As a journalist at PC World Australia:
Net celebrities are making their way from the Internet to TV in VH1's search for the 40 Greatest Internet Superstars. In the lead up to the show's March 23 premier, Internet users have been asked to vote from 51 bloggers, comedians, and some very odd characters to determine who makes the celebrity A-list of the cyber world.
Just what does it take to be an Internet celebrity? Liz Tay speaks with some of VH1's nominees for an insight into the WWW - that's the wired, wacky, and wonderful - hall of fame.The wired
Perez Hilton
Short, sharp rhetoric and clumsily edited photos make up what claims to be Hollywood's most-hated Web site, PerezHilton.com. Thanks to the antics of Britney, AnJo and the site's namesake, Paris, PerezHilton.com boasts an average of 3.5 million visitors a day, making its creator, Mario Armando Lavandeira, somewhat of a celebrity in his own right.
The blog has been popular since its inception in 2005, when Lavandeira, a self-proclaimed 'tech idiot', discovered how simple blogging can be. Daily updates, exclusive audio and video content kept viewers hooked, while Lavandeira's original stories and sharp nose for the latest gossip earned him the respect of gossip columnists in the mainstream media.
"I've always taken my blog seriously," Lavandeira said. "It was [always] updated daily, and now I update it several times an hour. When I'm blogging, I've never wanted to talk about myself, because I'm boring, and I think that's what sets me apart from other blogs."
Lavandeira's blog is 'not just a traditional blog', he said, as he sets out to actively and aggressively break stories. PerezHilton.com was there when Britney divorced ex-husband Kevin Federline and when Neil Patrick Harris was outed for his homosexual relationship with David Burtka. And when Lavandeira broke the news of Angelina Jolie's relationship with Brad Pitt, an unexpected ten-fold surge in readership brought the blog crashing down.
"Everything in my life has prepared me for what I'm doing now," he said. "I've been a journalist in the past, I've been a publicist, I've been an actor, so I know how the three groups of people think, feel, behave, what they want, what they need, and how to deal with them, and that all informs what I do now."The wacky
Ask a Ninja
Ever had a question that only the wisdom and power of a ninja could answer?
Ask a Ninja is a series of comedic videos in which a mysterious Ninja addresses viewers' e-mails on topics like ninja training, technology, physics, and Santa. Videos are characterised by the Ninja's exaggerated hand gestures and erratic camera angle changes, which occur constantly as the Ninja battles invisible enemies (or so he says).
Created in 2005 by Los Angeles improvisational comedians Kent Nichols and Douglas Sarine, the site averages 30,000 visitors a day, and is on track to grossing low to mid seven figures this year through advertising and merchandise.
"Douglas is a huge fan of martial arts and kung fu movies, and Kent is a huge geek, so it was a perfect fit," Nichols told PC World. "We just wanted to help get a real ninja's perspective out into the world, and the net has really embraced that goal."
Besides material success, the popularity generated by Ask a Ninja has also earned its creators some recognition and respect in the entertainment industry. Last year, the pair made guest appearances as commentators on VH1, while Sarine, who plays the Ninja, has appeared as a guest film critic on National Public Radio, and a judge on Yahoo's talent-show contest.
Mahir Cagri: "I Kiss You"
Before Borat, there was Mahir Cagri, a Turkish accordion player-turned-Internet-celebrity in 1999. At its peak, Cagri's personal Web site, ikissyou.org, was receiving around 50,000 page views per day, resulting in it being entered into the 2001 Guinness Book of World Records for the most visits to a personal homepage with a total of 12 million hits.
Cagri describes his online success as a surprise to himself and the rest of the world, as he claims to have done nothing to promote his site. "l'm first internet star off world and my site," he told PC World, in his notorious broken English. "l have thousand fans-friends all world and famous star fans too ... many my fans invited me their country house and come me too; this is continue still."
The obligations of fame have also led Cagri to make numerous high-profile appearances, including being parodied on The Late Show with David Letterman, appearing in Forbes, and an eTour-sponsored tour to the U.S. worth a rumoured US$1 million. In 2005, Cagri produced his own music video with EMI records. The video, titled "I kiss you", features Cagri taking in the sights of London, wearing a self-promotional T-shirt and chanting, "My name is Mahir. I kiss you, I kiss you."
While he is unable to say how much ikissyou.org has earned him in advertising dollars, Cagri estimates that he has been seen by "about 200 millions people." He is now appearing in televised advertisements around the world, and is soon to be releasing an auto-biography that he says will also serve as a script for a Hollywood movie in the near future.The wonderful
One Red Paperclip
At 26, salesman Kyle McDonald dreamed of owning a house. The problem was, he didn't want to pay for it.
So McDonald came up with a plan to trade his way to the dream. Starting with an ordinary red paperclip, he started a thread on online community classifieds, craigslist.org, offering to trade for anything of value.
The paperclip became a pen, pen became doorknob, doorknob became camp stove, camp stove became beer keg and so on, until McDonald found himself in front of a two-storey farmhouse in the Canadian town of Kipling Saskatchewan in July 2006 - just less than a year from when he made his first red paperclip posting on craigslist.
McDonald recorded his trades in a blog that, at its peak, received about one million unique visitors in a single day. His story appeared on CNN, ABC News, CBC Newsworld, and the BBC, the publicity eventually resulting in high-profile trades of surprising value - like an afternoon with rock star Alice Cooper.
"I heard somewhere that one red paperclip had given the town of Kipling Saskatchewan a freelance marketing push worth over 500 billion dollars," McDonald told PC World. "Yes, that's billion. The current population of Kipling is 1142 people, but town planners are expecting considerably more people to move to town this year as a result of all the because of all the publicity."
Quest completed, McDonald seems happy to be relinquishing his online fame to the town, and enjoying the "old fashioned serenity" of Kipling Sasketchewan.
"At the moment, [I'm] sitting in my parent's kitchen eating trail mix and looking at a banana. My brother is on the couch. He's Wearing glasses. My life is wild right now with all this fame going on," he jokes.
"Trust me, the high life is nuts."Take it from the stars
If you can't be them, you can at least try to join them. Here's what the Web superstars have to say to anyone wanting to follow in their footsteps:
Mario Armando Lavandeira, Perez Hilton: "Get a gimmick, get something that will get you attention, be consistent, be good, and work it! It takes a lot of hard work - I don't think people realise that I spend, on many days, 18 to 19 hours working on my Web site a day."
Kent Nichols, Ask A Ninja: "Be open to your fans, listen to them and really try and participate with them in the creation of your website."
Mahir Cagri, I Kiss You: "l can advise them they must be trust-honest and say clear open about theirself."
Kyle McDonald, One Red Paperclip: "First you need a good outfit and a DJ-like Web persona. If I could start again I'd wear a large beanie and call myself 'Thunder Blade'. Then you need to find a successful internet project, steal the concept, and do the exact same things the original person did. But different."
