Panic World - Mobile game ads: The worst online slop

Episode Date: September 3, 2025

They’re full of slime, weird crime, and seemingly a lot of fetish stuff. Today, we’re talking about the sloppiest of slop online these days, mobile game ads. An expert on the form, Chelsey Weber-Smith, joins us to talk about the history of the genre, from the earliest games like Evony to today’s prolific Lily’s Game, as well as what psychological tactics are being deployed in these banner ads, what makes anyone play these games, and is anyone?Our guest Chelsey Weber-Smith hosts American Hysteria, a show that explores the fantastical thinking of irrational fears of Americans — so very much aligned with our work here on Panic World. Check it out wherever you get your podcasts, and follow the rest of Chelsey’s work here. Want even more Panic World content? Like ad-free episodes, bonus episodes, and access to our Discord? Sign up for just five bucks a month at: https://www.patreon.com/PanicWorld. And Panic World is now posting episodes to YouTube Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I want to start things off with a question that I've been dying to ask other internet professionals for a long time. Have you ever on purpose clicked a banner ad, like to go do something? I can't think of a single time that I have, but I imagine I must have because sometimes they're just so weird, which is really on brand for what we're talking about today. But I can't think of a single one. What about you? I was wondering about this. Like, was there ever a moment in internet history where I ever thought, like, that sounds cool.

I would like to learn more about that. That's probably real. Yeah. The only thing I can think of is, like, I was a really big web comics person. Like, before a lot of them radicalized during Gamergate. And I remember, like, a lot of web comics advertising each other in banner ads. And I feel like, as a teenager, I would be reading, like, Penny Arcade. and then I would like click a banner ad to like read another webconic I'd never heard of.

And I feel like for a brief moment, that is how I learned about other websites. But accessing that memory took like all of my mental energy. Like I'm struggling now. Like that's deep in there somewhere. Well, and now they're kind of more like what kind of illness does Ryan Reynolds have and some like horrifying image of it. Right. Which I do want to see.

I want to see what's wrong with Ryan Reynolds. That's true. I feel like maybe I have clicked it because I know it goes somewhere that's bullshit, like a totally different thing that's just like 800 more ads because they're just getting paid per per little look you take, a little gander. But I asked that because today's episode is about banner ads with the onslaught of AI slop. There's a big conversation right now about, you know, all of the other dumb garbage that's been on the internet since time in Memorial. And I was thinking about, you know, the background radiation of internet slop that we've just sort of accepted as normal. The dumb, misleading, not infrequently gross stuff that's just part of our lives now, that we, you know, as people with computers on our hands, constantly just sort of deal with. So today, we want to talk about the sloppiest of slops, how it evolved, why it thrives in our world.

And let's just have fun and talk about awful mobile game ads, the most awful ads of all. This is Panic World to show about how the internet warps our minds, our culture, and reality. I'm Ryan Broderick, and joining us sometimes is our producer Grant. If I can just get them off that dang phone. He's always looking at those apps. Doesn't want to actively produce the show because he's always playing mafia wars. Joining us, according to analytics, they are already your favorite podcaster, the foremost expert on cultural slop from American Astoria, Chelsea Weber,

Smith. Hello, welcome to the show. Hi, Ryan. I am very excited to be here and share with you some of the weirdest shit that I have ever encountered. And my ideas on why it exists and why it does well, apparently. So yeah, I've got a real cornucopia of outrageous shit for you today. And I just, I'm honored to get to share it with you. I love looking at content and I especially love looking at bad content. So this is very, very, exciting for me. You know, a lot of these ads are working on a subconscious level, which is kind of how advertising, advertising's always worked, but we're just seeing like the weirdest iteration. The first maybe three to five seconds of the ad is something that you're just like, what in the fuck am I looking at? And then the rest of it is the same thing over and over again,

where it's this like poor girl who never wins the game and always gets her head shaved at the end for some reason. You can imagine that it like, for certain people, triggers a response that maybe they wouldn't fully even be aware of. Many people would be fully aware of it. You're kind of arguing like these ads are trying to maybe not awaken fetishes in people, but like tap into like a like a sensory sort of state that like powers fetish content. Like I don't want to get too far ahead of ourselves, but like I have a theory. I don't even know if it's like a theory.

I think it just is true. I just can't really remember it, like, how the order went. But, like, the first ASMR content, like, I ever came across was fetish content. Oh, yeah. And it has become now, like, a mainstream type of content that, like, even AI can produce. And, like, that to me is really interesting where it's, like, the internet and fetishism have, like, been so intertwined for so many years that, like, fetishists are developing specific kinds of media content for that. And now, like, mobile games are taking that and, like, one-shotting, unshitting, unshited. suspecting internet.

100%. I think that's a very good analysis. And I think we see it more and more because advertisers are figuring out and we're getting desensitized to what kind of content is really like triggering our primordial Freudian, you know, whatever. The inner foot fetishist in all of us. That's right. Kids are playing mobile dumb games.

Like this is. available, these are the ads for all, any demographic. Yeah, these ads are playing everywhere. And that relates. Yeah, and all of these have like a cartoon aesthetic, like we should say. Like this is, this is clearly like trying to capture the like the attention spans of like very young people. So I think we're going to start with you, you with your Slop Fest.

So, so, so I'm going to let you take the range of the show. We'll pick up hosting after the ad break and, uh, let me into the dark heart of what you've, uh, you've brought for us today. Wonderful. Okay. So amongst the slop we are talking about in the great trough of the internet, I have found that the strangest thing are these mobile game ads. And I think that probably most people listening have come across them in some form, right?

