This Is Not Satire

August 8, 2011 7:28 PM

Venerable satirical website The Onion will soon implement a paywall for non-US readers. The first 5 articles a month are free, and after that they will cost $2.95 monthly or $30 annually. The AV Club will not be affected.
posted by Lovecraft In Brooklyn (95 comments total)

This is a joke, right??
posted by zachlipton at 7:30 PM on August 8, 2011 [3 favorites]

I don't think there has ever been a month in which I've had to read 5 articles from Onion.
posted by vidur at 7:31 PM on August 8, 2011 [2 favorites]

It's almost like they're parodying a more established news site.
posted by Dr. Eigenvariable at 7:32 PM on August 8, 2011 [39 favorites]

Canadian man unreasonably irritated by confusing conflation of 'non-US', 'international' and 'overseas'.
posted by Adam_S at 7:32 PM on August 8, 2011 [41 favorites]

The A.V. Club has a sister?
posted by psoas at 7:32 PM on August 8, 2011 [3 favorites]

The Chaser and whatever its UK and Canadian equivalents are must be happy.
posted by Lovecraft In Brooklyn at 7:32 PM on August 8, 2011

AskMe
posted by Sys Rq at 7:33 PM on August 8, 2011

Wow, they've lifted this business model straight from half the bums in Chicago. They sell copies of The Onion (freely available from boxes on major corner) to tourists for a dollar a pop.
posted by phunniemee at 7:35 PM on August 8, 2011 [10 favorites]

I don't seem to be getting the popup, for some reason.
posted by Lovecraft In Brooklyn at 7:35 PM on August 8, 2011

I have a feeling I'm not alone in that I love The Onion but I never need to read beyond the headlines.
posted by bondcliff at 7:38 PM on August 8, 2011 [12 favorites]

Figures; reality is such that The Onion is increasingly indistinct from 'real' news.
posted by 2bucksplus at 7:38 PM on August 8, 2011 [5 favorites]

I just noticed this today and thought it was a joke. Another excellent way for me to waste time at work gone. Oh, internets, how you are beginning to force me to actually do things....
posted by lesbiassparrow at 7:38 PM on August 8, 2011 [1 favorite]

Comedy becomes commodity.
posted by twoleftfeet at 7:39 PM on August 8, 2011 [3 favorites]

Yeah, I really think you guys should look at the askme if you're annoyed about this. Perhaps theonion (and 'the browser' for that matter) should just merge with metafilter as pretty much everything posted on those two sites gets uploaded here as an FPP ten minutes later.
posted by joannemullen at 7:41 PM on August 8, 2011

In related news: NYTimes.com's Plan To Charge People Money For Consuming Goods, Services Called Bold Business Move
posted by farishta at 7:42 PM on August 8, 2011 [13 favorites]

The onion has always sucked.
posted by delmoi at 7:42 PM on August 8, 2011

I once made the mistake of posting an Onion "article" on MeFi. Yes, it was late & wine was involved. God, I wish there had been a paywall back then.
posted by R. Mutt at 7:46 PM on August 8, 2011 [4 favorites]

"Onion paywall forces despondent readers to write their own crappy joke stories."

"Due to recent Onion paywall, irate area man unable to complain to Onion about paywall."

"Recently paywalled Onion forced to shut down by poor business choices." CLICK HERE TO PURCHASE THIS ONION ARTICLE for $9.99.
posted by Salvor Hardin at 7:47 PM on August 8, 2011 [4 favorites]

So raise your hand if you thought that Onion Personals thing was a subtle and finely honed satire for years.
posted by The Whelk at 7:47 PM on August 8, 2011 [29 favorites]

The Onion Expands Internationally, if Canada Counts. Or not.
posted by googly at 7:47 PM on August 8, 2011

See, when I was in college The Onion came on paper. Real fucking paper. When you were done with it you gave it to someone else.

Oh yeah, and you had to drive to Iowa City to get it (up hill both ways).

Kids like delmoi have no sense of history.

True fucking story!

Sometimes, if you were lucky you would drive to Madison and get a few copies there while you were shopping for CDs in real music stores.
posted by cjorgensen at 7:47 PM on August 8, 2011 [8 favorites]

I thought the Onion was usually pretty funny but, damn. Now that I think about it. Yeah, you're absolutely right, delmoi. Just hard to argue with that logic.
posted by (Arsenio) Hall and (Warren) Oates at 7:48 PM on August 8, 2011 [9 favorites]

So raise your hand if you thought that Onion Personals thing was a subtle and finely honed satire for years.

