Who makes animated GIFs?

You may have noticed we have a ton of animated gifs and smilies on the site. Has it ever occurred to you that someone must sit down and make all these? The smiley sets I can understand but dancing supers? What’s that about?

And who sits down to make an eyeball poking through a hole in a screen?



The ones that make fun of a situation or person I can cope with:



But some are just plain odd:



Either way - whatever the reason, and whoever is out there making this stuff, we like them! And our stats show that you do too!

Does the site need porn?

There seem to be two sorts of fun web sites like Friday Fun.

Those like ours that started as a bit of fun and grew into something that thousands of people visit each day, looking for a laugh. Mostly not for profit.

And then there are those that set themselves up primarily as businesses to charge companies that want to seed their viral marketing campaigns.

Oh and there’s money to be made! A recent viral I was involved with, cost several 10s of thousands of our nice British pounds to seed properly. That meant getting it listed on sites and blogs where hundreds of thousands of people would see it, copy it, send it on and get the ‘viral’ aspects of the job done. And to be fair, it did well.

However, almost all the sites were covered in porn. “Why?” you ask. The answer, it seems, is to drive up traffic. Sadly in a world of numbers, the thing that brings the punters back in droves, is porn. Amazing huh?

So why no porn on Friday Fun? Well two reasons really. First we are not a money making operation - we do it for fun. Sure we get paid for some of the clips, but you know what, they still need to make us laugh first. We hand pick every item we list - if they are not funny, they ain’t there!

And the other reason is we really do believe there must be space for just ONE site on the web that adults can happily send their kids to, without worrying about what they see.

So if you want smut, porn, snuff or scat, go somewhere else. So we may not make money this way but at least one little corner of the web is sticking with it’s principles.

Take it or leave it.

You're Beautiful

I happen to like the song by James Blunt. The video is weird and deserves to have the piss taken out of it. So I was pleased to find that one of our silly British sketch shows has done just that:



Like it?

And then for people who work in those lovely cubicles, here's a version for you ...

To Spam or not to Spam

So here’s a weird one. We use (even pay for) an official, above board, email service, to allow people to get updates on what we’ve added to Friday Fun.

“Fine” you think. They opt in, they confirm, they reconfirm, they receive the email, they open it, they laugh. Job done!

Not so!

On average only 47% of recipients open the emails they receive from Friday Fun. I’m told that’s great compared with a 37% industry average. But that’s for business selling stuff to punters. We’re not selling anything. We’re giving away fun … for free! How can so many people opt in for some fun, then ignore it? Perhaps their spam filters are getting there first? But for 53% of emails - no way!

So then we find of all the people that open the emails, only 62% actually click on a “funny”. So what do the rest do? Go “Oh yeah some fun I asked for” then delete it? Well apparently so! But why? I give in. Again, the experts say I should be happy as the average click-through rate is 8.9% - but I already explained why that makes no sense.

So maybe they opt-out? No - less than 0.5% do. Maybe they ain’t there? Nope - under 4% bounce.

So here’s the thing - 100s of people who ask for our emails don’t open them. Blah!