Late one Friday night, I found myself skimming through the boards, trying to catch up on any new industry drama or crises that may have taken place while I was busy scribing away during the week. Just as my eyes were about to finally glaze over and I was ready to click off, the name 2HousePlague caught my eye. Always a fan of 2HP’s verbal acuity, I clicked open the thread and read the contents with a wry smile. No drama or crisis there. Quite the contrary, the post was overflowing with uncharacteristic generosity. (Uncharacteristic for the venue, not the poster.)When I went back to the thread the next day, it had grown substantially, both in post/view count, and in scope. Over the next several days it kept growing, taking on unexpected proportions, and encountered little to no interference from the usual board bullies.
I caught up with Jack Mardack, alias 2HousePlague, entrepreneur and president of profitLABINC.com, between phone calls and emails, and got the scoop on what he’s been up to lately.
SexyScribe: You created a small phenomenon on GFY, the industry’s most notorious webmaster board. It started with a thread you posted at 5a.m. on June 24th, grew into one incarnation known for a while as 2HPDaily, and has now mushroomed into quite a bit more than you had imagined, including the launch of impoverishedNOOBS.com and NOOBSBOARD.com. What’s the story?
Jack: What I did was I started this thread on GFY, titled: “…I’m looking for a few impoverished noobs…”
“Just to prove a point, I’m taking on a handful of inexperienced ‘webmasters’ who aren’t making any money. Within 60 days, you should be making enough to occasionally reach for the check and take cabs home from the movies. If you’d like to be considered for this opportunity, please send an email to [email omitted] with a few sentences about yourself and some links to your stuff. Participants must be willing to share information about the changes to their lifestyle after the 60 days, at which time a ‘Results’ thread will be posted to this board. There will be no cost to you. But you must be prepared to commit at least one hour per day (weekends included) to this project.”
Regards,
2HP
SexyScribe: You wrote in a subsequent post that it “started out as just an early morning whim — based on little more than wanting to channel outward some of the “abundant energy” that’s been overflowing GFY and the industry this week.”
Jack: Yes. Wanting to keep the good feeling going in the biz after the “impressive demonstration of politically sophisticated negotiating skill” from the FSC [et.al.], I decided to dispense some positivity on GFY.
SexyScribe: Why GFY?
Jack: Gratitude. Feeling loyalty and wanting to make people notice that I could make something on GFY which calls attention to a major flaw, and s t i l l make all parties involved look good – they call those “good news” stories, don’t they — ?
SexyScribe: What flaw are you referring to?
Jack: The marginalization that happens within the industry. We’re guilty of oppression within the industry; we have all of these noobs who exist on GFY but are invisible because they don’t fit into any of the cliques, they don’t speak the language, and that’s tragic.
SexyScribe: What kind of results have you had so far? How many webmasters have contacted you?
Jack: I still have unopened emails, it pains me to confess. Initially, I received hundreds. To date, I’ve received nearly 700 e-mails.
SexyScribe: Do you think that certain factors like timing, 2257 panic, or .xxx drama, contributed to making this grow so quickly and so enthusiastically?
Jack: Yes, all of it. One of the most fascinating phenomena I observe is the way people, who are also board personae give evidence of their awareness — when you see that — yes – this is all a like big video game – all of it virtual – servers, always the hum of servers, much of it is ridiculous unimaginatively contrived nonsense – that we are always just p l a y i n g on some level. But then you also see things that look a lot like real hate and awful spouts of bigotry, intolerance, ignorance, rage, depression, alienation, pain, joy – all the things we feel out here, it seems, we are learning to feel in there – GFY is the coliseum of the digital Rome.
The point of providing all that background is to help people whose lives are not so immersed in the web (measured in both invested time and stakes of the activities we engage in there) and may think it insane that anything one could make disappear at the flip of a switch could ever become so important. Adult people are in deep – and there’s a beauty and a pioneerism in that, but it also has a strange quality of corruption to it, like the sort of disgust induced by the Borg – soulless de-vitalized, for having desired too much [fill in the blank].
So, the industry’s crisis was real enough to pervade GFY just as there were witheringly hot Sunday afternoons in Rome, and the crowd became all one beast, we are ripe for change.
SexyScribe: Who else has become involved? What else has resulted as spin-off from that initial thread?
Jack: I approached Lloyd (baddog) Brown with the idea of having his Director of Marketing at GotWebHost.com, “goodgirl” offer a primer on SEO Techniquees to the NOOBS in the thread. I needed to offer something to all those people whose hopes I had lifted, and whose hopes would not remain lifted for very much longer…
I don’t think anybody knew where this thing was going until that moment. And, I tell ya, when I read what goodgirl had written, it felt just like my eyes were following the arc of a homerun baseball across the sky. The value she dropped into that thread was immense. And that was just the perfect first gesture to have rise-up out of this thing. Nobody knew what was going on. But to see Value given so freely, it gave everybody watching — pause.
There are three other people I should mention. Dameon (Deej), Angelo (Nightwind) and Mark (Texas Dreams) – each of them, at different moments, held me up.
And Tala. I met Tala about a year ago at Webmaster Access East in Atlanta, and we became instant friends, and the honor is all mine. Tala is the new COO of impoverishedNOOBS.
Amidst the crowded space of adult webmaster resource sites, we launched impoverishedNOOBS.com and NOOBSBOARD.com to target the legions of Pornographer-hopefuls trying to get a foot in Porn’s door.