I met my Canadian girlfriend through Onion Personals.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 7:52 PM on August 8, 2011 [10 favorites]

Didn't they try this already?
posted by Betty_effn_White at 7:54 PM on August 8, 2011

Remember, this is the second time theonion.com went behind a paywall. Back in 2004, they began charging $30 year to read their archives but abandoned that a year later and went back to being free. Now they have returned to charging $30/year, but are copying the New York Times pay model.

I can understand the Times asking online readers to pay, because reporting costs real money, and if you are reading over 20 articles a month, you should just subscribe to the paper already.

But is the Onion really not making enough money from its ads and merchandize and two TV shows to fund a bunch of comedy writers sitting in an office?
posted by riruro at 7:55 PM on August 8, 2011 [2 favorites]

The Onion of ten years ago would have been worth $2.95 per month.
posted by moorooka at 7:55 PM on August 8, 2011 [1 favorite]

I love The Onion but I never need to read beyond the headlines.

That's like never having read National Lampoon beyond the contents page.

Oh, right.
posted by Ardiril at 8:00 PM on August 8, 2011

Text was never good.
posted by This, of course, alludes to you at 8:00 PM on August 8, 2011

So raise your hand if you thought that Onion Personals thing was a subtle and finely honed satire for years.

This is actually the first I've heard otherwise :-[
posted by danb at 8:04 PM on August 8, 2011 [1 favorite]

Oh well, its not like the USD is very expensive these days to convert into from over here in the developing world
posted by infini at 8:04 PM on August 8, 2011 [5 favorites]

Awful Man Offers Witty, Acerbic Take On Everything He Sees

Though Bower's lightning-quick, whip-smart criticism occurs without pause, brother-in-law Peter Ulster, 34, said the deft ironist still manages to surprise those who know him by expertly dismantling their enthusiasm from an inexhaustible variety of angles.

"With Alan, you never see it coming," Ulster said. "You'll be discussing something you really enjoy—like, say, surfing or whatever—and you think he's engaged and agreeing with you, and then bam! He pulls the rug right out from under you with a spot-on remark about how it's a pretty feeble attempt to recapture one's long-past youth. He'll get you every time with that one."

posted by Rhaomi at 8:05 PM on August 8, 2011 [13 favorites]

The headlines are funny (sometimes), and the articles are like SNL skits turned into movies.

Comedy becomes commodity.

Well yeah, unless it's your uncle Phil at the party with 4 martinis down his gullet most comedy IS commodity. At least some "ART" it can be made for personal enjoyment/fulfillment, can't really see someone crafting a joke alone in a study, getting a quiet chuckle and then refusing to divulge it to the masses. "No... no.. this is too precious"
posted by edgeways at 8:11 PM on August 8, 2011 [1 favorite]

Perhaps theonion (and 'the browser' for that matter) should just merge with metafilter as pretty much everything posted on those two sites gets uploaded here as an FPP ten minutes later.

What are you talking about? Onion articles get deleted from the front page in a split second.
posted by Falconetti at 8:12 PM on August 8, 2011 [2 favorites]

The Onion of ten years ago would have been worth $2.95 per month.

And that's about what it cost.
posted by Room 641-A at 8:17 PM on August 8, 2011

The onion has always sucked.

Yeah but what is the question. What is the question? I dither, but it could be that they've invented fantastic new forms of sucking that are entirely worthy of attention by being better at sucking than anyone else in the history of sucking. This throwing the philosophical question and issue of sucking in general into a stark, harsh light, leading to those who suck most to question of logic or usefulness of sucking at all in the first place.

Did you ever think of that, eh? Did you?
posted by loquacious at 8:17 PM on August 8, 2011 [1 favorite]

I'm nostalgic about the days when every Thursday or possibly Wednesday was 'new Onion update day' at my college. But its still cutting. I was about to link to an example, but I just got paywalled.

