3 ms·

I wonder if the bizarreness of the images is part of a guerilla marketing attempt to create viral posts like this.

• enthdegree 9y ago
  Not only that, they seem consistently gross and provocative. I would expect randomly generated covers to be more mundane. This isn't the first the internet has seen something like this. (Remember Horse ebooks?)
  • asciimo 9y ago
    They may be optimizing for views. These provocative covers may have risen to the top through analytics because people are like "wtf?" click So they make more of those.
• jdietrich 9y ago
  I very much doubt it. I think the more straightforward explanation is far more likely - that someone has fed an Amazon listings bot with a big library of cheap or pirated stock photos. If you look on any stock photo site, you'll see huge numbers of unusual images with very specific titles. For stock photography, it makes perfect sense; there's a very long tail of articles that need cheap illustration. Healthcare is a very lucrative niche, hence the preponderance of medical images. Obviously this dataset is massively unsuited to this particular purpose, but if the cost of a listing is effectively zero, then there's no real downside to being completely indiscriminate. Given that the seller has listed nearly 32,000 items, I don't think that there's any amount of human decision-making involved.
  • hengheng 9y ago
    For a publicity stunt you'd have to license the best of /r/wtfstockphotos.