Sex and Crime: Oliver's Strange Journey (11 page)

So Carol had Kenny make the ad in full
color, even though he didn't know what he was doing, and after I
proof-read the final draft of the complete issue and it was about
to be sent off to the printer, she removed one of the pages and
replaced it with the full color ad, without me knowing about
it.

The next morning the paper appeared on the
newsstands, and the advertiser was livid, because his expensive
full color, full page ad was a complete mess. Kenny had completely
screwed up the color separation process, and some things that were
supposed to stand out in bold colors, like the advertiser's phone
number and address, weren't even there at all.

When the lawyer came into work later that
day, he called me into his office. He told me that since I am the
production manager, and I am responsible for every aspect of the
paper, I should have caught and corrected any mistake before it
went to print. He said he would deduct $500 from my next paycheck
to make up for the loss in ad revenue, because he had to refund the
price of the ad to the advertiser.

I was SO pissed, because this whole
clusterfuck clearly wasn't my fault. This was exactly the kind of
thing I had always warned him about, if he kept telling the girls
to ignore the deadline and keep taking ads. And because of his
instructions to ignore me, Carol took it upon herself to put an ad
into the paper behind my back, without me proof-reading it or even
knowing about it. He was the worst fucking boss ever!

After work, I googled labor law. I found out
that legally he was not allowed to just take any money out of my
paycheck without my permission. I knew that during any legal
conflict, you have to do everything in writing, so I wrote him a
letter and explained to him that he had no right to dock my pay,
and I quoted the exact paragraph of the labor law that said so.

When he came to work the next morning, I
handed him the letter without saying anything. He went into his
office, read my letter, and left without saying a word. He probably
felt pretty stupid that I suddenly knew more about labor law than
he did. The day after that, he came into the office and greeted me
way too cheerfully, as if the whole thing had never even happened.
But I knew that I was a thorn in his side now, and he was going to
fire me sooner or later.

Sure enough, when I put together the
classified section for the upcoming issue, there was an ad for my
job in it. He tried to disguise it, by using the phone number of
his silent partner, an accountant. But the job description was
clearly for a newspaper production manager. I pretended not to
notice, and when the paper came out, I asked Donna to call the
number and apply for the job. My job.

As soon as I went on my lunch break, Carol
called Donna and asked her to come in for an interview. Carol
didn't know that she was actually talking to my wife. Donna didn't
go in, and the ad for my job ran for several weeks, and they
obviously could not find a replacement for me. Ha!

Then the lawyer called Kenny into his office
and secretly asked him if he wanted my job, without getting a pay
raise. Kenny declined and told me all about the lawyer's schemes to
replace me. Kenny and I had become pretty close friends, and he
dreaded the thought of having to work there after I leave, because
he knew how stressful my job was and that all that stress would
fall in his lap once I'm gone.

So he looked for a new job and gave his 2
week notice. He was my right hand man, and without him things were
going to be even harder on me, so we decided to both quit on the
same day. Only I was not going to give them any notice, just like
the lawyer had not given me any notice and he was scheming behind
my back. And we tried to convince another guy in the graphic
department to quit with us, but he didn't, until about a week after
we had left.

"Formal education will make you a living;
self-education will make you a fortune."

Jim Rohn

"Money, it turned out, was exactly like sex, you
thought of nothing else if you didn't have it and thought of other
things if you did."

James A. Baldwin

I used to draw cartoons all the time, even
when I drove a cab at night. But this job as production manager was
so stressful, I had no energy left when I came home at night. There
was no way I could be creative after work and come up with new
cartoons.

For the first 5 years I had lived in the
States, I did not even have a computer at home. Hacking is
addicting, and now that I was over the age of 18, and I would be
tried as an adult if I got caught, and law enforcement had finally
caught up with hackers, I was scared to get in trouble again,
because I knew this time I would really go to jail.

The best way to avoid the temptation of
doing something with a computer that I shouldn't be doing, was not
to have one. But after 5 years of living in the States, and not
having had any contact whatsoever with the hacking scene for that
whole time, I figured I was ready to own a computer again. So while
I was the production manager at the newspaper in Brooklyn, I
finally bought a PC.

This was during the early days of the
Internet revolution. My hacker friends and I had grown up on the
Internet. To us it was an old hat. It was our home. But now finally
the rest of the world realized that there was a virtual online
world. All these huge corporations wanted a piece of the pie and
they all tried to figure out how to make money on the Internet.
They knew there was money to be made, they just couldn't figure out
how. They spent billions of dollars on Internet start-ups that
really had no business plan, and who were bleeding cash like crazy,
instead of making a profit, until they all ended up crashing and
burning. All these huge companies lost billions of dollars during
the days of the Internet bubble.

Meanwhile I had been playing around with my
new computer at home, and I figured out how to put my cartoons
online, by building a very primitive little website. I hadn't drawn
any new cartoons in months, but I put my old cartoons on the
web.

Up until then I had relied on sending my
cartoons to publishing houses, hoping that an editor would pick
some of my cartoons for a new book or the next issue of some
tabloid. And many did. I had a whole bunch of cartoons published in
all kinds of magazines, and in over a dozen different books. Some
of my cartoons were even hanging in museums for cartoon art or
modern art. I was making a name for myself as a cartoonist, just
like I had made a name for myself as a hacker a few years
earlier.

But as a freelance cartoonist, you never
know how much money you are going to make next week or next month.
Some magazines, like the New Yorker, were paying $500 for a cartoon
back then. Other papers, like the SUN supermarket tabloid with all
the crazy headlines, only paid $5.

