A couple of days ago I ran the Princess Kate bare bottom picture that first saw the light of day in a German magazine called Bild. If you don't fancy scrolling back to that posting, here's the bit of the photo that we both know is only part that you are interested in seeing again.
The Daily Mail was running one of its we are outraged stories, and now the Guardian and Independent have got in on the act, with both posting stories joining in the faux outrage. The Independent even made the plain wrong allegation that the money shot of Kate was taken with the "camera between her legs." The fact that the female photographer was standing with the rest of the pack and had the good luck to be in just the right spot to grab the shot has not been allowed to get in the way of a good click baiting rant.
What are we to make of all this?
Well, the photographer was in the right place to grab the shot of a lifetime which she then sold to the highest bidder as any freelance would. The photo was bought by Bild who ran it to increase their circulation, and then the Mail, Guardian and Independent jumped on the bandwagon. They did not buy the photo, but they used their contrived outrage as click bait to increase the hits to their sites, and thus the revenues that accrue from the advertising that pays for it all.
As for little old me, I ran the photo because it amused me, and I knew that it would increase my stat-porn, which it duly did as I'm on the first page of Google for the Princess Kate Middleton upskirt photos. What can I say? I'm just good at search engine optimisation.
Come to think of it, so are the Guardian and Independent. Just check out the URLs for both stories that I have linked to above. The Independent manages to include Kate Middleton, upskirt pictures and Bild in its URL with the Guardian giving us bums and Duchess of Cambridge in its version. This is pure Google whoring, even to the extent of using Waity-Katy's maiden name, just in case someone uses that as a search term.
The point is that both Bild and yours truly are being honest with our venality. We are not pretending to give a tinker's cuss that this is about anything other than increasing our hits. The inhabitants of Grub Street are trying to pretend that this is somehow a great moral issue, when in reality what they are really doing is exactly what the rest of us did which is make the hit counter shoot up like a rocket.
I think that honesty is the best policy and that sanctimonious self-righteous gittery should be discouraged as a matter of course.
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