There's a new craze on the internet
and it even has the comments trolls scratching their bitter invective-filled
loser-in-the-basement heads. It's called unboxing.
In order to understand unboxing you
need to understand how folks who post stuff on YouTube can get money.
Basically, if you post something that keeps a viewer's interest long enough for
one of those annoying ads to pop up on the screen and get in the middle of whatever
it is a viewer is watching, you get a tiny amount of money. The more tiny
amounts you accumulate the richer you'll eventually be.
"Unboxing" videos are
perfectly suited to this paradigm. Unboxing is the unhurried unwrapping and
taking out of a box of a piece of merchandise or technology. It's all done with
a certain amount of style and sometimes with slow background music
Kind of a product striptease.
The merchandise doesn't have to be
technologically oriented, though those sites are popular, as many folks like to
see a new iPhone or iPad unpacked with all the peripheral gadgetry on display.
(I like to peek at the Styrofoam
packing material.)
One site is making quite a fortune
unpacking Disney themed Kinder Eggs. Which are sort of packages within packages,
as you have your outer box, your foil around the egg, the candy confection of
the egg itself, and the "caution may contain choking hazard not for
children 3 and under" plastic egg inside the chocolate that is opened to
reveal a Disney character. Kids absolutely love the Kinder Egg unpacking
YouTube channel, which is being used as cheap electronic babysitting by harried
parents across the land.
I'm glad. The first unboxing
website I went to was weird. It had a short film of Mohammed Ali and George Foreman
just standing around doing nothing.
America, ya gotta love it.
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