Sometimes it's like you see those games where you have to rescue a character as the waters filling like different. chambers of the screen. You know that one, right? Sometimes it's like those ones where there's a human hand reaching onto a puzzle and it's like only someone with a 250 IQ could solve this and you, you know, you see them fail again and again. Have you seen the one of like a man holding a woman and like a jester is throwing knives at the man's back, like the man's back to protect the woman? I really like those. Great. I have not seen that one, but this is right in line with the things we will be looking at today. So those are like kind of the typical ones you see that aren't so like they're slop and

they're terrible. But I want to bring you some like darker, freakier, weirder stuff. Yeah, I want our listeners to know you just had this collection. You were like, hey guys, I got this great folder I want to show you. I guess we could turn it into an episode. Yeah, yeah. Yes. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. So this is like a really great day for me. So maybe we should dive in. And I thought that what would make them. most sense would be to have you describe what you're seeing. So it's a baby on a tree and now like a dinosaur has knocked the baby and the tree into the water and there's like a there's like a chieftain kind of man and you have to choose between

the beast and the baby and now he's pulling the baby out of the water. Now he's going to walk into the water and he's picked up a there was a shark in the water the whole time. Now the baby is eating the shark and has become a beautiful woman. And now he's taking the woman back to his castle, which is now filling up as like a fortress. And that is that is the game. So, okay, I'm imagining that this is a game like mafia, you know, where like it's like level one, thug, level 100, yakuza boss. But it's for your wife, which is interesting.

you can capture your wife as a baby and then make her an adult woman by feeding her a shark, which I think, you know, that is how marriage works, I think. Generally, yeah. Yeah, yeah, it's cool. Any good marriage starts out like that, I think. Okay. Yes. So, like you said, this is a game that is pretty much a basic kingdom building game,

like the ones we see advertised all the time. And this is just the ad that they do and has almost nothing to do. the game itself, which is something we'll see. I feel like that's important to set up here, which is that like these trailers do not connect to the game in terms of gameplay in any way ever, usually. No. Okay.

What do we got next? This is called Lily's Garden, it seems. Yeah, Lily's Garden, I think, is probably like the most famous. Yeah, I know the name. The mobile game. So they kind of have what they have done that is a little bit unique is have an ongoing storyline throughout their ads. And people get really obsessed with them and, like, catalog the characters, arcs, and everything.

And some of them are really normal. And then some of them are like this. Hit it. A woman. And she's opened. Oh, it's like a washing machine. She's sitting in the watch. Uh-oh.

She's sitting on the washing machine. I know where that's headed. She's looking very excited to be sitting on the washing machine. And now she's entering a laundromat with her female friends. And they're pouring wine. lighting candles and they're all sitting on the washing machines now or the dryers I guess you should say and that's it that's the game is that you sit on the washing machines and do big combs with your besties I guess that's the game but it's not interesting it's not the game no the

I don't think that is the game right isn't it like a garden simulator it's a garden building game Well, apparently, hold on, wait, the two other characters in this are named Penny and Flo, and they're from a sister game that's a home renovation game. I just look this up. So there's a cinematic universe of horny laundromat women here at play. Yeah. This is Avengers Endgame for mobile game ads, I think. To be fair, when you garden and also when you do home reno, you have to do a lot of laundry. You do get very dirty.

That's true. Yeah. Yeah. My theory is knowing the internet and knowing video games and like how culture works now. My guess is they released Lily's Garden and they're like, we made this character too hot. And a normal game company be like, this is just going to be a problem that we have to manage for the rest of the time that we have this intellectual property. But for mobile games, I think they're like, we should just really lean into this. Absolutely.

Absolutely. Yeah. Oh, yeah. And we'll definitely get into the kind of underlying psychological mechanisms that are at play here. Seems like they've done a redesign to Lily recently. I liked the old Lily better. I want to be on record there. I'm looking at how much did you like the old Lily better, right?

Let's just say, well, no. So they went from 2D to 3D. You know, it's the typical story. You know, I was happy with the 2D Lily. I think she had more. Interesting. Interesting that you like your women two-dimensional. Yeah.

It's fascinating to learn. Wow. I just, yeah, I don't know what to say. Although I guess now that she's 3D, you can download a model and put in your blender and you can do whatever you want with her. So that's great. You know, fine. Okay.

All right. Great. Not that I would do that. That didn't come out. I'm learning so much. I didn't say that. To say that I was going to do that. No, no, no, no, no, no, never.

I tried to learn blender and I had a freak out and I couldn't do it. Anyways. All right. Continue. Okay. So I wanted to now bring to you kind of what I consider to be the, let's see, top-tier, outrageous insane content that I have found. And, yeah, Project Makeover.

Have you ever heard of this game? Oh, yes. Wow. Grant, could you remove the not safe for work content warning on this video, please? Our last Our last guest asked me if I get Hazard pay for the show and we're really

We're really adding a No, no, it's the opposite. It's part of a work release program where I find I like to hire like tech literate perverts To do work for me and I have a great deal With the state of New York. Cancels it out. If he goes to if he goes too far off the rails

He goes back to pervert jail. All right, here we go. Okay, so it's some kind of cop or A pilot maybe? smelling this woman's stinky feet. Now another woman's sad because she saw it. She's walking the rain and she needs a makeover. How are we going to make?

Oh, we're going to cover in slime? A bunch of slime, yeah, of course. You got to cover her in slime and now she has hairy feet. What are we going to do? We're going to tape her feet and we're going to wax her. Cool. Yeah, this is fetish it. This is just pure, unadulterated fetish stuff.

Or shaving her head now. Yeah. And she's crying. And she'd go, I would cry too if I was covered in slime and then shave. against my will. I feel like let's hear it. This is

how do I say this? Okay, so like if you, I feel okay, I feel like if you've been around on the internet long enough, like you just sort of get a sense that you're staring at fetish art.

Like there's just, there's just a certain, there's like certain logic jumps in it where you're like, that's not, like that's not a normal thing. It's like a fetish thing. Definitely.

And they're also trying to attract, like, well, actually I'm going to hold off on that because I'm going to kind of explain the business side of this too eventually here. But let's let's go on to one. I want to show you one more project makeover video that you can let me know what you think. It's a chicken laying eggs. There's a couple in bed. The man says, Bay, I missed you. Now he's angry and he's cutting the bed in half because her,

her nightgown was full of eggs that the chicken laid. Yeah, so now she's going to go get her project makeover after that humiliation that makes very little sense to me. What are you both not following about this? What's not clear about that plot?

