today the french newspaper “Le canard enchainé” is 100 years old.
it was created during world war 1 to fight official brainwashing (with some anarchist flavour)… It is alive and well and earns money … without any advertising or any sponsor of any political color! only readers make it profitable! it has almost no web site to speak of … everything is on old-fashioned paper!
its specialty: political gossip and insider infos…
long life to such newspapers! I hope it could be a role model: think of it … no advertising! Hmm such as some favorite websites 
Lets buy it and make it much more profitable!! Commies and anarchists don’t pay attention to advertising anyway. That’s a silly ideological position. First ads from Unicycle.com!!
Save up to 50% on car insurance with Gieco!
Yeah, this is not false advertising, they are positive you will not save 51% on car insurance compared to a loan shark. But it is pounded into your head. I cannot walk out into my yard and see a lizard and not wonder how much money I should be saving on car insurance. And I don’t even own a car.
Geico spends huge bucks on advertising how cheap they are. Shop around and you will see what an over priced money sucking scam they are.
Many years ago my mom signed me up for Consumer Reports magazine. They don’t accept ads from outside businesses (only advertise their own services), and they don’t test any product unless they buy it themselves, retail, and anonymously. It’s a magazine of truth, where the only opinions are explained in advanced, when they describe how their tests were done and were “trained judges” give their opinion of what tastes better, is more comfortable, etc.
Yup. They run 3 or 4 different ad campaings at once (the Gecko, they money-man on the motorcycle, the silly situations, etc.). Their name is an acronym: Government Employees Insurance COmpany. Back then, I’m pretty sure they were a good deal, like USAA is now. And I believe they still were after they went “public” and sold to everyone. But in the last 20 years, on those occasions when I’ve shopped the market, they were never even close to being the cheapest. Like so many other things, it’s the message, not the facts. They tell you you could save money, so you assume you will. This is how political campaigns work also…
Yeah, and it’s not better insurance
Some things are relative. A KH could be a crappy deal for some people, but at least you are getting a better unicycle. About ten years back I went shopping for the cheapest insurance for my van. This is the lowest legal coverage you can get, because I was driving a rusted version of a 15 year old Sun Uni, only it was a Ford van, with even worse upholstery.
The lizard at Geico was wearing a Rolex and said 1000$/yr. This is the cheapest you can get he told me. He nicely offered to cut the price to 550$ for 6 months. So I went back to my former agent, the formerly slimeball who jacked up my price after I did smack an old crabby lizard’s car (costing my insurance Co 900 $) from 300/ year to 375 $/yr… Suddenly he didn’t seem so bad.
I’d even think about not calling him a slimeball on an internet forum, but he doesn’t make a habit of riding dangerous vehicles backwards and smacking into things, so he won’t be on this forum.