I had a chance yesterday to conduct an e-mail interview with the comic genius behind E-mails from an Asshole. The e-mails he sent were from a familiar name: Mike Anderson, the same Mike who accused a stranger of running over his dog. Here it is.
Fedorable: First off, who are you?
John: We can go with John. I’m a student at Penn State.
Fedorable: How did you get started writing hilarious e-mails?
John: It all started maybe a year ago, when I was trying to buy a car. I was looking through ads, and saw this ridiculous post in the “for sale” section where a woman was asking for a Ford Explorer for $1500. She even put a picture of herself up. I thought she was an idiot, and couldn’t let it go without messing with her. I tried selling her a piece of shit car, and she got very upset. It really amused me, and I started doing it to a lot of people whenever I was bored at class or work. I’ve always loved screwing with people though. I remember once when I was nine years old, I got my family kicked off of AOL for pissing off old people in a chat room.
Fedorable: Any e-mails gone horribly wrong?
John: A lot of people don’t actually read what I sent them. Some will respond to the most ridiculous shit with “that sounds good!” I remember once I sent a guy a picture of a BMW that was completely totaled, and he asked me when he could come check it out. Some people are too dumb to even realize that I am fucking with them. One woman was looking for a hot tub repair, and I told her how I would rig the hot tub with a hose hooked up to her sink faucet so she could add hot water. She told me that sounded good.
Sometimes, the people I am e-mailing are amused and it just turns into a regular conversation. Other times they will just completely curse me out and it is too unoriginal to post on the website. A lot of the responses I get are simply “fuck off!”
Fedorable: What kind of success has the site seen so far?
John: I’ve been really surprised at how popular it became. It really happened overnight. The first day, the site had 65,000 hits. Now it has been about a week and I am up to 800,000 hits from all around the world. I saw it was mentioned on comedycentral.com, which was pretty cool. Other sites like Digg and Reddit gave me a lot of traffic, as well. It is crazy to see how my e-mails are being posted on hundreds of message boards. Also, I’m actually getting a decent amount of money from ads and donations…I wasn’t expecting that, but it is nice to get money for doing something I love.
Fedorable: What efforts did you put into promotion? Or was it 100% viral?
John: Well, I posted the e-mails on a message board and showed my friends for a while and people thought they were hilarious. A lot of people suggested that I make a website. I really wasn’t planning on doing anything with them, but when I saw that people would actually go to a website, I made one. I posted the website on a few message boards, and it just blew up from there. Next thing I knew, people were posting it on tons of popular sites. I really didn’t do anything else to promote it. I told a couple friends, but I really don’t even tell my friends for the sake of getting hits anymore.
Fedorable: Lots of content creators and Internet marketers struggle daily to get this kind of exposure. Any tips for them?
John: My only tip would be to have good, entertaining content. I mean, look at my website. It is coded like shit, I probably only put like two hours of effort into actually coding it. It can be the best looking website out there, but if the content isn’t something that keeps people interested, nobody will tell anyone about it.
Fedorable: You’ve been doing it for a year. Does that mean you have a backlog of posts ready to go up? Do you plan to update the site regularly with new e-mails?
John: I had a backlog, but I posted a lot of those when I launched the site. I started with about 35 e-mails on the site. I am saving a few in case I run out of material, but I am still doing new e-mails. I plan on updating the site a few times every week. I do have a lot of e-mails that I probably won’t post just because I don’t find them as funny as others.
Fedorable: I’m sure people are excited to hear you’ll regularly update the site. Do you think the site’s success will hurt your efforts at creating new content, because of people becoming increasingly wary of online ads, either from your own e-mails or those of copycats?
John: I think it may have a minor impact on my efforts, but there are so many people out there, that I don’t think it will be that much of a problem. I try to single out ads that look like stupid, gullible people wrote them. A lot of people don’t even reply to my e-mails already, and they are the smart ones. I guess I feel that there will always be stupid people out there and they will always fall for my shit.
Fedorable: How about user submissions?
John: I don’t think I am going to accept user submissions. I’m sure some are funny, but I don’t want to have to pick and choose. Plus I am very lazy, and do not feel like programming anything that would handle user submissions. Maybe if the site gets really big, I would implement something like that.
Fedorable: You created a website because there were rumblings for a website. I’ve seen a few posts asking about a book. Do you think the format would make for a good book, and is it something you’d like to do?
John: I would like to make a book. I think it could be a good coffee table book or something. I am going to wait a while before I look into doing that, however. Even if it doesn’t sell, it would be cool to say I have a book. I’d like to think my life would be like David Duchovny’s in Californication, with bitches all over me because I wrote a book.
Fedorable: Since this was over e-mail, I was a bit worried that you would just mess with me for the entire interview. Did the thought ever cross your mind?
John: It did, but this is my first interview and I didn’t want to come off as an asshole. If someone I don’t like interviews me, I will probably just mess with them.
Fedorable: How should fans go about getting updates?
John: A lot of people are asking for an RSS feed, so I’ll probably set that up this weekend if I have time. I guess fans can just check the main page of my site for updates; they happen at random throughout the week.
—
Thanks to John for taking time out of his Internet trolling to give us some insight.
