Editing 2375: Worst Ladder

{{comic
| number    = 2375
| date      = October 21, 2020
| title     = Worst Ladder
| image     = worst_ladder.png
| titletext = [Six months later] "Well, our 'worst ladder' subscription series was a surprisingly lucrative success, but was completely canceled out by the losses from the disastrous Home Depot merchandising tie-in."
}}

==Explanation==

An always present concern of media industries is consumers shifting tastes or indeed abandoning a medium altogether (such as print newspapers or in-person theaters). This strip depicts one such scenario prompting a meeting to discuss the problem. The other attendees suspect the consumers are simply shifting to an online platform, but Megan reveals they are instead shifting towards image search results.

Of course, during the age of the internet, there are many sources of free entertainment. {{w|YouTube}} and {{w|TikTok}} provide examples of these services, as practically anyone can choose from a tremendous variety of content. Therefore, this abundance of free content hurts services that require money to see their content, particularly when this content does not have any factors that make it inherently more appealing than the free services. The {{w|Quibi}} paid service shut down, just 6 months after it opened, on the same day that this comic appeared.

The joke here is that instead of YouTube or TikTok, possible customers are going to the Google Image search page for [https://www.google.com/search?q=%22worst+ladder%22&source=lnms&tbm=isch "worst ladder"]. Even the meeting participants are entranced by it, so the meeting devolves into everyone showing their favorites to each other, even though everyone there should have a particularly vested interest in their own company's performance.

Searching for images is an unorthodox source of entertainment, frequently only seen when searching for memes (this, in fact, is how {{w|Know Your Meme}} gauges interest in a meme). Depending on your relationship with Google's personalization algorithms, image results may change up between different people or different views, or remain roughly stagnant from day to day (contrasted with other services that contain new posts nearly every second), and the quality of any Google Images page will decline with scrolling. Therefore, an image search results page is not a sustainable source of entertainment{{Citation needed}}, and may be unlikely to compete with the service in this comic.

Search results currently tend to vary widely from person to person, as Google uses the user's search history, IP address, and location to try to find the most relevant result for each person, even if they are not logged in. (For instance, regular readers of xkcd are more likely to see this comic in the search results for "worst ladder".) This provides social opportunities around searching, sometimes exploited by social media posts (which may be how Megan originally found out).

The title text explains that the company actually decided to use the idea, and created a subscription service for these images. The idea was a success and was indeed very lucrative. They then tried selling actual "worst ladders", or "worst ladders"-themed merchandise at a hardware store, thinking that people who enjoy looking at others' mistakes would also enjoy making that mistake themselves, but this tie-in ended up costing them as much money as they made from the subscriptions (if the word "disastrous" is meant literally, there may have been injuries and liability lawsuits involved). Alternately, those who happily consumed this company's new output were put off by the overt commercialism of over-promoting the chain-store and so took their schadenfreude custom somewhere else/back to their original ad hoc sources.

==Transcript==

:Megan: Our entertainment division is failing. We can't compete with free content.

:Off-panel voice: Where are they going? YouTube? TikTok?
:Megan: No.

:Megan: The Google Images search results for '''''worst ladder'''''.
:Off-panel voice: Huh?
:Off-panel voice: Let me see ...

:Ponytail: Yikes, look at this one! The stepladder is balanced on --
:Hairy: Wow, they ''tied'' a ladder to --
:Hairbun: Ooh, check out the --
:Megan: ''No!''

==Trivia==
Searching Google for "worst ladder" at the time the comic was posted allows observing ladders that are comically unsafe or poorly designed (see [https://drive.google.com/file/d/10xQ63VpvSBmz9e1rmKyUbHDKa5jIYPLK/view?usp=sharing sample results from shortly after the comic was posted]). It is worth noting that, while normally it does not undergo much change, the "worst ladder" page will likely now contain a barrage of results related to this xkcd comic, as happened with [[369: Dangers]]. This influence is similar to the {{w|Slashdot effect}}. For reference, at the time of posting (0:00 UTC), the comic was the 30th Google image result. From about 0:20 to 1:15 UTC, it was the 18th result; by 1:30 UTC, it had become the third result. Searching Google for [https://www.google.com/search?q=worst+ladder+-xkcd&tbm=isch "worst ladder -xkcd"] yields better results, but some xkcd is still there.


{{comic discussion}}
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