consult this

i worked at a large newspaper in new york a few years back. the paper was "alternative" and not home to too many suits and such outside the sales department. soon after i started working there, i noticed about 3 suits/pantsuits set up in the cubicle next to mine. they never said hello or even acknowledged the presence of the people who worked in the building. you could tell they were scared shitless, surrounded by a bunch of queers and freaks. they were wonder bread.

it turns out that the paper hired a consulting firm for a million dollar study on how to make money on the internets. so that's what the suits were, consultants. they were all super-young, right out of college. i had never seen consultants before and was perplexed. i didn't understand how you could "consult" and have no experience in anything beyond doing your mid-terms and wearing hats with beer can holders. a coworker of mine filled me in on the whole consulting skam - go to college, graduate, get a cushy job at a consulting firm, work about 10 minutes a day and collect a huge salary. and that's exactly what these kids were doing. their "research" consisted of them surfing around, looking at nothing in particular. stuff like lolcats and the hamster dance and then the sports sites. you could hear them talking amongst themselves every once in a while. they talked a lot about sports. a lot of talk about college football. i hate football as it is, but college football makes my blood boil. it's like pro football times two. twice the stupidity. these kids were straight out of that movie 'happiness', like the fat, heavy breather dude. happless, uninteresting kids with zero ambition beyond making money. they were really annoying.

after about 3 months it was time to gather up all the data and come up with some answers. they picked up their shit and left without saying a word. i'm sure the next client was eager to throw money away and needed the services of these asshole, pronto. so, after about another month, the upper managers, who initiated the study received their answer. the answer came in the form of a three ring binder, with about 200 pages of charts and graphs that meant nothing. it was like a homework assignment from a c- student. my boss found the binder sitting in a pile of old software manuals about a year later. we both laughed or asses off.

the consultants were gracious enough to provide two answers actually. the first answer was internet porn. i'm not shitting you. that was an answer. the second answer was internet radio. this is what $1,000,000 gets you from consultants. a no brainer and a dead-end.

ever since then, any time i read an article/blog/etc. where people take seriously the kinds of research that comes from consulting/marketing/whatever firms, i roll my eyes.

recently i came across one such article in ars-technica. i've actually seen a few stories on this now. nielsen, the giant media consulting firm did a study on the differences between facebook and myspace users. apparently they discovered that facebookers make more money than myspacers.

myspace is for kids. facebook is for adults. this is not news. anyone under the age of 55 knows this.

why would i want to hang out with a bunch of retarded kids, going through their post-pubescent trauma? and why would kids want to hang out with a boring old fart like me? i don't hang out in bars and clubs overrun with hormone addled kids, cuz it's annoying. so, the end result is we hang out in different places. and if older people are using facebook, then it's users have more money, cuz older people have more money than younger ones. end of story.

i've written this in about 1/2 an hour. it probably took months for the nielsen report to come to about.

bottom line, if anybody out there wants to throw their money away, throw it at me, i need the money!

link | rss | share | posted: 2009-10-10 16:34:08