Come on, Grant. What do you think? A weird thing I kind of love about these videos that I've also seen in like a lot of the home renovation videos that went viral on TikTok last year is like, telltale signs that they were not made by Americans.

Yes. Yeah. Like there's something really interesting there. Like little things where like that's not an American house. Like this isn't like an American idea. I assume most of these animations are being made in like content farms in the global south. Like I assume that's where like people on Fiver or something. Like I have to imagine that's where a lot of them. And I think that's true.

I think that there are a handful of American companies that are all. making these ads. And there's even one that I read an interview from, they do a lot of mobile game ad blog posts where they talk about how these ads work. And they do talk about the really weird ones. And they talk about how they actually do create these ads because they know that people will, they called it like the what the fuck factor. You know, that like basically, you know, you're scrolling, you're scrolling. Everything's kind of the same. Or at least in the, the same like universe of things. And then all of a sudden, the only thing that's going to stop you in your kind of mindless

algorithmic scroll is something that shocks you out of your kind of coma. Yeah. That some of them are made. And there is this like lost in translation thing that happens that makes it a little more uncanny. It's, it is kind of fascinating that this is like not totally dissimilar from like how video games like some. like the hedgehog got lore.

Old video games were limited by what you could show on screen. So they'd come up with all this crazy backstory stuff that like never appeared in the game as like a marketing tool. And it is funny that mobile games are effectively doing the same thing, but like with fetish slot for me. Yeah. Yeah. What's like Sonic lore that was used as marketing?

Yeah, I don't know. Oh, like the entire, the entire thing. Like they're like Sonic didn't really have, like there's no story in the game. Sega America made up a whole backstory that isn't the same as Sega Japan's backstory because there was no there's no one paying attention so like a lot of your games in the 90s

they'd come up with this crazy ridiculous story that you'd read about in the back of the game and you play it as like just a pixel jumping up and down like it was very common in the 80s okay interesting and did that have to do with like users like did they did people create the story and then it was pulled from like fan fiction or was it just totally original

No, no, no, like in very old video games like this, you would sort of try to like encode a bit of a vibe into the very simple platformer games, but the most of the story was invented by the marketing department. So, and especially if you were localizing a game from Japan, you, you would oftentimes just like make a totally new character out of it. That's why there's so much weird inconsistent stuff between like Mario in the U.S. and Mario in Japan or Sonic in the U.S., Sonic in Japan. So this is not totally unheard of. It's like, but they're just like these mobile game company marketing teams are pulling from a very different well of culture. They're pulling from like how to catch your eye online rather than how to catch like a little kid's eye in a video game store. That makes sense. But the thought process is the same.

Got it. Or even in the, uh, in the advertisement on TV. Uh, I'm saying this as someone who watched several nine hour videos about the history of Sonic spinball for the Sega Genesis. So yeah. So what I'm saying is it would have been great if like Sonic. had stinky feet or was breastfeeding somebody or stealing chicken eggs. That would have been great. Which all of which you can find online these days if you go to deviant art.

So like that's all there. Yeah, if you want it. I wonder if the fan fiction universe did influence this or like, you know, the porny fan fiction influenced these ads as well because there is a lot in common with those two worlds. We are now slowly kind of getting to a strange place within. internet content where there are just there's like core viral content storylines you know like someone's cheating or someone loses all their money or someone's out on the street giving you money like if you go and watch any random video on instagram or facebook there are just like skit

storylines that everybody does it's like very vaudevillian in that way like there's just like these and a lot of them have porny undertones, I think largely because you're dealing with the same kind of people. Like the people that make viral content for Facebook are making it up on the fly to get your attention in the same way that like porn actors are trying to like slap a plot onto something to get your attention. It's the same mentality. And so mobile game marketing teams, I think are probably operating under the same logic.

And they're just like taking someone gets. stuck in the dryer and then you've got to play Solitaire to get them out. You know, your stepsister stole your breast milk or whatever. Like that is it's the same thing across the web, whether it's porn or not a template. The next one,

King's Choice, is going to get into another really popular trope in mobile game ads. Okay, so a woman's like wants to get pregnant. And so she goes into a bush

and has sex with a man to get pregnant because she saw the king having sex with someone else yeah and now she oh okay so the baby is a different race than the father

and the father's mad yeah yeah so it's basically yeah a woman who appears to be maybe the princess or maybe not she sees the king the king is getting a different woman pregnant so then she thinks oh I'll get I'll have the king's fake baby with this gardener in the bush, and then the baby turns out to, as you said, be a different race.

And it doesn't really make that much sense since the race of the gardener was white. And so the whole thing really is kind of incongruent. The storyline doesn't really make sense, but it ends with a healthy dose of, yeah. She was busy in the bushes. Yeah, weird healthy dose at the end there of confusing. Very confusing racism, but this is kind of a theme in this world. We're going to move on to something now. Let's see Happy Hospital, ASMR.

Okay, so it's Mark is not safe for work again. And it's gross. So they're scrubbing, they're shaving like lungs or feet? It's an ass. It's a butt. It's a butt. It's a butt. And now they're popping the pimples on the butt.

It's a woman's butt. Oh, this is awful. This is just awful. There's like maggots coming out of the butt or like a blackhead coming out of the butt. I think it's like pull stuff. Choose the tweezers. Yep. Okay.

Yeah. I think this add in early, but I think we can imagine where it goes. Okay. So yeah, that's kind of your classic, like disgusting pimple popper content that we see a lot. Okay. I watch a lot of pimple popping videos. Tell me about that. I do.

As a stress release, I go to R popping on Reddit. Do you like the other stuff, like the bigger, like boils and, okay, so bigger the better? Cist removal, if they get, if they get the whole sack of the cyst, because a lot of times they don't get the whole sack, so there's stuff still in there. I also really enjoy septoplasti, which is the, is an operation where you remove, like, impacted mucus from someone's nasal cavity. I mean, I can, yeah, it's not for me, but I can understand the, uh, this, enjoying the success. of the moment and something that's completed. Do you guys want to watch some pimple pop videos? Should we just like change the topic of today's episode and just like watch some pimple pop videos?

