Young Underpaid Professionals

The Triumvirate of Evil (Rica, The Overlord, and I) have been working on, in and with the Internet long enough to know that:

One. The surefire ways to be popular on the world wide web include posting porn, disgusting things, flamebait, and lolcatz. Unfortunately, we have none of those things or have serious issues with posting them on YuppieUniverse. That said, we’re not really surprised that our monthly visits never broke 1,000 in 30 days. (About a decade ago, The Overlord advised that we write our posts around specific keywords, but Rica and I, being the stubborn ticks that we are, stuck with the “we’ll post what we want, if nobody reads it, so be it” mantra.)  Still, it breaks my heart to think that nobody ever bothers to bookmark us or leave a lousy comment or follow us via RSS. The basic idea was to create and maintain a website we’d want to read ourselves, and to some extent, I think we did manage that part of the plan. I mean, my posts aside, I really think the people who write with us (Rica, The Overlord, Mabie, Rem, Mai, Karl, wasabikid, and onlysecond) are worth reading. The hard part is getting the content out there.

Two. Any online publication, without the porn, disgusting things, flamebait, and lolcatz mentioned in One, have little to no chance of getting read without any sort of promotion or major financial backing. With an entire shitload of far more entertaining websites out there, how does a gangly band of pseudo-intellectuals-slash-creative-writers get heard in a world where a bajillion other people are talking at the top of their lungs, all at the same time?

It is hard, but out of the sheer biblical proportions of my pride I couldn’t find it in myself to do more shameless PR than cheaply peddling the site to my friends on Facebook and YM. Someday soon, when people stop talking to me out of annoyance, I shall stop doing that, too. Come to think about it, maybe I should stop doing that now lest I find myself suddenly friendless.

Three. Successful websites (I mean the ones with actual human traffic) answer this question: What do people want? Wikipedia answers the question by giving out massive amounts of info (like oversharing, only useful oversharing), just like FML (fuck my life) lets people give in to the visceral desire to laugh at other people’s miseries.  What desire does YuppieUniverse fulfill? Off the top of my head, the answer to that blazes on in neon lights: YuppieUniverse provides a place for us to vent and to laugh at the irony-rich environment we and our counterparts find ourselves neck deep in. While I understand that most people don’t need that, I find writing about it strangely stress relieving and relaxing.

Four. All websites need a plan that provides direction. Well, we don’t have that either. We don’t have reader comments with which to gauge our audience’s (if we have any to begin with) wants and needs, and we’re far too lazy to grovel and beg for feedback. Same as two years ago, we’re just winging it; we haven’t run out of the fun and kicks factor yet so we’re still going with this motley collection of posts dipped in sarcasm and rolled in irony-enriched breadcrumbs.

Anyway, enough of what we don’t have. Here’s what we do have right now: a new subblog for Fiction and a new story to (re)kickstart it. The Triumvirate of Evil discusses the Apocalypse, as the name suggests, has three of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse – Death, Famine and War – having coffee in a faux-posh coffee shop while waiting for the AntiChrist. Also, we’ve got a new humor column called the Corpo Dictionary, an Internet Marketing for Dummies series from the Overlord, humor collections in Stories in 150 words or less, and loads of other stuff.

In a previous lifetime, a journalist felt compelled to interview Rica and me. I guess most of the stuff I said there is still true today (though by now it sounds like glorious corn), with some dinks ironed out and most of the idealism rubbed clean off by months of additional experience. If you want to see that interview it’s at Marlet Salazar’s blog. By the way, we do plan to release a compilation of sorts; how soon that happens depends on my ability to beat deadlines and Rica’s ability to stay alive long enough to approve stuff.

And here’s the mother-in-law of all updates today:

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