#7. The Bait
They pitch their invitation with lines like "Cracked articles and videos are made almost entirely by people like you", "get paid money for it" and "We don't care if you don't have tons of comedy experience. We want you on board." So you head on over to the site, whip up an account if you don't already have one, jump into the thread to be accepted into the Comedy Workshop and a few days later, you get that shiny confirmation email.
"Well hot shit!" you think, "I'm just a few hours' work away from being ready to be published and making a hundred bucks!"
Nope.
#6. The Idea Search
So you have an idea for one of their standard list articles. A quick search of the site and/or the Comedy Workshop forum reveals that it's either been done 3 times or 20 different people have pitched the same idea at the same time. Easy enough. Just fucking think of something else. Chances are, your next 30 ideas will hit the same wall.
So you sign off and figure you'll have a brilliant idea pop into your head sometime in the next day or so. 2 weeks pass as you constantly see idea after idea already done or in progress of being done by someone else. Finally, it hits you. It's not your first choice, as evidenced by the past 2 weeks you just spent cursing your thinkmeat for coming up with shit that's already been done, but you sit down, snap open a few tabs in your browser and set off reading and finding videos and exposing yourself to shit that you normally wouldn't touch with a 10-foot pole, but hey, nobody else has done it yet.
#5. The Pitch and the Wait
You spend a day or so gathering links and working on the basic layout of your pitch. After sitting through some of the stupidest videos or the most boring reading you've ever encountered in your entire life, you feel the irritation driving you to pound this pitch out and you know exactly where you want to go with it. After an hour or two of making sure it fits their format requirements, you do a quick reread and then smack that Submit button. Fifteen minutes later, after about 38,000 refreshes, still no response. So you hop up and wash some dishes, take a good shit, cook a meatloaf, take a nap and sit back down. The browser loads and there's a response! It's go time!
#4. The Generic Welcome! Response and First Cold Feedback
Hi and here's the rest of our generic copy/paste first response to something not immediately polished enough to go straight to the queue for publication!
Followed by:
The biggest issue that I'm seeing here is that this is an opinion piece, and those are strictly "columnists only" territory around here. What Cracked wants from its purveyors is fact based articles that introduce the reader to new and surprising information and make an observation about the world.#3. The Analysis
Ok, so they included a standard, generic block of text at the beginning of the response. Fair enough, as it was nowhere near polished enough to go straight to the queue anyway. But even after all the time you spent earlier making sure your pitch post was as conformed to their formatting guidelines as possible, it's kind of fucking annoying to be told to go look at that shit and these examples of that shit. After you put in the fucking time and effort to do just that.
Then they follow up with "this is an opinion piece" and "those are strictly 'columnist only' territory." Really? Fucking really?
Well, let's just pull up your first page and see what we have, irrelevant of who the author may be. You can't tell me all the entries on the first two pages are by regular columnists, right?
Just on the first page, we have Disturbing, Terrible, Things We Have To Accept, Guilt, Upcoming Movies We Already Hate, Weirdest, Horrible, Most Terrifying, Mind-Blowing, Why You Never Want [something], Awful, Eerie, You Won't Believe, Shatter Your Image, Insane and Most Horrifying.
On just the first page, in just the titles, that's already 16 fucking opinions. And I have read a good number of articles on Cracked, from both regular columnists and the one-off contributors that I had never heard of before and haven't since. They are all overloaded with fucking opinionated paragraphs. This is just a bullshit angle for a response.
#2. The Letdown
So after you spent more than two weeks coming up with ideas that had already been done and then wasted your time and efforts sitting down and making sure the first pitch was how they want them to be, you get shot down. Boy, doesn't that feel awesome? Stupidest and most boring things you've been exposed to in years just for the sake of trying to make a few bucks, and the response you get is "We don't allow anyone but our regular columnists to do the stuff that everybody else is doing all the time." Not even a proposal for an alternate angle you could take the idea in. Just "Nope, you did it all wrong."
Wasted time, wasted effort, and not even a fucking penny to show for any of it.
#1. Fed Up
After all that, and an already-shitty day, you decide it's just time for bed. So you go to bed. And you lay there just being pissed and irritated with a pounding headache completely unable to fall asleep, just wishing that goddamn headache pill would kick in and you could at least just be annoyed while trying to get to sleep. But no dice. So you get up and come in here and sit down and whip up this opinionated fact-based article that wouldn't even come close to their quality standards just to get some kind of article published and out there, whether you get paid for it or not.
I might try again some day but right now, fuck Cracked. I don't even feel like reading any of their articles for a good while after this waste of time.
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