Maybe next time. Next summer when we all take a real week off with an episode. There we go. All right. This last one, I just wanted to end on a positive note since we've seen a lot of intense stuff. So this is for a game called chapters. Here we go. So it's like sexy men in suits.

Mafia boss. Okay, like a sexy mafia boss. And now it's like two girls kissing in a hot tub. Good for them. So I guess they're secretly together, and now they can't tell the mafia boss. Oh, but the mafia boss says long live the LGBTQ. And then he gets rewarded with a threesome.

Everybody wins. Yeah, you're given the option of a threesome or to call 911, which is funny. Yeah, so I just love long live LGBTQ. And then, so that is my collection for you and our dear audiences. Yeah. That was great. I'm going to sit and think about that when I listen to our wonderful, probably very, very upset sponsors.

And we're going to come back from the break. And we're going to talk all about how the world of digital advertising evolved into something this vibrant and amazing. So once again, dear advertisers, I'm sorry. I hope someone told you about this show before you figure out there. Why are you apologizing? We can just run mobile ads now. That's true. I would love an advertiser to talk about stinky feet.

That would be great. So we want to try to figure out like how do we get to a world of like Elsagate, you know, culture where everything kind of looks just like insane internet garbage. And dear listener, don't worry. If you don't know what that is, we're going to get to it in just a minute. Yes. Really sort of like the way we think about like modern video game advertising started in the late 80s, 88 to 91. You start to see like hobbyist magazines for your games arriving, you know, Electronic Gaming Monthly, Nintendo Power, GamePro. Were you ever like a reader of like early 90s video game magazines?

I was only a reader of them so that I could get cheat codes. Sure. I was really into like. Stuff like Wizard magazine, which was like for comic books. And then, which like sometimes overlap with video games a bit. And then I was subscribed to Dreamcast magazine because they would put free demos of Dreamcast games in the magazine. I was aware of like the very like outrageous, very sexual video game ads in these magazines,

which has kind of been in the industry since the beginning. There's like a lot of like 90s like PlayStation ads that are like, stop kissing girls and start playing PlayStation. or like, you're a PlayStation will suck your dick off, like stuff like that. Yeah. In terms of like internet advertising, the very first banner ad, like the thing you could sort of imagine as a banner ad launched in 1994 on Wired, of course. And you can look at it right here.

It says hot wired and then it's like a bunch of symbols on it and you can like click it, I guess. Very, very cool. By the mid-90s, early 2000s, we're now. getting interactive ones so they're moving around um all right so these are like animated gifs which you know would take like 25 minutes to load on dsl not load on non dsl internet but uh this is also where flash ads start to sort of become important how would you sort of describe the difference between like the ads that you're looking at right now which are like animated

gifs of like a monkey running around or whatever to like ads you see on the internet now like how would you sort of described the difference in aesthetics? Well, I think it's just very, very, very simple, obviously, as Flash animation was back then. These look like you can actually play them in the banner. Is that true? Because it looks like if they want you to think so. You can. Okay. Okay. So if you were to like throw the rock at the monkey, it would activate the ad and then you'd be brought over the website. So it's a trick. It's a trick click. And you know, there's no storyline. I don't think that they have the time for such a thing. So it's really basic.

Monkeys running back and forth. Yeah. When you're talking about like the interactive ads, so those are, they sort of start to pop up in what you would call like the Java era. Tree Lute is like the first company to figure this out. And they're giving away coupons and discounts. And it's an animated monkey with boxing gloves.

And then you're supposed to like punch them on. and you win $20. It's done entirely in Java. It gets eventually replaced with Flash. And here's how they make their money, according to the Walsh Journal at the time. By offering free gifts, prizes, coupons, or big cash winnings, gaming, and sweepstakes sites are able to sign up players and get them to divulge their names, addresses, and in some cases, hobbies, interests, and buying patterns.

The sites then use the information to sell advertisers targeted email lists or space in a daily email message to players. It's market research, disguised is a game, and the information they are getting is very valuable. Yeah, I mean, that's basically how I make money with garbage things. I trick people into clicking links, and then I steal their information. So, yeah, you basically, you see a ton of these in the early 2000s. If you go down one, Grant, you look at this one, which is three ads for tickle the fat kid till he barfs and win two free iPod Nanos. Grant, does this ad still work?

I'd love to play this game. It doesn't work. I want to tickle the faculty parts. I want an iPad Nano. I want to win a free iPad Nano. Oh, God. Okay, so we've already got a little bit of gross out content here. No, we are.

We are fully in sort of a, like, just to keep track at home here, dear listener. The first ad was in 1994. And by like 2002 or three, we are now, like, fully in Slop World. So that's how quickly this stuff has devolved. By the mid-2000s to like early 2010s, we're now seeing tons of flash games. They're the stuff that's crashing everybody's browsers. This also starts kind of like the browser advertising war, you know, the ad blockers versus the browsers that sort of like make them faster.

This is sort of why Google Chrome like becomes like an early popular favorite for people who are using the internet all the time because these ads are gigantic and they are also full of slop. So like this is a McDonald's ad where you. click to play and then you, you're like fishing for a filial fish, basically, right? Yeah, it's like you're supposed to tap the reel and then avoid the obstacles, which is kind of odd. Like, those two things aren't really working together, but there's like a shark, a submarine, and some sort of mine.

And then if you get past that, you get to catch your own filial fish. And that is the, there's like a real picture of the filial fish in the animation. which I always love. And I had totally forgotten like this weird moment online where brands had just turned ads into video games and vice versa effectively. So if you go down one, Grant, we're now looking at a, this is Postopia Games. You can play a fruity pebbles themed game. Yes, like, yeah, Flintstone fruity Pubbles game.

Interesting. It's much more complicated. There's a lot more going on. A lot more going on. And if you look closely, there's an ad inside the branded game for a sleepover at the Smithsonian. So it's an ad within an ad. What?

Yeah. That's really strange. Okay. So yeah, they're just kind of throwing a bunch of shit at you trying probably to get you to be attracted to one of the things in the group, whether that be fruity pebbles or a sleepover at the Smithsonian, which does sound really fun. Yeah. So like during this period like early 2010's like mobile internet hadn't overtaken desktop just yet.

