Globe and Mail columnist Ivor Tossell on the bottomless appetite for lists online -- and how Cracked has turned them into an art form.
... no medium has thrown itself bodily at the art of iffy lists like the Internet. If lists have proven themselves the ideal format for puffy filler in other media, just think of how they play online, where puffy filler is the main course. In the social-media circuit, where people spend their time recommending pages to one another in a bid to while away the hours, they're huge.
... Cracked.com is all about lists. Up this week: "History's 10 Most Terrifying Contraceptives" (#3: Lemons), "6 Endangered Species that Aren't Endangered Enough" (#6: the Goliath Bird-Eating Spider), "8 'Self-Help' Books That Will Do Nothing of the Sort" (#1: The Secret). After reading its will-it-into-being philosophy, writes Cracked, "all that we managed to will ourselves into was an aneurysm."
They're funny, but it's not satire of the sort you'd find on The Onion. Instead, as Jack O'Brien, the 27-year-old editor of Cracked.com, puts it, they're "reality-based": real facts assembled and given an entertaining spin. It's more like a guided tour of Wikipedia.
The format evolved organically, O'Brien says. Editors noticed that "reality-based," list-formatted pieces were just as funny as satirical fiction, but better read. When the site was acquired in 2007 by Demand Media, a social-media company, its new owners "looked at the numbers" and told Cracked to run with what worked.
The site's features were all-list from that point on, and monthly readership jumped into the millions. The format, says O'Brien, is good for their target audience: workplace readers, looking for articles that can be digested in bite-sized chunks over the course of a day.
Even more interesting is how Cracked gets its content in the first place. When editors noticed that many of their contributors were coming from a Web forum called, astutely enough, Pointless Waste of Time, Cracked purchased the forums outright, brought its creator on board, and started using its hundreds of members as a talent farm.
Anyone who signs up and expresses interest is given access to a hidden, behind-the-scenes forum at Cracked.com, where denizens bat around ideas for future Cracked lists with one another. Editors trawl the forums for promising candidates, and when they find good ones, the forum member who came up with the idea is commissioned to write it as a piece of paid freelance work.