How to become Internet famous

For those seeking Internet fame, here's some advice: Don't try."It's precisely the people who seem to try too hard or want to prolong their Internet fame for way longer than the Internet is willing to give them that get the most crap ," says Tim Hwang, a research associate at Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet & Society.Hwang is most famous for organizing a conference called ROFLcon in April 2008 that brought together some of the Web's biggest stars for a few days in Cambridge, Mass..
(ROFL is text-message speak for “rolling on the floor, laughing.”)One Web celeb who didn't make the event is Numa Numa Guy, Gary Brolsma. He became Internet famous in 2004 when he posted a goofy video of himself lip-synching to the song "Dragostea Din Tei" by the Romanian pop group O-Zone to the Web site Newgrounds.com. Brolsma, who made the video while bored, thought it might make a few people laugh.
Instead, it went viral, racking up millions of hits as it spread on the Web like wildfire. Numa Numa Guy even made an episode of Comedy Central's “South Park” alongside animated Web luminaries including Tron Guy, “Star Wars" Kid and Chris Croker – the Leave Briney Alone guy."In the time since then, the Numa Numa Guy put up a new site called NewNuma and he's tried really, really hard to prolong his Internet fame, but as a result, no one has paid attention to him, or when they do they kind of make fun of him," Hwang says.
Really, don't try
Not trying is central to the story of Internet superstar Christian Lander, the comedy writer behind the blog Stuff White Poepl Like, which serves as a nifty, tongue-in-cheek guide to understanding and interacting with upper-middle-class liberal elites. Entries offer insight to the phenomenon of taking a year off and explain why the critically acclaimed, low-rated TV show “The Wire” is so adored.Lander, a former copywriter and graduate-school dropout, says he started the blog with the expectation that a handful or two of his friends would get a chuckle. They did, and sent the link to friends. Within a few weeks, thousands of people were visiting the site. Within a few months, Lander had landed a book deal, making many white people incredibly envious."I didn't think for a second that it would be anywhere near this popular," he says. "My tip for getting Internet fame that I always like to pass on is, 'Don't try.'"Lander does offer an easier-said-than-done formula for success: Have a great idea, a great title and great execution."To do all three of those things requires an awful lot of luck and timing," he notes.For now, Lander continues to bask in the fleeting spotlight of Internet celebrity, but he says he doesn't expect it to last nor does he hold it in high regard."Internet fame, aside from maybe crime fame, is the lowest level of fame you could hope to achieve," he says.At best, fame might bring the opportunity – as it did for Lander – for career advancement (he quit the copywriting job to become a full-time comedy writer), but few Web stars are able to parlay their stardom into lasting Internet fame like Hollywood gossip columnist Perez Hilton did."I think it would be a lot more advantageous to be Internet rich than to be Internet famous," Lander says. "My advice is to wait for that law to get turned over and start an online poker site."
Get fired for blogging
Back in 2004, before most of the world knew what a blog was, former Delta Air Lines flight attendant Ellen Simonetti decided to start an online journal as a way to help her grieve over the loss of her mother to cancer. Simonetti mostly wrote about her travels and work and, over the course of nine months, she cultivated a following of about 100 readers.Then, her employer stumbled upon her now defunct blog, Queen of Sky: Diary of a Flight Attendant, and discovered Simonetti had posted pictures of herself in uniform. The airline promptly suspended her without pay and, a few weeks later, fired her. Simonetti wrote about her job loss and the story spread around the nascent blogosphere."Then the BBC online did a story and I got 90,000 hits on my blog when that came out, and then The New York Times started contacting me and various other people," she says. Much of the media coverage concentrated on free speech and company rules on blogging. "This stuff wasn't the norm back then," she adds. "Nobody even knew what a blog was."Simonetti adapted her blog into a book – a novel in blog format – and the book was optioned in 2008 for a TV film, which she is working on with a production company based in Canada. She is currently blogging on her new site, The Quen of Screen Blog.The experience of Web fame did not make her rich nor was it enjoyable, Simonetti says. "I'm a shy person, and so being thrust into the limelight all of the sudden was quite traumatic and so I'm actually glad that it has quieted down now."