It's like this really weird moment between like 2009 to 2012 where people are still investing in websites, even advertisers. So you get stuff like the Muppets like doing like an entire website full of I don't know, just like Muppet shit. Just like branded Muppet slop. And this is like ads within ads within ads within an entirely branded takeover of the site. Yeah. It's chaos, man. And this leads us directly to syvony. So have you ever heard of syveny?

Okay. I hadn't remembered this at all. I totally forgot about this. So it was a browser-based strategy game on Flash that launched in 2009. And it's basically like a strategy game that's sort of like civilization or age of empires. It is a very early example of what we would now regularly call freemium. So you've definitely seen the ads because there's a lot of like hot chain mail bates and stuff. It used to be also called, it used to be called Evony.

Okay. Interesting. Yeah, I definitely have seen these games. They were everywhere. Yeah, this is very, I very much remember this. Yeah. Yeah. The banner ads went very viral.

They even got like written up by the Guardian at the time. Friend of Garbage Day, Jeff Atwood, uh, even like did a great timeline of these weird. ads. He wrote about it back in 2009 in a post titled How to Not How Not to Advertise on the Internet, which is great. And this is sort of like the last big moment of this style of mobile game advertising that you're going to see, possibly because people were so, so mad at Evony that the creators started suing bloggers. And then the head of Evony, Eric Lamb was sued by Microsoft for click fraud before the game launch. So, like, he was already kind of like not a good guy, you know. So, yeah, anyways, this is all to say that, like, this is the last kind of browser game style advertising you're going to see. because from then on it becomes like the mobile era

and you're getting plants versus zombies, Temple Run, then you're also getting the stuff that like lives inside of Facebook like Mafia Wars, Candy Crush. Did you ever play any of those games? Not really. I've never been a mobile game person. I've definitely slang them on my show, so don't tell anyone.

But no, just hasn't been my thing. I like to play crosswords. Yeah. That's cool. I once found out my mom, I think, beat Candy Crush. Wow. I didn't know you could beat it. That's cool.

She, like, got really far and was spending real money on it. And I couldn't yell at her about that because I spent a lot of real money on Pokemon Go during the pandemic. Well, that's fair. At least you're getting some exercise. I was saying. I was paying to not go outside. Okay. You could pay money during the pandemic to increase the radius so I could do it from my couch.

Wow. Okay. Great. Well, at least you're honest. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think my analog example I'm going to give, since I'm not as into the mobile games, is I did beat Boppet alone, which you can do.

If you get to the end of it, I didn't know you could beat Boppet. I didn't know either. I didn't know either. I thought it was just going indefinitely. Imagine my surprise and excitement. It threw like, it threw me a little party. Do that instill you with any skill? I got fast hands.

I can catch a softball really fast. I was always a sporty kid, so I think it was, you know, I enjoyed it because it was like a tiny sport. that you could play, which I guess mobile games are too, but... Yeah, they are. I would say they're dexterity. Let's take a little look at, like, what the early, early to mid-2010's mobile game landscape look like. I assume most people are kind of familiar, but, like, Grant, if you could just click

the first link there, fortify yourself with an army. This is, I think, very indicative of, like, what mobile game ads look like, which is that, you know, about 10 years ago, 15 years ago, which is a lot of just, like, clicking stuff, big armies. fighting, like, no real emphasis on story. You're just, you're just clicking, you know, and like, the, the industry wasn't, you know, super mature yet, not mature in the sense that, like, they're doing, they're mature now, but, like, hadn't matured, you know, it hadn't been around for a long time.

They're also using a lot of, like, flash animation still. Yeah. It seems like, though, they pretty quickly realized what everyone else realized, and that sex sells. So, if you go down to the link titled Cartoon Busamy Woman Doing Dance. All right. Yeah, we've got like a scantily clad woman and kind of a loincloth. She's doing a very suggestive dance with, yeah, big cleavage. And yeah, she's just kind of like looking at the player, which I think is key. There's like attention to you. The potential person who I imagine will save her. I don't know. And it's called Bruttle. age, which is a little unnerving. Yeah. And then let's click the next link down there, because I want to show you what happens when we get a bunch of different marketing genres all coming together for one video. Okay, so we've got like a pretty blonde woman and a devil woman

and their mouths are huge and open and a little guy went in them and now everyone's kicking the little guy and now there's a woman with a green face who's giant and her tongue is out and she is eating these little guys that are presumably. You, the player. Oh, now one of them's pulling something out of a statue's ear. Oh, now she sucked him up. Now he's bones in her stomach that you can see. Now he's pulling a sword out of a golden kind of Mary-esque woman. Oh, a skeleton hand came out of the hole in her chest. Grant, can you pause for a second? Something is important here to point out. And I think this, I think for listeners, this is important to know. If you ever see anything on the internet,

then like depicts like a giant woman or giant woman like thing eating a man who's small and you can see inside of her stomach as he's digested and dies you're looking at fetish content that is like straight up that is giant as fetish content and like that is just classic and the giveaway is you can see inside the belly that's that's that's that's that's that's that's the giveaway really yeah cool in my experience okay okay yeah no i was gonna include this one just to put forward the giantess fetish. So I'm glad that you brought it. We're on the same wavelength. It is remarkable that none of the ads have overlap so far. Just like it speaks to how many of these there are that we both went into separate corners to research this. And there's been zero overlap. That is impressive.

