Panic gripped the global business community on Thursday as reports of a new and widespread monetization virus shot through social media. F$JNews got involved when Phil Harmony, our Digital Marketing intern (really, our entire marketing staff), noticed something wrong with his hand.

It was, apparently, turning into money.

Naturally, we turned to our cut-rate health provider (provided by our cut-rate health insurance) for answers. On a 90-second Zoom call which required a co-pay that consumed the entirety of Phil’s monthly salary, we learned only that the Doctor had been seeing a number of other cases, had no idea what the risks were and had no information about possible causes or cures.

Luckily, where medical science falls short, F$JNew’s crack journalists are there to pick up the ball. We searched LinkedIn and found tens of thousands of other cases just like Phil’s. While they tended to start with just the fingers, almost all had progressed. In a few cases, the central nervous system itself had begun to jingle with the tell-tale signs of change. Most curiously, those who were most concerned about the phenomenon seemed to suffer the worst cases.

That was the hint that unlocked the mystery.

We brought on our crack Data Science team who analyzed the browser history of affected individuals and discovered a direct correlation between visits to WeirdSymptoms.com and the extent of the individual’s illness. Further digging revealed that WeirdSymptoms.com had recently hired Beth Murgeson, a brilliant biological engineer. As with many smaller organizations, WeirdSymptoms.com had figured that because Ms. Murgeson was smart, she could do marketing too. So, she was assigned a challenging task: monetize the user base.

What followed was almost inevitable. Ms. Murgeson introduced an otherwise harmless virus into the general population. She then implanted subliminal psycho-physical messages into media produced for WeirdSymptoms.com. If you were infected with the virus, and 99% of humankind is, every visit to WeirdSymptoms.com would further trigger the latent capabilities of Ms. Murgeson’s virus. Those latent capabilities? Literal monetization.

Ms. Murgeson has already implanted new subliminal psycho-physical messages into WeirdSymptoms.com media. These new messages deactivate the latent effects of the monetization virus. Phil is already looking better.

While the urgency of this phenomenon has passed, the case does raise the very real dangers of miscommunication between otherwise intelligent people in different fields. If you want to tell a story well, and in a way that crosses domains, consider hiring an expert – like F$JNews itself.

Also, we want to remind our readers that trying to self-diagnose weird symptoms can have drastic and dangerous effects. Please, please, consult with an expert before you convince yourself you’re dying of cancer.

Finally, we recommend installing Ms. Murgeson’s new virus protection software. We hear it’s like nothing else on the market.