [email protected]. Lastly, here's my advice for you. Chill out and touch

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