Also, I just, your ability to narrate what was happening there, you could do play by play. Yeah, that's pretty good. Yeah, that was very impressive. It's my bop it, my bobbit hands. I'm quick. As we sort of head towards the pandemic, we get to the modern era, or at least the most modern era so far of mobile games, you know, and this is what we sort of talked about in the first act,

which are these bizarre ads that sort of are psychosexual in nature. I feel like people started to notice them around 2018, 2019. Does that sort of gel with you as well? Yeah. I do wonder if part of it, was TikTok. Like, because TikTok launches in 2017 and all of a sudden now we have like people watching more video content than ever before. And TikTok just like kind of opens the floodgates on digital, digital video advertising in a way that we hadn't seen before. Yeah. But there definitely is like a

renewed sense of like, oh, these are weird and people are noticing. Yes, definitely, definitely. And I mean, do you guys want to talk about ElsaGate at any point? Because it does feel connected. Well, I think we should. Before we go to the. break. I do think we should touch on it. So just for people who aren't familiar, let me just get the broad strokes down so we can talk about it. So if you've ever heard the term Elsa Gate, it refers to a controversy where there were a few different YouTube channels making like very disturbing children's content by slamming together. Things like Elsa from Frozen, Spider-Man, they're doing different costumes. It was very sexual. A lot of goos, a lot of slimes. It felt very

algorithmically generated and YouTube eventually had to start cracking down on it after like a bunch of different publications started writing about like how disturbing these things were. So what's the connection? Like how do you see the connection there? Because I agree with you there is one, but I'm having trouble articulating it. Here's what I think. So I mean, I think it's important to point out that yeah, it's like all these characters, all this like private IP and they're doing things like eating shit and burying each other alive and like getting abortions and getting hypodermic needle injections from like a hairy hand, like a real hand coming into the cartoon and like injecting Peppa Pig or like pulling her teeth out. It's like really dark stuff like violent eye surgeries, right? Just like these things that should not be in a kid's thing, right? And the whole point I think is that when you slam together like the titles of all of these are like Peppa Pig, Popatrol goes to the bathroom and like, you know, just like these really weird but

long titles that will in the same way that a mobile game ad kind of makes you pause. Like it's going to attract the attention of anyone who is on YouTube. If someone's shown this, it's kind of, and whether you're, you know, people act like kids wouldn't be, would never, ever click on such a thing, right? But it's like, we remember being kids. Like we were going to click on the weirdest thing. I'm absolutely going to click on it. For sure.

You know, it's just works, right? So it's just, again, this, this shock. gross out novelty. I think novelty is kind of the key here. And if you're jamming together all of these IP names in the algorithm, it's obviously going to show up. It's going to keep your attention longer because the continuing storyline is very, very strange. You're going to watch it longer. Then it's going to get pushed farther up the algorithm. And then it'll just do better, get more clicks and more views. And that's what they want. And then kids are also way less likely to skip commercials. And I think that's kind of a big part of why this worked so well was like

kids are pretty passive viewers. So whether it's a toddler that has no idea what's going on or it's a kid that's, you know, morbidly interested in whatever weird thing is happening, it's going to get a lot more engagement. And I think it's just pretty basic, right? It's like fucked up and gross. And it's not made by people who care about kids, obviously. But it's just yet again, capitalism. influencing our subconscious and vice versa. And it's very, very weird. Yeah. I think that's right.

I do think it's important to point out that like, like, the algorithms for different platforms work differently. And they don't really want us to know how they work, but like we kind of know, right? So on YouTube, like Elsagate is a really good example of like at the time in the late 2010s. YouTube was really prioritizing like pop culture. topics like search terms. So like so if you could just jam a million search terms into a video, it would do really well. And YouTube was at the time, I believe, just starting sort of siloing off children's content. So like if you could be like safe for children or you could be popular

children, you could like get a bigger audience. So like it was like hijacking the platform. Totally. And then with like TikTok, TikTok, TikTok is way more trend focus. So it's like more interested and but it's also trying to sell you stuff. The most viral things on TikTok you're ever going to see are like people like, okay, water talk. Do you remember that trend? No. So it's like a perfect example of like what TikTok is designed to do, which is like, it's people being like the hot trend right now is like putting different flavor packets in

my water and then you like show off your flavor packets because like TikTok wants a trend that involves products. Okay. That makes sense. Like 90% of the most viral TikTok content on there is just like, I bought this product and now I can do this trend. So it doesn't sort of shock me that like the big kind of outcry about mobile game ads being weird and salacious happens with like the advent of TikTok. All of these things are basically just like you're trying to capture people's attention but doing it through an algorithm.

I don't think that these are meant to be looked at by humans first. I think they're meant to be looked at by a machine first. And then the machine goes like, ooh, this is like weird. like I'll promote this. Yeah. That's my theory. I think that's a good theory. Yeah.

But we're going to be talking about how you crack down on something like this and why it's so difficult after a word from our very, very, very, very regretful sponsors. Sorry, all. How big do you think this problem is? Like you've done a lot of sort of investigations into this world. Do you feel like there's something that can even be done here to like crack down on this stuff? So I just, I didn't really get into any of the,

ideas of how to make this stop because I was looking at it more as a sociological phenomenon, not as a as a moral problem, but it is obviously showing up on the feeds of anyone and everyone. I do think that it's like kind of slowed down, at least in my experience. I used to get them all the time. And now I just don't see them as often. And I don't know if that has anything to do with the mobile game industry. I don't really know how it's doing right now. But I know it's been really profitable, right? Because all people need to do is get someone to click the game. Then the advertiser gets the credit for the click through rate. And then the gameplay, that's a whole different set of people. So the advertisers, all they are trying to do is get you to click into the game. If you

download the game, you're going to immediately get ads. They're going to make money that way, or they're going to try to sell you like, you know, whatever. They're going to sell you things within the game that you need to progress in the game. So really it's just an advertising issue that obviously is going to be hard to solve. I guess there would have to be new laws about what you can put in an ad. But it just feels like this is everywhere on the internet. It's kind of just the way things are now. So I think it'd be really hard to try to crack down on that. And as we know, when people try to crack down on things like this, they usually sneak in some insidious censorship. So I don't have a good solution, but I do know that it works really well.

This type of ad does work really well. Yeah, I mean, the reason we've focused specifically on mobile game ads this week, not just because they're weird and funny and fucked up, but also because digital advertising doesn't work and is essentially like mass scale fraud and we would need our. to talk about like why it doesn't work. Okay. Okay. I have friends who work in it and like it is not it's not real. It is I yeah like it's sorry. Sorry to be the bear bad news for anybody working

digital advertising but like it's it's it is very it is it I have a friend who who works digital advertising is just like it's broken on a scale that like if people knew would crash like the economy like it doesn't really work. Great. Okay. Like because like the click is effectively a meaningless metric now. Do you think it was less meaningless like? five years ago.