Roll with it
According to Hwang, Internet fame often comes to people who are awkward or slightly goofy, or who exhibit otherwise fallible traits that everyday people also possess, making them easy for a Web audience to relate to. While the attention may prove embarrassing, his advice is to "roll with it."
For example, Matt Harding, a former video-game programmer from Connecticut who quit his day job to travel, gained Internet fame when a goofy video of him dancing at locations around the world went viral. Now, he gets paid "to travel wherever he wants in the world to do really whatever he wants, and it is really kind of an amazing deal on so many levels," Hwang says.
Harding found the success by accident. He started a Web site, Wher the Hell Is Matt, to keep friends and family up-to-date on his whereabouts. A traveling buddy suggested videoing Harding doing his dance – one that his Web site says is "the only dance Matt does." A few years later, someone found the video online and passed it around. The video spread and Harding became Internet famous.
Harding rolled with it. And since then, Stride gum has funded him on two more video-making trips with essentially no strings attached. About a quarter of the way into the most recent video, posted in 2008, Harding invites other people to join him dancing. That video went viral, too. Now, when he talks about his fame, he might even invite the audience to join him in dancing badly.
Do something interesting
Kyle MacDonald, who lives in a house in Kipling, Saskatchewan, says the secret to Internet fame is to do something interesting – just make sure that it's something of interest to you, too. "You've got to be passionate to make it work," he says. "I worked for over a year to get from one red paperclip to a house pretty much every day, 12 to 15 hours a day, trying to trade things."MacDonald is the guy who traded up from a red paper clip to his current digs, which he is now looking to trade for something else.
He started the famous bartering in July 2005, arranging the trades via postings on the online classified service Craigslist. After five trades, he started his blog, one red paperclip.
The link was passed around, chatter picked up in the blogosphere and then the mainstream media caught on. "The next thing you knew, I had hundreds of thousands of people going to the Web site," MacDonald says, adding that his idea – trying to trade a paper clip for a house – certainly had mainstream appeal.
All the media attention, in turn, helped him achieve his goal."I didn't try to do this to become some sort of Internet celebrity," he says. "I just tried to trade a paper clip for a house and the attention on that story definitely helped that happen."
Use traditional media
Susan Boyle, an aspiring singer from Scotland, reached Internet superstardom this spring while trying for fame the old-fashioned way – a television talent competition. She signed up for "Britain's Got Talent," which is hosted and produced by the brutally honest judge Simon Cowell, who is famous in the U.S. for his acerbic comments on his hit series "American Idol."Boyle's rise to Internet fame came when the video of her audition was posted on video-sharing Web sites shortly after it aired. In the audition, she comes on the stage clad in frumpy garb, has some awkwardly cheeky banter with the judges, who roll their eyes with can-you-believe-this looks, and then wows everyone with a stunning rendition of "I Dreamed a Dream" from the musical “Les Miserables.”The performance, Boyle's back story (she says she's never been properly kissed, for example) and the judges’ reactions were an irresistible warm fuzzy for hundreds of millions of Web surfers, who were also given a rare glimpse of a truly ecstatic Cowell, who deadpans, "Susan, I knew the minute you walked out on that stage that we were gonna hear something extraordinary, and I was right."Boyle, who sings in her church choir, says there was some "try" in her road to superstardom. A few years ago, her mother passed away and Boyle stopped singing. She started to sing again to help get over the pain, she said in an interview with TV star Oprah Winfrey. "One of the reasons I applied for the TV show was to try and see if I could perform in front of an audience," she said.Boyle met success on the Web and the television show (she took second place in the talent competition) in part because she was doing something she enjoys. In her case, that's singing. Hwang, the ROFLcon organizer, says Web fame often finds people who follow their own dreams, such as comedy writer Lander and Randall Munroe, the artist behind the wildly popular Web comic xkcd."They were just trying to do what they wanted to do and it kind of exploded out unexpectedly from there," he says. "The Internet is really good at picking up on that."