Hat Tips Don’t Pay The Bills, Websites Told

A SHOCKING new economic study has revealed that hat tips don’t pay the bills, shaking a number of high profile websites to their very core.

Hat tips, the currency used by many websites to pay people for extensive work carried out all by freelance content generators, have been a prominent feature of publications here in Ireland and abroad, but after several brave viral content makers shared their experiences with leading economists, the harrowing truth was revealed.

“I didn’t even ask for my content to be shared, but I got this cheque for one hat tip like a month later,” explained Peter Tynan, an Irish man who filmed himself switching on an immersion earlier this year only to find the video was shared by over 4,000 Irish websites.

“I was over the moon initially as hat tip after hat tip rolled in, and I thought ‘great time to spend these bad boys’, but no shop would take them,” Tynan revealed, from his grubby apartment, decorated only by an empty fridge.

Tynan is not alone as the practice of ‘deferred hat tips’ was also uncovered.

Deferred hat tips are paid out by websites long after they are found to be sharing other people’s content without crediting them, as was the case with Annie Brennan, whose 10,000 word thesis ‘Copy & Paste Culture: Stelaing Content & Making a Killing’ was reproduced on all Irish websites in full without credit.

Economists Paul Krugman and Thomas Picketty, who carried out the study, are frankly shocked by their results.

“I’ve never been left so perplexed by a study in my life as an economist, hat tips don’t seem to be a tangible thing,” Piketty explained to WWN.

“We can’t rule out some sort of elaborate fraud being perpetrated by websites, I mean the ‘hat tip’ has absolutely no monetary value in any currency, it’s almost like the hat tip means nothing,” Krugman concluded.