Back when it was a great, respected, and profitable business, journalism employed thousands of reporters who worked tirelessly to cover interesting and important stories from around the globe. But now, after years of neglect, an overreliance on programmatic advertising, and predation by private equity firms, the industry is but a desiccated husk of its former self, crawling toward death with nothing and no one but The Onion to save it.
Fortunately, you can do your part to help slow the humiliating and completely preventable demise of media by participating in The Onion’s annual Click Drive.
Today, we invite our dumbest, most loyal readers to spend just a few short minutes of their sad, pathetic, worthless lives clicking mindlessly through various articles, columns, infographics, slideshows, and videos on TheOnion.com. Rather than allowing corporate overlords to gut the industry and sell it for parts today, you can help ensure they hold off, line their pockets a bit longer, and instead destroy your favorite news outlets tomorrow.
So please, open a browser on your computer or mobile device, type in TheOnion.com, and click anywhere and everywhere for as long as you are able. Every single click through our bloated, ad-riddled website will help keep the entire industry on life support until a billionaire owner, private equity firm, or consulting group finally decides to pull the plug once and for all.
Double the points if you click through our entire Click Drive slideshow, endure the excruciating full minute of pre-roll advertising on our videos, or click on one of the many intrusive, browser-crashing ads below!
And then, once you’re done, click as fast as you absolutely can through some other Pulitzer Prize–winning articles on TheOnion.com, like the ones here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.
Who knows? Maybe one day you’ll tell your grandchildren how you clicked hundreds of times on a website, pumping embalming fluid into the rotten corpse of online media and allowing it to last about 30 seconds longer than it would have otherwise.
So long as you register just one pageview on TheOnion.com, you can help the American public suspend disbelief and continue to pretend that journalism is alive and well for yet another day. With your help, we are confident the industry will survive just long enough to say goodbye before descending into a hellscape of abandoned websites, broken URLs, and AI-generated click farms for all eternity.