As Kpopalypse blog has increased in popularity, there has correspondingly been a steady increase in the number of offers from companies smelling the revenue that large amounts of web traffic can generate, putting forward advertising deals to Kpopalypse for consideration.  Replying to these companies gets tiring and repetitive, and I’d rather spend that energy blogging for my lovely readers, so therefore I thought a post explaining my advertising policy might be helpful for me to link to any future people soliciting deals, as well as entertaining for readers in general.  If you’re from an advertising company and I’ve linked you here, that means this blog post is for YOU!  Please read on for the Kpopalypse advertising policy!

A BRIEF INTERNET ADVERTISING HISTORY ACCORDING TO KPOPALYPSE

As probably the oldest person alive today, I was naturally around when the Internet was born, and because of my super Boram powers I remember everything about it.  Back in the early 1990s I was generally ugly and stupid, therefore I wasn’t getting laid much so I had plenty of time to explore geeky interests, and as a result I was the first person I knew who had an Internet connection in my house.  Okay, it was really just a normal phone connection and a modem, but these objects were still foreign to most other people where I lived.  At my day job I was mocked for being on that weird Internet thing that nobody really understood, and there really wasn’t much to see on it anyway – web pages were mostly text only and very boring.  Early Internet content fell into three broad categories:

1. Government and official business websites from countries and organisations who wanted to show off how “pioneering” they were by being one of the first on the Internet
2. Homespun websites of the “look I made a website, here is my website, OMG random stuff!” type
3. Porn

A few years later the Internet started to git gud, and more and more websites emerged.  Being a geek suddenly became vaguely enviable, and I had the last laugh at work when the Internet was rolled out at my workplace, and the same colleagues who mocked me before were now asking me for advice on topics of interest such as “I just received an email, how do I read it” and “what is a URL, like, what am I supposed to do with this”.  However with this newfound user-friendliness of the Internet, came a punishment in equal measure – Internet advertising.

The first form of Internet advertising that I encountered was the most intrusive – the “popup”.  You’d open some page (usually porn) and some other bullshit page (usually also porn) would come up instead, often using web-coding trickery to make the X to close the window difficult or impossible to click.  Popular browser at the time Netscape (the forerunner to Firefox) implemented “popup blockers” to stop this practice, and other browsers were forced to follow suit or lose relevance – soon everyone had a built-in popup blocker and the advertisers had to rethink their strategy.  Advertising gradually migrated toward the “banner ad” format, with advertisers correctly deducing that people would be more likely to tolerate ads if they didn’t take up the entire fucking page, but were instead alongside the content that the customer was there to actually view.

Of course once advertising cunts realised that they could have an inch, they proceeded to try and take a mile, with so many websites becoming so completely ad-encrusted with banner bullshit everywhere that they became almost completely unuseable.  Eventually, adblockers were invented that hid all the stupid ads so you didn’t have to see them, but companies recently worked their way around that with adblocker-blockers that either hard-coded their way around the ads, or just refused to show you the content that you were there to see until you white-listed the site’s bullshit.  Then came the emergence of adblocker-blocker-blockers with special scripts to defeat the practice of adblocker-blocking and still allow you to access the content.  This marks the state of play currently, but right now you can bet that sneaky advertising caonimas are already in the process of developing adblocker-blocker-blocker-blockers, and hackers are no doubt poised to respond to these new measures with adblocker-blocker-blocker-blocker-blockers as the cyber-arms race continues.

The above traumatic history of decades of putting up with this shit has ingrained in myself a deep-seated hatred of Internet advertising.  You may feel similar – after all, although the Internet is becoming increasingly unuseable with ads in place, to navigate one’s way around all of the block-wars is fast becoming an equally horrid IT nightmare for all but the most tech-savvy Internet users.  I realise that maybe you just can’t be fucked with any of that shit and may be putting up with ads on other sites under sufferance rather than goodwill, and that stupid gay-ass ads might actually somewhat diminish your enjoyment of your k-pop browsing.  On Kpopalypse blog, it’s well documented that I like annoying people, but it’s the content of this site which should annoy, not the accessibility.  Therefore the Kpopalypse website currently adheres to the following seven codes of practice.  Since I’m definitely a proud sinner by the standards of most well-known orthodox religions, and in Australian aboriginal culture the word “deadly” is roughly analogous to “excellent”, let’s call these codes of practice:

THE SEVEN DEADLY SINS OF KPOPALYPSE ADVERTISING POLICY

#1 – No banner advertisements for other companies will be displayed on Kpopalypse blog.

#2 – Aside from the EU compliance popup which is legally required for EU residents to view the site, Kpopalypse will never display annoying popup ads of any kind.

#3 – Embedded video content or surveys may have advertising in them by default, Kpopalypse encourages readers to use Ublock Origin or similar programs to disable this.

#4 – The only current monetization of Kpopalypse content is via Patreon, which is completely optional for all readers and will not be the topic of beg-a-thons.

#5 – Kpopalypse may at times display certain products, or recommend that you check out certain sites/artists/etc but this is as part of naturally-occurring organic content and is indicative of personal taste, not paid promotion.

#6 – Advertisers who email Kpopalypse about advertising offers will be linked to this webpage, such advertisers also automatically consent to their solicitation emails and all related correspondence being used as content in future Kpopalypse posts for entertainment purposes, regardless of any disclaimers to the contrary on such emails, which carry no intrinsic legal weight.

#7 – Other k-pop websites that do carry advertising may occasionally be held up to ridicule by Kpopalypse for trolling education purposes.

If any of this changes it may be because of policy changes at WordPress, but for now, we’re good with the above general policy of “no ads, get fucked cunts”.

Hopefully this clarifies the Kpopalypse advertising policy for all who are concerned!  Please continue to enjoy ad-free content on Kpopalypse blog!