This is from the latest Marketing Sherpa Case Study about the folks at Despair Inc.:

The Sewell’s and their partner Dr. E.L. Kersten (who has since become infamous as the ‘bad manager’ photographed on the site) founded Despair Inc. They soon discovered it’s fairly easy to get great viral traffic if your content is funny enough.

(Side note: They also learned well-meaning fans would steal the content to post elsewhere. Now Despair includes an URL on all images that a fan might be tempted to take.) [Emphasis Rob Z.]

Can you imagine? Customers blatantly steal their content from their websites and, rather than, oh, I dunno, launch a multi-million dollar campaign to catch the crooks, they find a way to not only capitalize on this theft but make it actually work in their favor.

Oh those silly, silly, wealthy fools.