Failure is a part of life. No one has never experienced failing because those who even tried not to fail, failed to fail (double negative? yeah just to press on my point) Take the most successful names for example: Bill Gates, Michael Jordan, and Oprah Winfrey. I'm sure they all had their low points before they started to experience the successes they are now enjoying. It is, after all, through several failures that we find out the benevolent path towards victory - from grander stages of career, fame, fortune, love and whatnot, to everyday mundane situations that may seem insignificant. Failure is not always about hardships and moping around and feeling sorry for oneself. There is constantly a lighter side to it, and the FAILblog has been successful (irony!) in encapsulating this.
Before anything else, why is it a Filipino online favorite?! Basically because all of you out there, Filipinos, from the Philippines, can't help but love blogs like these, just like the now "defunct" but oh so hilarious Hay! Men! Ang Blog ng mga Tunay na Lalake! (all of us who go to work everyday know that the FAILblog is a good way to kill time *winks*).
NOW, the FAILblog is just a weblog filled with pictures and videos of stupid signs, stupid designs that fail their very purpose, extremely dumb puns, major wipeouts, mind-boggling feats of idiocy, discreet and not-so-discreet signs and images that have sexual connotations, bad engineering and unfortunate situations, you will never again look at failure the same way. Enjoy a showcase of extreme lapse of judgments, some bordering on morbidity (but is sure to squeeze out some chuckles from you) while some bank on their sexual innuendo (warning, some may be nsfw). A big caption that says “FAIL” or a variation of it makes the failure all the more glaring. It’s not all about failing, though, as FAILblog posts the occasional "WIN" for extremely witty signs, write-ups or captions or extremely lucky situations.
The FAILblog has been so successful here in the Philippines and in the WWW that it provides a good chunk of the 5.5 million clicks a day to the Pet Holdings Empire (responsible for other novelty sites such as Once Upon a Win, Engrish Funny, GraphJam and I Can Has Cheezburger) to which it belongs to. It won in the 2009 Webby Awards in both the ”Weird” and “Funny” categories, making failures out of other more popular sites like Southpark and The Onion. There are even merchandize available now for FAILblog addicts. They have a section named “LOLmart”, a brilliantly named online store that captures the spirit of the site and sells items such as shirts, stamps, toys, magnets and buttons. It has even spawned a book that brought "failure" from the blogosphere to the printing press.
To add to the "success" side of failing, the FAILblog capitalizes on it's amused readers who are given the power to share on the blog their own fail findings making the site a unique and powerful crowdsourcing case study.
The irony of FAILblog's success is truly phenomenal. Who would’ve ever thought that so much failure can bring about so much success? So go ahead, visit FAILblog and be inspired to fail... Or laugh in the face of failure.. or, you know, something like that (FAIL.)
