I never had a treehouse in my backyard growing up, but I always wished I would have. We had a forest in my backyard in New York, but unfortunately, I wasn’t blessed with the skills to build things and my parents weren’t the kind of people that built stuff either.

The allure of a treehouse for me, was having a place I could call my own. A secret place where I could plan my world domination in peace, without my mom asking me if I wanted a sandwich or some lemonade. She wouldn’t be allowed into the tree fort because she wouldn’t have the password, the keyword, to get into the tree house. My treehouse would be much like Dunder Mifflin in the Dwight Shrute protocol era, where he required the employees to give a certain password every day, or they would get the steam. He was so strict on the password that it even backfired on himself.

Whether you know it or not, words have a lot of power these days. When I was young and naive, I used to think some things were actually free. Things like water, air and words. My bubble first burst on the free theory when companies started selling water in bottles and claiming that they were extracted from the pure, untouched snow drifts of Alaska. Since the water was from only purest springs of water, and they came with a fancy picture of the mountain spring they came from, they decided that not only must they charge you for the water, but they must charge a premium price for it. They decided that it must be even more than soda, milk or juice too.

Certainly something as abundant than air could never not be free though, right? I could never imagine someone charging for air. Until I went to a gas station and needed air for my tires. Sure enough, there was a pump, but they charged $2.00 per minute. Then I heard that there were these new things popping up in Las Vegas called Oxygen bars as an escape from the smoky casinos where you could pay for a much cleaner version of air. And if you haven’t been lately, just take a tour of your local hospital and look at all the people that have breathing problems. The hospital created a machine that allows people that are having a hard time breathing that gives them pure oxygen. If you think they are getting that oxygen for free, then you don’t know Jack Black.

Most certainly words are free though, right? We have free speech right? And I can write as many of them as I want on this blog, and no one is charging me to write them right? Well, technically, yeah, but I do pay WordPress a yearly fee for getting the bensbitterblog.com without the WordPress at the end, and I pay them for extra storage so I can get more Gifs up on here. So I guess I’m paying for words.

What about everyone else though? Ever paid for a magazine, or a newspaper? I guess you are paying for some pictures, but mostly for the words right? How about a book? Those are almost exclusively words. I went to college and paid for a lot of books, and I’m pretty sure I didn’t read most of them. You could probably avoid paying for a book by going to the library a lot, but paying for words are almost unavoidable. Have you ever paid for song? You’re paying for the music, but there’s also a lot of words involved there too.

The craziest part to me is that I have a full-time job that almost completely relates to not even purchasing words, but renting them. I’m an online ad buyer and I rent words from Google, and Microsoft. My company pays me and Google and Microsoft millions of dollars a year (Microsoft and Google millions, not me) to bid on keywords that allow my ads to show close to the top of the page on Google and Bing. I tell my computer to tell Google to bid on things all day long. All my hard work is in hopes that when you go to Google and type in words that I want you to, that you will click on my ad and buy what it tells you to do. I pay Google $.63 a click in hopes that I sell you on buying my product for much more than $.63.

It’s a game, and I play it everyday, in the hopes that I spend less money on that click than you spend on my product. It’s basically an online auction that my company plays every day for words.

Google and Microsoft Bing make trillions of dollars a year by charging millions of people dozens of cents per click so they can rent words. It’s a high stakes game of Bridge, a fight to the death with competitors for Words. Me and two other people spend almost all of our entire day using our digital prowess and words to take down our competitors and win the battle of words.

Are words important? Apparently, and in my case, they are the closest thing from free. In Google and Bing’s case, they are the thing that makes most of their money. Someday, when I put enough of my words in a row that make sense, I’m going to then get those words bound into a collection of pages that contain those words, and then use Google and Bing to sell my book to millions of people. In that case, I’m going to make sure that my words are very expensive.

Sticks and Stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me…is about the least accurate statement I’ve ever heard. Sticks and stones have never broken my bones, and words have not only hurt me, but made and cost me money, and built and destroyed empires. I plan to make my empire on words and they will definitely hurt you.

Bitter Friday Giftures are incoming…

I always wanted treefort…

A place where I could keep my parents…

The key to keeping people out of the club…

And like Dwight use steam…

When I was growing up…

But then some person…

Now water costs more…

Good thing air is still free…

Well at least words are free…

Not to Google…

And certainly not from me…

ARRGGGHHHHHH

Bitter Keyword Ben