THE LOADED X-RAY GUN

From Fleet Street to Tabloid Superhighway 

We’ve all been there, we’ve all been tempted to click. We should be working, researching something on the Internet, but we’re distracted by that bizarre photo and intriguing headline shimmering at the corner of our screen. Okay, just one little click, one quick peep … and before you know it you’ve wasted fifteen precious minutes scrawling through ‘Ten Really Awkward School Photos’ and then reading about Mark Zuckerberg’s glamorous new home. The new wave of tabloid websites, or rather, parasitic hubs that beg, borrow and steal from the rest of the Internet, can be high on entertainment and low on moral fibre, in true Fleet Street tradition. WTFHub and Wahoha are two classic time-wasters. You could say that wtfhub.com panders to the female market with its celebrity tidbits and sickeningly cute dogs dressed like Ewoks while the raffish wahoha.com is something of a mutant Lads’ magazine, seriously hung up on celebrity breasts, fast cars, and before-and-after bodybuilding pics. Both hubs are big on headlines and lots of lists and glossy images; and very short on text. Oh yeah, and they seem to have an unhealthy obsession with everything Mark Zuckerberg. According to w3snoop, the kitty-cute WTFHub receives just 50 unique visitors per day compared to the staggering 180-plus million daily visitors at the testosterone-pumped wahoha.com. If these figures are any indication, then it seems the men are wasting a whole lot more time online than their female counterparts. It doesn’t matter which site you choose, though, because many of their articles are interlinked, and linked to other similarly gaudy sites, the lot of them leeching off the rest of the Web like an invisible army of drooling paparazzi.

Movie poster for 1932 Freaks

All in the name of good fun, of course. Click on a story (or more likely an image) at WTFHub or Wahoha and you never know where you’ll end up: one instant you’re chuckling over the 15 biggest movie mistakes at feedbox.com (“Quality news and entertainment”, their masthead promises us), the next you’re frowning at the Schwarzenegger Dog at animalslook.com (an over-muscled bully-whippet with mutated genes). Quite a few of these eye-popping images are obviously photoshopped and some of the sites don’t even bother to lie about this. In any case, if you’re not careful with this kind of surfing you’ll soon have a dozen windows open on your screen, the half of them trying to fleece money out of you or trying to cajole you into making that leap from soft celebrity porn to the harder stuff. Indeed, some of the grubbier sites appear to be booby-trapped with hard-porn backlinks. For all its girly pomp, WTFHub is my pick of the litter for harmless fun. If you can get past the cute cats in hoodies there are some gold nuggets to be gleaned here. The Top 12 Most Modified People, for instance, is well worth wasting a few minutes on (and you can find variations on this highly popular list at half-a-dozen different tabloid hubs). In the old day, you'd have to go to the cinema to see Tod Browning's Freaks, or rent the video from Blockbuster. Now all the freaks are on the internet under the aegis of 'modified'. I'm probably just jealous. In fact, I can never decide who from this bunch of lovable wackos I’d like to be seen out having a coffee with: Rick the Zombie Boy, who is tattooing his entire body in homage to the living dead; the Enigma, who's completely tattooed with puzzle pieces and likes to hammer nails through his nose; or the truly disturbing Catman, whose extreme plastic surgery has give rise to permanent cat whiskers, teeth filed to sharp points, and the weirdest cheek implants you’re ever likely to come across. Now back to work!