December 24, 2022
You know who’s also looking for writers that wants to be like cracked? Distractify.com – I did some tryouts for them. Forget it, I joined and gave good ideas others took the credit for. They have a forum you join and you are given a title of ‘purveyor of dick jokes’ and then someone who writes the article for cracked.com does not give you any credit for the idea or coming up with some of the jokes.
But we couldn’t have the incredible breadth of observations and interesting information we’re able to pack into our articles without this process. Now Cracked has a new target, the little known British-based website WhatCulture.com. Their plagiarism is a bit different however as the site has tried to copy the Cracked model. They also allow anyone to write for them (although they don’t pay their writers, despite what their ads say).
As part of the marketing campaign, Cracked encouraged fans to post pictures of themselves alongside the book with 50-word captions. In 2010, Cracked drew over 1 billion page views. By 2012, Jack O’Brien reported over 300 million page views in February and 7.3 million unique monthly users, making it the most visited humor site in the world, ahead of The Onion, CollegeHumor, and Funny or Die. In October 2005, Cracked.com launched as a separate website under editor-in-chief Jack O’Brien, a former ABC News producer.
In 2011, Cracked partnered with Rotten Tomatoes and Movieclips to launch Cheat Sheets, a comedic, user-generated guide to popular movies. “Some News” – Cody Johnston delivers a recent week’s news report, while being increasingly frustrated by some of the news subjects’ behavior. “Hate By Numbers”— Wayne Gladstone lists the reasons why a clip from a news report, music video, movie trailer or viral video is great or terrible.
Doesn’t matter, you all start off on equal footing with us. Once you’re in, we’ll show you how to do everything — we have an editorial staff who will work with you directly. You don’t think you’re capable of writing long list articles like Cracked is famous for? Good, we need you even more — we recently started running Quick Fixes, shorter content that can be read in a minute or less, in basically any goddamned format you can imagine. We’ve done quick insights into current events and pop culture, we’ve done comics, video reviews and more.
The sign-up page itself warns potential writers that the editors are “very, very picky,” but the true nature of the workshop is not visible until you start working and writing up pitches of your ideas to sell to the editors. The truth is that the Cracked editors are some of the most demanding people on the face of the earth. They don’t hold anything back in criticisms, and having your work slapped down stings. Senior editor David Wong is particularly harsh, displaying the social grace and tact of a battering ram. Even the smallest hint of disagreement or dissent against the editors is dealt with quickly and mercilessly. The workshop is a dictatorship, and the editors never let you forget it.
They also pay $50 for one-tine use of your photographs, and they pay upon publication of your article. They pay via Check upon publication of your article, within the first week of the month of publication. UX Booth is an authority when it comes to User Experience, and they are looking for research-backed articles on how to create better user experience.
They have also stated that once you have published 4 articles the amount will jump directly to $200. If your article lands in the Top 10 articles of the month then you will get another $50 bonus. As soon as your article is published you will be paid immediately through Paypal.
If you want to give it a try, then the best thing you can do is to actually try it. Join their writers forum, choose a topic, look at the guidelines, write something up, and submit it. It is challenging and will cause you to have to constantly push your boundaries as a writer. Unfortunately, I didn’t see any references to what you can earn per piece, but this is not so uncommon either. I have been looking at quite a few of these sites lately, and almost none of them actually publish these figures on their website. Meanwhile, the author also obviously had some rather extensive knowledge of comic-book history and mainstream movies.
Especially ones containing detailed numbers, strategies and advice about saving or earning money. Metro Parent is a leading parenting publication looking for parenting articles. They pay $35 – $350 per article and they want features to be within 1,000 – 2,500 words. Cracked is looking for funny and clever articles, mainly in list format, and they pay $50 – $200 per article depending on the type of article. They want blog posts, reading lists, short interviews, personal essays, memoirs, critical essays, book reviews, investigative projects, and long-form journalism. The best writers on Fiverr easily make more than $100 per article, so if that’s what you’re after, it’s a great place to start.