So if a couple of editors at well-paying
magazines bought a bunch of your cartoons, you could make a lot of
money that week. But if nobody bought anything, or you just made a
sale to a paper that paid next to nothing, you'd go hungry. Being a
starving artist was not exactly a glorious lifestyle. That's why I
had to take that day job at the newspaper.

I discovered that there was a webmaster
scene online, similar to the hacking scene I used to be a part of.
A bunch of guys like me had their own websites and were trying to
figure out ways to make money online. I picked up on what they were
doing pretty quickly and surpassed them not much later, blazing my
own path into unknown territory, and learning more and more about
the ways of the web as I went along. I was now an online
entrepreneur! A guerilla marketer! An Internet ninja! A lot of the
ideas I came up with had never been done by anyone else before
me.

Suddenly my cartoon website was making
money. Not much at first, but then the next month my site earned
about $1000. Simply by being there. I wasn't even doing anything. I
had just uploaded a bunch of my old cartoons, and now people were
finding my cartoons in Google, came to my site, saw the banner ads
on my site, and I was earning money.

I literally didn't have to do anything at
all. The way my website made money was similar to a TV station.
When you watch CBS or NBC, you don't buy anything from them. But
big corporations pay TV stations a lot of money to show you ads
during the commercial breaks. Whether you actually get your ass off
the couch after seeing that commercial and going out to buy a new
car from Ford or the latest hamburger at McDonald's doesn't matter.
NBC gets money from their advertisers, simply for showing you an ad
for those products.

Online ad agencies, who manage and
distribute online advertising for their clients, call that kind of
banner a CPM ad, or Cost Per 1000 impressions. If one thousand
people visited my site and saw a CPM banner advertisement on my
website, I earned $4, or whatever the current rate was for that
particular ad campaign. My visitors didn't even have to click on
the banner ad. Just the fact that they were looking at it was
enough for me to get paid.

Then there were CPC banners, or Cost Per
Click. Those ads only paid money, if one of my visitors clicked on
the banner. And then there were CPA banners, or Cost Per Action.
Those only paid something, if one of my visitors clicked on the ad,
went to the advertiser's website, and bought something there. Then
I got a sales commission. My favorite were the CPM banners.

The next month my cartoon site earned $3000.
Without me lifting a finger! $3000 was the same amount I made as
production manager at the newspaper, being totally stressed out,
overworked, and miserable.

I decided to build a few more websites,
about embarrassing true stories, the secrets behind magic tricks,
funny video clips, weird news, celebrity gossip, optical illusions,
and a few other popular topics, using the same basic recipe for
make-money-in-your-sleep riches.

The next month my sites earned $5000. The
month after that $7000. Then $15,000. And I still wasn't doing
anything to maintain my websites on a daily basis. I just built
them and then basically forgot about them, while they took on a
life of their own.

Thanks to my hacking background and my
intimate knowledge of computers and the Internet, and my knack for
cocky self promotion, and the things I had learned about
advertising and catchy writing through my two newspaper jobs and my
scene mag, and having learned how to get publicity by provoking
people with my incendiary rants, I intuitively did everything just
right, to make my websites a success.

Back then there was no word for what I was
doing yet. But a few years later, after the Internet bubble had
burst and the dust had settled (What a horrible mixed metaphor. I
probably just made an English lit major turn in his grave.)
colleges started to teach classes on how to make money online.
Today that is called "affiliate marketing."

The funny thing is, when I started thinking
about ever new ways to make money with CPM, CPC or CPA ads, I
figured that I could make a lot more money with CPA ads, if I
posted my advertiser's links directly into search engines, instead
of on my own sites. Think about it: How many people who came to my
cartoon site were actually looking to buy a new car at that moment?
Not too many. They were just there to look at my funny
pictures.

So if I placed ads for a new car next to my
cartoons, the chances of actually making a sale were next to zero.
But when someone googles the nearest car dealership, he's obviously
thinking about buying a new car. So I placed CPA ads directly into
a bunch of search engines. The advertising companies I was working
with told me I couldn't do that. They had never seen anyone do that
before, and they felt it wasn't kosher. They felt that somehow I
was cheating the system and they told me to stop.

I had been ahead of my time again when I did
that back then. But nowadays, placing CPA ads in search engines is
the backbone of affiliate marketing. Nowadays everyone does it. Go
figure.

Ironically, a lot of hackers make money with
affiliate marketing these days. Why bother hacking into a bank or
credit card company, and risk going to prison, if you can hack into
a search engine instead, and put a bunch of your own websites at
the top of the search results, and make money with the banner ads
on your sites? That way it's perfectly legal to make millions of
dollars with your hacking skills.

Anyway, my Embarrassing Moments website
became so popular back then, that a Canadian TV production company
took notice. They were going to produce a new show about awkward
true stories, for The Learning Channel in America, and they
contacted me to ask for my permission to reenact some of the
stories on my website for their show. The show was going to have a
few regular commentators who would introduce the next clip and put
their two cents in afterwards. A little bit like the judges on
American Idol, I guess. So I coulda been the next Simon Cowell! I
coulda been somebody! But I declined. I was too shy to be on
TV.

I did give them permission to use some of
the stories on my site though and helped them get in touch with the
actual people those embarrassing true stories happened to. A few of
those awkward moments really did end up on the new TV show.

That Canadian production crew wasn't the
only media company who took notice to my sites. A Japanese
entertainment news show featured a segment about my Embarrassing
Moments site and suddenly I had hundreds of new users from Japan on
my forum, sharing their most intimate sushi-regurgitating mishaps
and sake-soaked blunders.