Internet celebrity

An Internet celebrity, blogebrity,^[1] cyberstar,^[2] online celebrity,^[2] or Internet personality is someone who has become famous by means of the Internet. Internet allows people to reach a narrow audience across the world and so become famous within one or more Internet communities.^[3]

Rising to fame

Millions of people write online journals or weblogs. In many cases, they write anonymously or their focus is upon a specialist topic. But if the author has or develops a distinctive personality, their fame may derive from this as much as from the content of their blog.^[2]

In some cases, people might rise to fame through a single event or video that goes viral. The Internet allows videos, news articles, and jokes to spread very quickly. Depending on the reach of the spread, the content may become considered an "Internet meme," and thus, any of the people associated may gain exposure. For example, Zach Anner, an Austin, Texas-based comedian gained world-wide attention after submitting a video to Oprah Winfrey's "Search for the Next TV Star" competition. There is substantial searching online for people.^[4]

Internet celebrities have also become a popular phenomenon in the China (PRC) with the likes of Sister Hibiscus, Shi Hengxia (Fu Rong Jiejie), who received worldwide notoriety and fame for her unashamed efforts at self-promotion via Internet postings.^[5]

The concept of web celebrity ties in to Andy Warhol's quip about 15 minutes of fame. A more recent adaptation of Warhol's quip, possibly prompted by the rise of online social networking, blogging, and similar online phenomena, is the claim that "In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people" or, in some renditions, "On the Web, everyone will be famous to fifteen people".^[6] This quote, though attributed to David Weinberger, was said^[6] to have originated with the Scottish artist Momus.^[7]

Examples

• Kyle Craven, an American Internet celebrity known for his ubiquitous photo that became a popular image macro in 2012.^[8]
• Chris Crocker, an American Internet celebrity, occasional blogger, and occasional recording artist. Crocker gained international fame in September 2007 from his viral video "Leave Britney Alone", in which he tearfully defends pop singer Britney Spears's comeback performance at the MTV Video Music Awards; his video had over four million views in two days.^[9][10]
• Perez Hilton, a blogger, whose blog, Perezhilton.com, is known for its controversial posts covering gossip items about musicians, actors and celebrities.
• Eduard Khil, a Russian singer whose song, I am Very Glad to be Returning Home, or Trololo, became an Internet meme in 2010.
• Jon Lajoie, a comedian, actor, rapper, singer and musician who became an Internet celebrity thanks to his many humorous music videos.
• Violet Benson, a comedian, most known for her female driven funny Instagram account and large social media following.
• Germano Mosconi, an Italian sport journalist who became famous after the leak, in 2004, of videos showing his off-air bursts of anger and blasphemies.
• Casey Neistat, an American filmmaker, famous for his inspirational YouTube videos. Created the Make It Count Film which was viewed over 5 million times in 10 days
• Josh Ostrovsky, an American comedian known for his stunt viral videos and large social media following.
• Grumpy Cat, a female cat known for her grumpy expression.
• Roma Acorn, Russian YouTube celebrity, who started his career in social network VKontakte.
• Colonel Meow, a male cat known as an "adorable fearsome dictator" and for his love of Scotch.
• Zubin Damania, a Stanford hospitalist who used an alter ego, "ZDoggMD," to produce YouTube parody rap videos that comment on the state of the healthcare system, different diseases, treatments, preventative measures, and stigmas around healthcare.^[11]
• Vahid Online, an Iranian netizen who rose to fame following his coverage of 2009 Iranian presidential election protests.^[12]
• Felix Arvid Ulf Kjellberg, the Swedish engineering student now known as "PewDiePie", started making "Let's Play" videos in 2010, and later became the most subscribed channel on YouTube in December 2013.^[13]
• Jenna Marbles (Mourey), an American comedian and internet personality on YouTube. Began making videos in 2010 and has since become the most subscribed to female YouTuber on the internet.^[14]
• Crash & Burn aka Shawn Kavanaugh & John Farrell, known for their vlogs, movies and deadpan comedic timing in all of their videos.
• Rebecca Black, known for singing Friday in a 2011 music video that went viral.

See also

• List of Internet phenomena
• Usenet celebrity

References

1. • 2005 — Michelle Meyers, "Do you have 'blogebrity' status?", CNET News, 1 June 2005:

     Two weeks ago, if you "Googled" the term "blogebrity," you would have received zero results. Today you'll get more than 80,000.

     No one is more surprised by this phenomenon than Southern California-based Kyle Bunch and Jeremy Hermanns, who entered their idea for Blogebrity.com--a Web site celebrating the growing cachet (and ego) of bloggers--into Eyebeam's "Contagious Media Showdown" competition.

   • 2005 — Ron Rosenbaum, "Frenzy of Judyism May Augur the Dawn Of New Neural Age", New York Observer, 31 October 2005:

     But suddenly she's writing these insanely complex, destabilizingly complicated Judyist posts. She's the high priestess of Judiana. A blog star, or "blogebrity" (as the Blogebrity blog has it).

   • 2006 — "E-Branding The Red Light District", WebNewsPro, 5 September 2006:

     Of course, the site received a boost in late July by blogebrity Michael Arrington, who, on his TechCrunch blog, drove the shuttle bus to the red light district’s feature attraction.