My understanding is that like the minute advertising went online, like advertising, which was never really a thing, like was broken permanently. That's what I've heard from people who work in digital advertising. In terms of like how you crack down on this stuff, like America's not going to because we don't have, we're not going to have any new laws or regulations ever again. But other countries are trying. The UK loves cracking down on internet content. and they,

a, what they would call like a media watchdog, which is kind of like a non-official kind of group, they found eight frightening adverts that depicted women in bad ways that they want to address. Okay. And they want them banned. One of the games is an interactive romance story game called My Fantasy,

which, according to The Guardian, featured an animation of a woman being approached by another woman and being pushed onto a desk and the options appeared asking what she should do. Enjoy it, push her away, please continue, and stop it. And this advertising watchdog said that the animations were strongly suggestive and implied the sexual encounters were not consensual. Yeah, I've seen a lot of that as well.

A lot of that. And so, like, there are, like, some places on earth that, like, want to figure out how to deal with this stuff. But I agree that it is systemic. And ultimately, the only way to fix it is to fix the platforms that we're using and what they incentivize. Like they're looking for specific. And it's sort of what I was talking about in the second section is like they're looking

for specific content. And as long as they're trying to make you outraged or catch your attention without caring how they're catching your attention. And these algorithms aren't thinking. They're just like, they just know like, okay, like this, this content shape produces this user behavior. And advertisers or shady weird fiber groups with blender. skills can figure out how to do that. And so yeah, I agree with you that like it's,

it's just like a thing that I think is going to be around until people stop getting like pulled into looking at it. And I guess it's like you could say like don't click on it, right? Or like don't watch it for very long. But it's pretty hard to do when you're seeing like we want to know how this outrageous thing you're watching resolves and then it doesn't resolve and then you're just watching this stupid ass game. especially because like because the click is meaningless and has and has been increasingly meaningless for like 15 years the eyeball is becoming more meaningful so it's like don't hover like is that well so for i mean this is true so yeah you can you can do this test at home if you want like go on ticot find like a video in your

feed that you like watch it and then refresh the feed and i guarantee you like if you look at like a video of a dog for too long your feed will refresh and it'll be almost all dogs And it's doing that in real time. Yeah, that makes sense. So, like, the platforms know that the click doesn't work anymore. And they know that advertisers know. And they're just waiting for, like, the weird shady ad firms. If you want to read more about this, by the way, I recommend, like, 404 media.

They're very good at sort of, like, talking about the rot at the heart of digital advertising. But, like, the eyeball is the view, the sort of like momentary hesitation is replacing the click. And all of this is, of course, leading to the AI version of it where, like, you're, weird fetish game is built into an AI bot or whatever. But like it's all going the same place, which is like trying to just monetize your attention span. So that way, even if you don't like what you're looking at, they can still say, well, you looked at it.

Yeah. Yeah. And that's the thing is like you're not just going to look at things you like. You're going to look at the novelty. And that's what mobile game ads hit on and knew whether or not, you know, they were successful in the way we're talking about remains to be seen maybe. But it still gets you, right? Maybe the solution is we've got to sit down like everyone, like everyone on Earth and just show them the worst content imaginable for hours, like Clockwork Orange style.

So they're completely and totally, yeah, and they're completely and totally desensitized. And then we can crash the digital advertising economy and be free because you will no longer be interested in looking at pregnant Elsa or Sonic with stinky feet or like a woman eat shark. and then become a baby or whatever, because you won't, your brain will be so used to it. You're killing the novelty. That's what we're saying. Yeah, listener,

you've got to kill any sense of novelty in yourself before you can use the internet. And then you'll finally be free. This is how Zuckerberg's actually going to connect us all. There's a term that the users of the R drug subreddit use called Kill Your Eagle. And they use the term, kill your eagle to sort of mean like you,

ego death kind of, but you're eagle inside. of you. And what you do is you got to kill your eagle before you go online. If you do that, if you kind of take in the worst content that you can, then the novelty will become something nice. It will get nice content again. So then the cycle will kind of continue, though. Have either of you just hovered visually over something too long that you never, like, you're like, I don't want my feed to become this, but I looked at and now like, I've betrayed myself. And you know that's the only way. And then you're like, in.

the data inundated with a type of content yeah i've been keeping track of the sites that can do it now so uh reddit on mobile can definitely do it's to a degree it's not as sophisticated it's a little more complicated ticot can definitely do it but not with story content it seems interesting x can do it now but x has a really bad algorithm so it like does it too much so like if you hover over something on x you're going to get nothing but that on the mobile app Watch one pro wrestling video and God. Just watch 10 seconds of the rock making an eyebrow and like, I'm only saying stunners now. It seems to like, yeah, it seems to have like the autoplay feature tied to the algorithmic recommendation system somehow.

But TikTok is the one that has the best version of this. Also, uh, Netflix. Uh, they never get talked about, but they have something called a bucket system where you're in a bucket and like the other, another user is in a bucket. and it's constantly moving you between buckets based on what you watch or what you hover over. So that's happening. YouTube doesn't seem to do it weirdly enough because YouTube wants you to watch the video. So they're much more interested in like you clicking in and watching. We're all friends here.

We are. I don't like where this is headed wherever this is headed. I've one dark thing. I don't know why you need to bring that up before you're going to say whatever you're going to say. Because I might not make it into the episode. I was once listening to a Savage Love, the Dan Savage Sex Advice podcast, and somebody's girlfriend called him was like, I went to my boyfriend's Instagram and like the search feature was all just like women with big boobs. Oh yeah, I remember this. And he swears to God.

He never clicks this content. And everyone was like, bro, that's bullshit. I must have just hesitated on like some alt, they, them for like two seconds. seconds too long because I never I'm like I don't want this in my feet and I never clicked it but now when I go to my search it's only people that look like my wife it is like it's like just me over and I'm like I'm like I'm like it looks so incriminating if anyone had my phone and I'm like I barely click on tattoo content for this reason like I really didn't want this I was talking to a friend about this actually last night.

