My experiment in e-lebrity
Posted: Sunday, March 25, 2007 6:38 PM by Dateline EditorThe Mank Blog
by Josh Mankiewicz, Dateline correspondent
What do you get when you mix Mentos and diet coke?
What do you get when you eat a live praying mantis?
What do you get when you put on a rabbit suit and stage a bunch of fist fights?
The answer’s the same for all of them. What you get is an explosion of e-lebrity. In other words, you become famous....on the Internet.
Chances are, if you have access to a computer, you recognize one or all of these. Maybe you were the first to click on one of them. More likely, someone told you about it, or sent it to you.
Keith Richman runs the Web site Break.com , a sort of online machine for creating e-lebrities.
Keith Richman: You’re gonna go to lunch and you’re gonna tell people, “Have you seen that clip on the Internet?” The guys on the radio are gonna talk and tell their listeners, “You gotta log on to break.com and check it out.”
But whether you’re looking at break.com, which specializes in catchy, outrageous, and memorable video clips....or YouTube, which carries a much wider assortment of material, the lightning-in-a-bottle nature of some videos just can’t be explained....or denied.
Video of a German boy waiting impatiently for his computer to boot up was seen 9 million times in one month.
One minister’s daughter wanted her friends to go to church with her. They said okay, but on one odd condition – that she eat a live praying mantis. She didn’t just eat it. She ate it on camera . And it got on the Internet and then, a couple of million clicks later, she was famous...not as Joanna Respold, which is her name, and not as Joanna the minister’s daughter. Or Joanna the amateur actress... but as “bug girl.”
Mankiewicz: How was the bug?
Joanna Respold: It was little bitter, kind of like eating a tree, so the thorax was runny and then the rest of it was crunchy. I wouldn’t recommend it, although it is an excellent source of protein.
We interviewed bug girl at a Hollywood party for e-lebrities, thrown by break.com and featuring perhaps the most famous e-lebrity ever—a Website designer who achieved fame sitting right in front of a keyboard.
Gary Brolsma: I just submitted it for the heck of it. And I didn’t think it was gonna take off.
Gary Brolsma’s “Numa Numa” dance is one of the most-downloaded clips ever.
It didn’t make him rich, which is pretty much the rule, not the exception. Generally, viral videos fall into a couple of categories—the biggest of which includes videos like the ones you’ve just seen, that inadvertently became popular.
But there’s also a group of videos that were made specifically to attract Internet attention, like a guy miming to the song “Torn. ”
Another guy does a thing called "the evolution of dance."
What all of these have in common with the inadvertent group is that e-lebrities can’t afford to quit their day jobs.
Some of them did get a free trip when HBO flew Gary , the "evolution of dance" guy , and the Mentos boys to Vegas for live appearances at their comedy festival. It was a chance to turn e-lebrity into celebrity.
It lost a little in the translation. Usually, you just have to be happy with your achievement, even if it’s just consuming a live insect to get your friends to go to church.
Mankiewicz: You ate a bug for Christ.
Respold: Yeah, I ate a bug for Christ, exactly.
Break.com’s Richman says that money is rarely the reason people post videos.
Richman: If we put up a video, it’ll be seen usually about 400,000 times that day, and maybe 800,000 to a million in that week. And a lot of people are just gunning for that promotion. They’re not interested in payment they might receive from us.
That would include people like Floyd Lloyd.
His on-camera challenge to real celebrities turned him into an e-lebrity.
Mankiewicz: You don’t seem to really be trying to provoke anybody.
Floyd Lloyd: No—I’m just having fun.
And most of his celebrities seem to get that, and they play along.
Remember, I said “most” celebrities.
Sometimes the only people to turn a viral video into a commercial success have nothing to do with the actual video.
A slightly disturbing clip of a kid screaming on Christmas morning is real. And after it aired again and again on the Internet. Someone thought to make it into a TV commercial.
The truth is that it’s impossible to predict what will catch fire in cyberspace, and what won’t. Some of these videos are about as exciting as watching paint dry.
Which got us thinking.
We bought a canvas and some paint, and went to work. Then we posted it on YouTube. We called it “paint drying.”
Then we waited.
24 hours later, we were still waiting. We had only 10 hits. Not too good. Then again, it is video of paint drying. So we changed the title, from “paint drying” to “my triple-x project”.
And that made no difference. No one saw it. Well, we got 27 views, but on the Internet, that’s like no one. If these are viral videos, ours was positively bacterial. So instead of being an Internet video star, I’ll settle for being a supporting player.
