* Welcome to The Big Jewel, which has never tried your patience with intrusive animated pop-up ads. Little motionless ads to the right of our articles, just above our blogroll, featuring books by some of our contributors, sure, we're not above forcing those on you. But nothing so annoying that you'd need to use AdBlock. So let this week's bit by Jordan Stein be a total fantasy, a cautionary tale for all of us. We're just about the last humor site in the world that doesn't force march you through a bunch of irrelevant crap before you get to our delightfully curated crap. Hallelujah!

A Plea Not To Use AdBlock

By: Jordan Stein

Hi there, loyal website visitor. We know you come to our site for journalism, not advertisements, but unfortunately, in this day and age, ads are how websites like ours make money. That’s why we’re begging you to please, please turn off AdBlock.

We know ads suck. Believe us, if it were possible we would create a big mousetrap and use a huge pile of money as bait to capture all the ads in the world. Then we would drop a giant cage on top of that mousetrap and throw the whole thing down a well. That’s how much we despise ads. With that being said, they’re a necessary evil and our site is filled with them.

Listen, we’re so desperate to have you shut off Adblock, we’ll do anything. We’ll ship you a cake. You could be anywhere in the world. It doesn’t matter at all. All you need to do is click that little red stop sign in the corner of your browser and we’ll get that cake to you. It’ll probably be chocolate because there’s a shop by our office that makes killer chocolate cakes, but if that’s not your thing, we’ll send a different one. And we’re going to be shipping it Priority, none of this ground shipping garbage.

If you’re still reading this, apparently that thoughtful cake gesture wasn’t good enough for you. All right, we were hoping it wouldn’t come to this, but we know where Atlantis is and if you pause Adblock we’ll tell you how to get there. It’s a beautiful city and the restaurants are wonderful. You would think they only have seafood, but there’s a fantastic barbecue place as well.

Remember, you don’t need to permanently get rid of AdBlock, just disable it while on our site. It doesn’t have to be for that long. A few minutes maybe or even a couple of seconds. Please just look at an ad for any amount of time and we will literally write, produce, and perform an original song about you.

Ads are lame, but do you know what else is lame? Getting stuck in traffic. If you happen to be the one person in the world willing to look at the ads on our site, we’ll create lanes on every major highway for your use only. We’re not joking. We’ve run this by world leaders, it was tough, but we got the political support for it. Your lanes will go right next to the carpool lanes.

The old saying “There’s no such thing as a free lunch” applies to our company as well. We have a lot of expenses and if you want to continue reading our free articles, just let us show you ads. Plus, we’ll clean your roof, give you a massage, and stop climate change.

You know what? We were trying to be nice, but it’s clearly getting us nowhere. The cold, hard truth is that ads exist for a reason and by blocking them, you ungrateful readers are contributing to the decline of free, universally accessible content. Readers like you smugly scrolling through this message without the decency to just help us out are an embarrassment. If we never get another view again, we won’t care because we would rather go bankrupt than let you sickos mooch off us any longer.

We might’ve gone a little far. We’re so sorry. You readers are the reason we got into this business in the first place.

To make it up to you, we’ll bring your childhood dog back to life. We had to build a makeshift lab in what used to be our break room, but it worked. You could have that little guy in your hands right now if you would just let us show you a few ads for Pepsi. C’mon, you don’t even have to click the ads and we will literally bring back the only living thing that has ever loved you unconditionally.

You’re playing hard ball, huh? We have tomorrow’s winning Mega Millions numbers. Sure, we could just play them ourselves and never have to worry about generating ad revenue again, but it’s not even about the money at this point.

No? Fine, you win. You’re just lucky we don’t put up a paywall. Those are impenetrable.

 

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