Because I recently started using Instagram more, although I kind of lost interest again. But I go through phases. And when I was using it in the winter, my explore page was like nothing but like alt women with tattoos. And I don't like follow any celebrities. I don't really follow any meme pages. I just like follow my friends. What I suspect is happening is that Instagram is using a hybrid system where it's showing you content based on what you're looking at, like, but it's also probably being influenced by the social graph, which is what it has across

Facebook and Instagram that that meta is like very proud of maintaining. So it's not just you. It's like if you also follow people who are also interested in that. And then so I don't need to be a pervert. It's just that I'm friends with perverts. Yes. Well, you're also unfortunately a man and the platform knows you're a man. Yeah.

But the platform knows you're a man. And so there seems to be definitely like a button it presses when it knows you're a man and just starts blasting you with like your woman type of choice. Yeah. Makes sense. That's like a thing that like all like I know a lot of male users that complain about it. Fascinating. Very interesting. I don't have TikTok.

I know it's really brave of me. But I have YouTube obviously. And so my algorithm, because of the show that I make, is completely insane. And it will depend on the episode. But like when I did the LCGate episode, which I'd love to push here for anyone who wants to know more about Elsigate, you'll, like, kind of hear me go completely insane on the episode. But that was a really dark time. And so my algorithms are always corresponding with the episodes.

And it can be really, really fun sometimes when it's like just a nice history story. but then it can get really strange. Like when we did our Skibbitty Toilet episode, another one I'll push. Things definitely got really weird on my algorithm. So I feel like mine is really based on my work. Yeah, I've been watching a lot of Andrew Tate videos recently for work. For work. And so now I'm getting all kinds of weird YouTube stuff.

YouTube thinks I'm a 35-year-old man who's obsessed with radio had half the time and the other half the time I think I'm a 14-year-old who, really needs to learn more about nofap and it's just really uncertain what to do it doesn't know that you're both that's so crazy that it doesn't know that you love nofap and radiohead i bet there's a lot of crossover actually let's not do this and like people who have addictions to pornography i bet that's like a lot of overlap um but i'm a creep but yeah exactly uh grant any pickups before we bounce i got i got one I've been sitting on this idea.

Just one. Just one, but it's an idea. And it might. Oh, those are the worst because it's the, oh, okay, fine. This might not, we can pass. Like, we can, we might be able to hold this. Let's hear it. Something I've been thinking about for a long time.

You look at this and this is slop generated by people. And when you look at the trajectory of content, all influencers have trained themselves to think algorithmically and have been, and TikTok has trained us to be just shilling products and basically making ads and pretending that it's a take. And so we've trained the human experience to be sloppy, slop, slop. Sure. And that is what feeds us most of the time. And we're all very worried and rightfully so about AI slop.

But I'm starting to feel more and more nihilistic about. about like when we've trained ourselves as people to just think like algorithms and to just make things with must get click must put word here. And I think these like kind of ads like really are like the true essence of like the way that we've like warped our brains to try to like make human eye hover. Like I kind of like just want to throw out my hands and be like what the fuck's the difference between like if this is what we're doing with the human mind then like who gives a shit what we do with the like the computer mind. besides the like water waste, which is real. That's really real. Yeah, I mean, that's a good, it's a good point. And I guess I also think of the algorithm as kind of like our subconscious, right?

So it's kind of like it's not just a computer affecting us. It's us affecting a computer. And I think what the hover is has a lot to do with not even our conscious mind, but really just that's why these places put forward things like sex, violence, growth. out content the things that bring our attention to them. I mean, the algorithm's being created and we're creating it and it's creating us. And it's getting weird. But yeah, this is kind of what always happens when people can make their own media. Like there was there was a slop, quote unquote, like equivalent for like newsletters when they got really cheap to make in the 1800s. Like this is a thing that happens. And I don't feel very nihilistic about this. This is just sort of like

what the end of an era looks like. Whether or not you feel good about this is up to you, but like it's very clear to me that the transition that we're going through right now is very similar to the like independent publishing boom of the late 1800s, early 1800s into like radio and TV and the equivalent would be the user generated internet to an AI powered internet. And obviously there are all kinds of problems there, but like that's clearly what's happening right now. Right.

The stuff that you're seeing around the internet, like, fall apart and, like, turn into slop is just what that looks like. Like, we are moving on and we're going to have new problems to deal with. But, like, this is all, I think, already in the rear mirror in a lot of ways. Like, I was talking to someone else this week, a very not internet friend who was just like, I don't know what to do online anymore. Yeah. So, like, this is already happening. And the fact that it's like falling into disrepair is like very sad and there's like lots of problems like I said there. But like this is already kind of ending in a way, I think.

Yeah. Chelsea, I want to thank you for coming on the show. This was great. Thank you for coming. This is a silly question, but I ask it to all of our guests. Where can people follow you on the internet? I'm sure people already know, but where can they follow you if they don't know? We have Instagram.

That's the only one we got and it's at American Hysteria podcast. We also have a website and that's AmericanHisteria.com. And you can find some other stuff there that we do. Thank you so much. was a delightful conversation about the worst stuff on the internet. Yeah. Thank you both. Thank you, Grant.

Thank you, Ryan, for letting me bring this presentation to you. Really was an honor to talk about this shit with both of you. So thank you very much. Panic World is a production of Courier. It is written and produced by Grant Irving and hosted by me, Ryan Broderick. Josh Fielstead is our production coordinator. And our amazing researcher is Adam Bumis. From Currier is Shane Verkest, who edits our video episodes, along with our producer.

Devin Moroni and National Managing Director and Executive Producer Kevin Dreyfus. R.C. DeMezzo is their VP of Brand and Social. Charlotte Robinson is their Deputy Director of Brand and Social. Marianne Couga is their Director of Marketing. And Tracy Kaplan is the Senior Vice President of Sales and Distribution. If you want to sponsor the show or give us products to sell, she's the one to talk to. You can email her at Tracy at CourierNewsroom.com. Lastly, here's my advice for you.

chill out and touch grass while you still can.