itt: times p4k got it right

http://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14880-my-beautiful-dark-twisted-fantasy/

Imagine you are the head of an online publication that writes reviews on a form of media. The type of media is inconsequential: whether it's film/theatre, music, interactive; it 's all applicable. Since you are the head of an online publication, you have access to analytics and metrics which can often be quite comprehensive. You can also likely see how people use your website, how they migrate from one article to the other.

You want to increase readership, and thereby worth in your website. However, this requires the antithesis of what the idea of a "critique" is. Instead of impartial analysis, you must impart guided advertising. Rather than opinion, you express manipulative rhetoric. There's an easy way to do this: have the media creators or curators pay for positive reviews. But that's too blatant, too messy: if word were to get out about the pay-to-play method of your publication, serious ethics complaints would afflict your organization.

So complete advertising, devoid of critique is not practical if you want to increase value. But remember: you have the gift of analytics!

Overwhelmingly, the readership prefers Hip Hop over Rock, Social Politics over Meta-Drama, or Action-Adventure to Real-Time Strategy. An album to get high marks prompts much more clicks and certain writers get greater public reaction than others. This data is very important: with it, you can make seemingly innocuous opinions into dangerously marketable pieces. Oftentimes, you can catch people into cycles of habitually returning to your website simply because you've catered to the way they browse the most.