Making Money from the Swine Flu – Shirts and Games Appear on the Web

With the way advertising works today and the internet, it didn’t take long for shirts and games to appear. If you don’t get enough with just the daily news updates, you can now entertain yourself too. We just can’t get away from entertaining ourselves it appears, no matter what the topic is. Perhaps this is a way to relieve stress levels?

As this article states too, watch out for the spammers on the topic, they are out there too. BD

Over the last few days, the TechCrunch tips box has been flooded with pitches from companies looking to capitalize on ‘Swine Flu’, the potentially pandemic disease that is currently freaking out a significant portion of Earth’s inhabitants. Now that everyone is stressing about it, what better time to make a buck, right?

First, there’s Flu Shirts, an online T-Shirt marketplace brought to you by some of the people behind Groopvine. The store has a variety of shirts mocking the current hysteria, emblazoned with taglines like “Maybe the Muslims were right about pigs” and “My dad went to Mexico and all he got me was swine flu”.

Then there’s Swine Fighter a Flash game from the guys who brought you HeyZap. Gameplay consists of clicking on diseased pigs to inject them with something and make them say, “Oink!” The game has done quite well, hitting the Digg front page and seeing over 150,000 game plays in only 24 hours. It also features a handful of guidelines from the CDC, though they’re so far below the fold I suspect very few people actually saw them.