This past January, #Soup was able to avoid saying the lovely and talented Sarah Lane was leaving TWiT because she was continuing on iPad Today. And then when he fired her from IPT in March, he just said it was old news, she left back in January. The man is clever, he knew it all along. On the very day he announced she was going to TC he stated that she was probably going to get too busy to do Ipad Today on Saturdays.
He is aware that the fans will realize that twit is collapsing when they have to shutter the Brickhouse, so he is setting them up. Remember, revenue has risen every year, 5% – 30% per show. Uh huh. TNT is back. Uh huh. This is just a strategic move. Uh huh. Get ready for some prime time bullshit about this last ditch retreat.
Jesus Christ, could you straighten the shot out, the table is completely crooked. Nothing is centered and everything looks ridiculous. It appears as if no one even moved the screens to even them out, one is behind the table and the other is floating outside the table. I get it, it’s about the content but could you please put in minimal effort? My mom would yell at me in high school if I left my room like that.
It’s not like the staff was rushed:
Seriously, what the F? Will they put anything on air just to sell a few ads or fill a slot? What happened to Triangulation? It used to be great guests, then it turned into people selling books, then TWiT staff became guests and now Scoble’s Facebook feed? Are we getting punked?
A long-held thesis of #TotalDrama states that the quality of content at TWiT in general is sinking faster than TNT’s ratings. A new story has just emerged that gives credence to this very thesis. A stunning rise in the number of ads on the network has miraculously taken hold of TWiT. It is apparent on all shows—from the merely unwatchable to the fantastically brain-wrenching. Did the sales team do a good job? Has the content improved? Is Gum a hit?
I fucking doubt it.
Money balks when quality walks.
An anonymous new tipster has alerted us that TWiT ad rates have been drastically reduced. Shit content will NOT get premium rates. It seems that in return for lowering the rates, TWiT head of sales/CEO/host/head of programming/reporter/bookkeeper/GF has asked for an increase in the quantity of ads to make up for the cash shortfall. But therein lies the problem: The founder of TWiT has long promised that no more than one ad per half-hour segment would appear on any network program. A solution was quickly discovered—breaking yet another promise to the suck-up fans who remain loyal to the legendarily lazy lard-ass. Already today, two hour-long shows, the never-prepared-for “Triangulation” and the forever-unwatchable “Marketing Mavericks,” contained unbearably long ads that practically dominated the hour of “content.”
So what we are left with is a virtual admission that the content has indeed reached truly awful levels. This ad-stuffing maneuver is merely a short-term solution that guarantees no long-term success for the network. A network, it must be said, that should have been declared DOA in 2013. Only once the few sponsors that are hanging in there realize that they are being fleeced (and ask for similar decreases in their ad rates), will the CEHo have finally succeeded in scuttling this sinking ship of a network for good.
Anyone have a spare life preserver?
*update* A new, and as yet, unverified source is claiming that the ad rate drop strategy may have come from #soup and not the #CEHo. We are investigating.
The Twit Cottage, during the original “happy times” for the Twit network.
NCE UPON A TIME there was a simple man who broadcast his little tech show to thousands of adoring fans from a tiny cottage in an idyllic California town. That man was Leo Laporte. He shared the technology news from atop a bouncy ball that was soon to pop under the groaning weight of his late middle-aged fleshiness.
Little did we know, that that man would one day grow to be a cancer upon the zit of the pimple covering the melanoma that is new media in the 21st century. And nobody had any idea that his once infectious enthusiasm for teaching the liberating nature of tech would soon be adulterated (for lack of a better word) by an unaccomplished alleged gold-digger from loony-toon world.
Lisa “The Stringy-Haired Witch” Kentzell
If only we had had some sort of temporally-based contraption that could have transported us forward on the sea of time to present day, perhaps we could have foreseen the mess of a man that Leo would become. A failed marriage, a troubled family life and a stringy-haired freak of a CEO girlfriend…all horrors from which we would have gladly averted our eyes. I daresay that Leo himself would also choose to turn back the clock and return to that happier pre-Twit Brickhouse time. A time when he didn’t have to mislead his fans that “NatureBox is a healthy alternative,” or “SquareSpace is the best place for your new website,” even though Twit doesn’t even use them for Twit.tv. A time when he wasn’t overburdened with bothersome warehouse leases, pesky health-insurance-grubbing employees or loathsome Skype guests who don’t laugh at his jokes.
Unfortunately, we were unable to see into the future: There were no fortune-telling gypsies to show us the way, no crystal balls into which we could gaze for guidance. We have been left alone to suffer this desperate fate. And so it is that we band together here at #TotalDrama.
Come closer, friend. And let the fire of #truth light the way.
Exposing The Dark Underbelly of TWiT, Leo Laporte, and Failed CEO Lisa Laporte