Guess that's what I get for defending the site.
posted by Lovecraft In Brooklyn at 8:18 PM on August 8, 2011

And the reason they get deleted is because so many people still try posting them here Falconetti.
posted by joannemullen at 8:19 PM on August 8, 2011

The only thing I don't like about The Onion is the sleeper cell lizard people feeding the writing staff accurate stories about the future. It's terribly unsettling.
posted by loquacious at 8:22 PM on August 8, 2011 [17 favorites]

And the reason they get deleted is because so many people still try posting them here Falconetti.

I'm really confused. What's your objection here? I mean, even if Onion articles are regularly posted and deleted - apparently so fast that I've never seen one during its brief tenure before corext or Jessamyn get to it with their whacking-sticks - isn't that only really a problem for the mods? Aren't the rest of us totally insulated from it by their speedy Onion-purging? Saying "We may as well merge the Blue with the Onion because Onion articles show up here so often, even though they're deleted before anyone sees them," is basically gibberish.
posted by Tomorrowful at 8:25 PM on August 8, 2011 [4 favorites]

Our long national nightmare of humour and satire is over.
posted by blue_beetle at 8:28 PM on August 8, 2011 [11 favorites]

can't really see someone crafting a joke alone in a study, getting a quiet chuckle and then refusing to divulge it to the masses. "No... no.. this is too precious"

Dude, this is all I do.
posted by Uther Bentrazor at 8:30 PM on August 8, 2011 [7 favorites]

can't really see someone crafting a joke alone in a study, getting a quiet chuckle and then refusing to divulge it to the masses. "No... no.. this is too precious"

Posting it as a comment on MetaFilter is the next best thing...
posted by oneswellfoop at 8:33 PM on August 8, 2011 [1 favorite]

Posting it as a comment on MetaFilter is the next best thing.

Onion Readers, Listen Up! Metafilter offers same high quality soundbytes for one time fee of USD 5, remains valid for a lifetime AND you get to answer back! Apply Now, doors closing at midnight PST.
posted by infini at 8:39 PM on August 8, 2011

So it's free for USians, but behind a paywall for non-USians?

That's a pretty lazy way to punish readers for the fact that the marketing guys can't work out how to deal with international advertisers.
posted by UbuRoivas at 8:40 PM on August 8, 2011 [8 favorites]

What's your objection here?

Pretty sure her objection is to the notion that she is every bit as much 'of MetaFilter' as the rest of us.
posted by Sys Rq at 8:45 PM on August 8, 2011 [2 favorites]

So raise your hand if you thought that Onion Personals thing was a subtle and finely honed satire for years.

I'm too lazy to find her/him right now, but my favorite AV Club poster of all time used the same picture that always showed up in the Onion personal ads as their profile pic for AV Club comments. And AFAIK never acknowledged that fact.

Brilliant.
posted by graphnerd at 8:47 PM on August 8, 2011 [1 favorite]

I'm nostalgic about the days when every Thursday or possibly Wednesday was 'new Onion update day' at my college.

I had a friend in high school who was from Wisconsin and claimed to know the people who wrote the Onion. He came back from vacation and gave me a paper edition as a gift. I had no idea at the time that it was an actual print paper. It was also the first time my little isolated small town Christian self had ever seen the types of ads that are run in alt weeklies. That you could seriously get away with printing THAT was the biggest shock of reading it.

A couple of years later some friends and I were in Milwaukee for a concert. They were delightfully surprised to see me on a bench reading though the pages of the Onion. They had no idea it existed outside of a website.

In my late teens, I had this idea that a cool city in America = one where you could pick up a free copy of the Onion
posted by riruro at 8:51 PM on August 8, 2011 [1 favorite]

In my late teens, I had this idea that a cool city in America = one where you could pick up a free copy of the Onion

Seeing free copies of The Onion in New York was always fun. I had a friend who got them mailed to him too.

If the AV Club starts charging I'll probably pay.
posted by Lovecraft In Brooklyn at 8:53 PM on August 8, 2011 [1 favorite]

So it's free for USians, but behind a paywall for non-USians?

That's a pretty lazy way to punish readers for the fact that the marketing guys can't work out how to deal with international advertisers.

No, it's just payback for using the execrable term "USians".
posted by adamdschneider at 9:06 PM on August 8, 2011 [19 favorites]

The AV Club will not be affected.

Well, OK then, that's good. But if it were, I'd just use a proxy to get there.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 9:13 PM on August 8, 2011

I had a friend in college who started basically every conversation with either "Did you see that Onion article?" or "Guess what I learned about ants today?"

If the Onion ever goes behind a real paywall, I truly fear for the ability of grad students to relate to people outside of their field. It'll be ants all the time!
posted by Winnemac at 9:21 PM on August 8, 2011 [3 favorites]

I had this idea that a cool city in America = one where you could pick up a free copy of the Onion

And here is the part of this I'm not grokking: The Onion isn't the same as The New York Times, in that print versions of The Onion are also free, so it's not like they're losing money as readers drop subscriptions or buying the morning paper at the newsstand or whatever in favor of going online for content. Am I missing something here?
posted by naoko at 9:24 PM on August 8, 2011

"And the reason they get deleted is because so many people still try posting them here Falconetti."

First off, a quick scan of the "onion" tag shows that the vast majority is from the AV Club, which is totally a different beast.

Second off, that only gets posted about once a month.

So, unless you care to prove that assertion, I guess the most reasonable assumption is that this is another baby-eating dingo fantasy from our antipodean Jenleigh knock-off, posted (I assume) because there were no obvious Muslim targets to slag, so MetaFilter becomes the next best target.
posted by klangklangston at 9:25 PM on August 8, 2011 [9 favorites]

Ten years ago I used to wait for every Wednesday when the new Onion was published online...
posted by KokuRyu at 9:31 PM on August 8, 2011 [2 favorites]

And here is the part of this I'm not grokking: The Onion isn't the same as The New York Times, in that print versions of The Onion are also free, so it's not like they're losing money as readers drop subscriptions or buying the morning paper at the newsstand or whatever in favor of going online for content. Am I missing something here?

Afaik, an issue faced by many websites in the developed world with local (to them) advertisers is that they often have numerous visitors from around the world who may not be relevant to the advertising/or be of interest, and rack up charges for the hosts by hogging bandwidth. Often, visitors from certain countries are blocked in order to save costs.

Alternate approaches include the BBC's which offers an ad free environment to their readers in the UK (who are already supporting the Beeb) but international visitors are now seeing advertising.
posted by infini at 9:33 PM on August 8, 2011 [1 favorite]

Meanwhile, I was just reading Metafilter without logging in and along came this gem of an advert on the front page:

"Editions by AOL. The magazine that reads you."

Paywalls are one thing, if you needed definitive evidence that online media is scraping the bottom of the barrel, I'd say it's that they are now lifting magazine concepts straight from the Yakov Smirnoff joke.
posted by dixiecupdrinking at 9:46 PM on August 8, 2011 [1 favorite]

Really I just had to share that ad copy with someone. WTF AOL?
posted by dixiecupdrinking at 9:47 PM on August 8, 2011 [1 favorite]

The advertising vs international visitors thing makes sense, but it's still crazy; people inside the US (where the vast majority of Onion articles are relevant) are much much more likely to pay than people outside, where only a small proportion of articles are relevant etc.

Paywalls can - I believe - certainly be done right, but damn if papers aren't continually underestimating their readers and overestimating the value and spread of their content.
posted by smoke at 10:20 PM on August 8, 2011

The advertising vs international visitors thing makes sense, but it's still crazy; people inside the US (where the vast majority of Onion articles are relevant) are much much more likely to pay than people outside, where only a small proportion of articles are relevant etc.

Existential despair and human stupidity are universal.
posted by Lovecraft In Brooklyn at 10:37 PM on August 8, 2011 [1 favorite]

You suck gangrenous lab monkey testicles.

In all fairness, they're meant to be savoured.
posted by Sys Rq at 11:12 PM on August 8, 2011 [4 favorites]

dixiecupdrinking: also relevant, it seems that Editions is not available outside the US. (At least not here in Australia, so I'm making the leap)
posted by dumbland at 11:35 PM on August 8, 2011

Meanwhile, I was just reading Metafilter without logging in

Whoa, wait....you can log out??
posted by nevercalm at 12:10 AM on August 9, 2011 [4 favorites]

Whoa, wait....you can log out??

Anytime you like, but you can never leave









sorry, i'll go home now
posted by infini at 12:12 AM on August 9, 2011 [2 favorites]

Area man uses proxy to pretend he's not area man
posted by 3mendo at 1:15 AM on August 9, 2011 [12 favorites]

If we're really lucky The Onion will sell the Canadian rights to an inferior Canadian site called The Leek whose distribution method will blow compared to the American version. And then every time someone links to an Onion article we'll be redirected to the Leeks' home page (instead of the article we were interested in) with no way to find the article because the originating link was completely context free.
posted by Mitheral at 1:30 AM on August 9, 2011 [5 favorites]

The "paywall" can be circumvented by hitting stop on your browser just after the page loads but just before the obscuring popup appears. It wouldn't surprise me if they were fully aware of this and considered it a feature, not a bug, in much the same way that it's a bit inconvenient but not impossible to copy music off an iPod.
posted by chmmr at 1:38 AM on August 9, 2011 [1 favorite]

I never understood how The Onion became so huge. Midwestern obvious dumb humor. OH WOW what a funny juxtaposition... what a clever piece of wordplay. How did The Onion become so popular? Any average American moron (myself included) sitting on a couch riffing with some friends about current events could come up with ideas/headlines as funny as The Onion. If this isn't a joke, then wow, they're even lamer than I already knew they were.
posted by ReeMonster at 1:48 AM on August 9, 2011

I haven't read it for years - like the UK equivalent The Daily Mash, the joke ends once you've read the headline and thought, deadpan Hollywood laugh style, 'Oh, that's funny'. I would pay for the AVClub, though. I don't read Savage Love but I love the articles on the US shows I follow that are hard to find over here (Party Down and Parks and Rec, I mean you!)
posted by mippy at 1:59 AM on August 9, 2011

I've never tried this "onion", but obviously having mass-produced jokes shipped to you all the way from a flyover state isn't going to give you the best experience. Personally, I only laugh at sustainably raised, in-season jokes crafted by local artisans making a fair living wage.
posted by Pyry at 2:49 AM on August 9, 2011 [4 favorites]

I'm in tears.
posted by buzzman at 3:02 AM on August 9, 2011

I never understood how The Onion became so huge. Midwestern obvious dumb humor.

Oh my. Quite the scathing review.

That same Midwestern dumb humor helped to shape The Daily Show after Job Stewart took the helm in '99 (See Karlin, B., Javernaum, D.). Midwestern dumb humor (joining forces with their Canadian counterparts...WONDER TWINS! FORM OF...CULTURAL LEGACY!) has been responsible for the lion's share of SNL comedy over the decades (via Second City). So, lay off the rant about Midwesterners and their humor before we knock you upside the head with our ear of corn.

I won't deny that I feel The Onion was sharper in the late 90's, when it was still only print and less widely available. My Onion print edition memory was when I was working for Habitat for Humanity in Costa Rica in 1998? (1999? It's been so long.) A certain famous actress ended up on the project at the time and we discussed briefly how we both enjoyed The Onion. She had to leave the project for 48 hours to fly back to the States and accept some award. When she returned to Alajuela, she handed me the most recent edition of The Onion. I was having a miserable week health wise, and was going quite mad with a sinus and lung infection that I could not kick. The Onion was a welcome distraction from that misery.
posted by jeanmari at 3:10 AM on August 9, 2011 [5 favorites]

*stands behind jeanmari with kleenex*
posted by infini at 3:40 AM on August 9, 2011

I haven't read it for years - like the UK equivalent The Daily Mash, the joke ends once you've read the headline and thought, deadpan Hollywood laugh style, 'Oh, that's funny'.

Sometimes; sometimes the articles are pitch-perfect slices of the absurdity and despair at the heart of the human condition.
posted by acb at 4:05 AM on August 9, 2011 [1 favorite]

in the late 90's, when it was still only print and less widely available

The Onion was definitely available on the web in the late '90s; I remember reading it in college out on the West Coast and being gobsmacked years later when I found out there was a print edition too.
posted by psoas at 4:10 AM on August 9, 2011 [1 favorite]

I like the articles where they say 'fuck' a lot.
posted by box at 4:40 AM on August 9, 2011

From the AV Club piece "We’ve also found that our many international users, especially those in the UK, are already used to paying for digital content, hence our testing it there."

Or "The Brits are getting gouged already, they won't mind a bit more". Which is not only deeply condescending, but judging by the very poor subscription rates at the Times is also a bad misjudgement.
posted by Hogshead at 5:06 AM on August 9, 2011 [1 favorite]

Local Man Admits To Being Too Lazy To Remove Rarely Used Onion From Newsreader Subscriptions
posted by digsrus at 5:06 AM on August 9, 2011

The interesting thing about The Onion's personal ads is that they were/are operated by a company called Spring Street Networks, which also did the personals for Salon, Nerve, Gawker and a few other places. And all the user profiles were lumped into one big database with separate gateways. This led to some confusion on first dates.

I speak from experience.
posted by Hogshead at 5:11 AM on August 9, 2011

Any average American moron (myself included) sitting on a couch riffing with some friends about current events could come up with ideas/headlines as funny as The Onion.

Uh huh. Just like all those armchair quarterbacks totally could play better than the pros on Monday.
posted by kmz at 5:26 AM on August 9, 2011 [1 favorite]

See, when I was in college The Onion came on paper. Real fucking paper.

It still does come on paper.

When I was in high school, a friend would visit his dad who lived on Milwaukee's East Side once a week. He'd bring a stack of Onions with him and distribute them like they were samizdat. The jokes were funny, but even beyond that, the stuff in the second half of the paper (the AV Club), introduced me to a world of music and movies and sex advice (way before I needed it) that would have otherwise been closed off to me.
posted by drezdn at 5:31 AM on August 9, 2011

The Onion is available on paper in a couple of places in Austin, TX.
posted by Renoroc at 5:35 AM on August 9, 2011

Just like all those armchair quarterbacks totally could play better than the pros on Monday.

My kid could have painted that comment.
posted by box at 5:46 AM on August 9, 2011

delmoi's critical analyses have always sucked.
posted by Eideteker at 6:14 AM on August 9, 2011 [1 favorite]

It's mid-western dumb humor that runs this country.
posted by Ardiril at 6:33 AM on August 9, 2011

This thread has the highest percentage of "I am old" comments I've ever seen on MeFi.
posted by adamdschneider at 6:49 AM on August 9, 2011

I will say that the Onion is one of those websites where it really was their terrible redesigns that made me stop reading. When they were breaking every mediocre story into three online pages, it just wasn't worth clicking through to see how it ended, especially since that was before they cut the print edition in LA (though that was kind of obnoxious itself, as it would routinely jump to the web — jumps are known in newspaper and mag business to essentially kill off two-thirds of the readers following through, and that's just jumping in the same piece of paper you already have in your hand. Jumping to the web was just moronic).
posted by klangklangston at 7:34 AM on August 9, 2011

I don't suppose it's a coincidence that they're trying to break into television.
posted by Stagger Lee at 7:45 AM on August 9, 2011

I don't suppose it's a coincidence that they're trying to break into television.

How hard can it be? I see crackheads break into TVs all the time. They usually just use a rock to smash the end of the tube off to get at the copper coils.
posted by loquacious at 8:00 AM on August 9, 2011

What, and pass up the opportunity to throw a television from a great height? I guess that's why they call it 'dope.'
posted by box at 8:49 AM on August 9, 2011

Well, I've always liked The Onion and have always looked forward to Thursdays when I can pick it up. For free. Correct me if I'm wrong, but the USA has been tragically bereft of satirical humor for a long time. The first few years of The National Lampoon were good. Then...

Oh, and if you didn't know this (and this explains why some people only read the headlines) the way the paper is crafted is that the editorial staff sits around and makes up the headlines first. The stories follow a predictable format. (Still, funny!)
posted by kozad at 9:14 AM on August 9, 2011 [1 favorite]

Anonymous are to destroy Facebook – for privacy’s sake
posted by infini at 9:29 AM on August 9, 2011

Ooops wrong thread
posted by infini at 9:29 AM on August 9, 2011

The Onion was definitely available on the web in the late '90s;

Yes, it probably was. But in 1997, the only things I was reading on the web were CNN.com, Yahoo Mail, and...hmm. Yup, those were the only two things I was reading on the web in 1998.

................ \/ ...is old. And crotchety.
posted by jeanmari at 10:29 AM on August 9, 2011

The onion has always sucked.

You're doing it wrong. That "life" thing.
posted by secondhand pho at 11:00 AM on August 9, 2011

It was- I used to read Pathetic Geek Stories on there in 1998 or so.
posted by mippy at 2:25 PM on August 10, 2011