   • 2006 — Kevin Smokler, "Citizen Media: The High School Years", Fast Company, 1 October 2006:

     Pod Tech is looking to be the digital lifestyle's media of record with a network of corporate-branded podcasts, event coverage, and interviews with tech honchos. Most notably, it grabbed blogebrity Robert Scoble away from Microsoft.

   • 2006 — "Perez Hilton says he's an 'outsider'", USA Today, 6 November 2006:

     It's been quite a turnaround for Hilton, who said that before becoming a blogebrity he had been in a deep depression and last year filed for bankruptcy and was fired from a job at a celebrity weekly magazine.

   • 2007 — Christopher Williams, "Lego, Superman and the US Army", The Register, 15 March 2007:

     The real action is in the panel debates scattered around the Center, where we saw a guy with pink hair talk about webcasting his masturbation sessions, strange creatures describing themselves as blogebrities whine about mainstream media, and found out just how much web TV producers are wetting their pants for the release of Apple TV.

   • 2007 — Shivam Vij, "Blog Baron of Agra", Tehelka, 5 May 2007:

     Agarwal is one of India's biggest blogebrities, and perhaps the only one who lives off blogging does not live in a metro — he lives in Agra.

   • 2007 — Beth Merchant, "CS3 Up Close", Studio Monthly, 1 June 2007:

     Charlie White, the former Digital Media Net columnist and now a regular product reviewer and associate editor at Gizmodo, has been called everything from King Geek to a regular blogebrity.

   • 2007 — Samantha Wender, "The Brightest Stars in Cyberspace", ABC News, 11 September 2007:

     But it's the people behind these blogs who have access to the hottest events, keep tabs on the haves and have nots, and can make or break a career and influence an industry with just a stroke of a keyboard. They are blogebrities -- writers, thinkers and gossipers who have branded themselves by taking over the Web, and have thousands of people awaiting their next postings.

   • 2008 — Chris Hudson, "Bad Girls Go Digital: National Selves, Cyber Selves, Super Selves", in Youth, Media and Culture in the Asia Pacific Region (eds. Usha M. Rodrigues & Belinda Smaill), Cambridge Scholars Publishing (2008), ISBN 9781847184603, page 137:

     I will focus on a specific milieu of the "blogosphere" that is inhabited by young Singapore women — women who have attracted public attention and become blog celebrities or blogebrities.

   • 2009 — Jory Des Jardins, "Forward", in 42 Rules of Social Media for Small Business (Jennifer L. Jacobson), Super Star Press (2009), ISBN 9781607730149, page 1:

     Not all of us are trying to be blogebrities or have the most friends on MySpace; many of us are just trying to grow a business.

   • 2010 — "Pleasing with persona", National Post, 8 March 2010:

     After spending some downtime in Burlington, the 26-year-old "blogebrity" -- who has been almost obsessively documenting her voyeur- friendly life online since she was 17 -- is back in Toronto, and spoke with the Post's Barry Hertz about haters, hipsters and Hogtown.

   • 2011 — Maggie Parke, "Fanpires: Utilizing Fan Culture in Event Film Adaptations", in Theorizing Twilight: Critical Essays on What's at Stake in a Post-Vampire World (eds. Maggie Parke & Natalie Wilson), McFarland & Company Inc. (2011), ISBN 9780786463503, page 36:

     This is a symbiotic relationship between Sueno and Summit, as the studio maintains some control over the information that the fans are receiving, but the originator of the group now also has easier access to the film and its peripheral elements due to her connections with Summit, thus raising her profile and status in the fandom as a known blogebrity.

2. Jason R. R. Rich (2009). "9. Become Famous as a Blogger". Blogging for Fame and Fortune. ISBN 978-1-59918-342-8.
3. Anne Hammock (May 1, 2008). "The new fame: Internet celebrity". CNN.
4. Spink, A., Jansen, B.J., and Pedersen, J. 2004. Searching for People on Web Search Engines. Journal of Documentation. 60(3), 266-278
5. Celebrity in China. Hong Kong University Press. Retrieved 6 August 2015.
6. Weinberger, David (July 23, 2005). "Famous to fifteen people". Archived from the original on December 14, 2006. Retrieved December 21, 2006.
7. Momus (1991). "POP STARS? NEIN DANKE! In the future everyone shall be famous for fifteen people...". Grimsby Fishmarket. Archived from the original on September 27, 2008. Retrieved October 7, 2008.
8. Contrere, Jessica (January 5, 2015). "Being Bad Luck Brian: When the meme that made you famous starts to fade away". The Washington Post. Retrieved August 6, 2015.
9. Ramirez, Ramon (2007-09-13). "Britney Spears: Bombshell or just plain bomb?". The Daily Texan. Retrieved 2007-09-13.
10. Popkin, Helen A.S. (September 13, 2007). "'Leave Britney Alone!': Tear-stained video plea makes YouTube vlogger an Internet rock star". MSNBC. Retrieved August 6, 2015.
11. Aimee Swartz (October 10, 2015). "The Doctor-Rapper and CEO Who Intend to Fix Healthcare". The Atlantic.
12. Diamond, Larry; Plattner, Marc F. (2012), Liberation Technology: Social Media and the Struggle for Democracy, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, pp. 145–146, ISBN 1421406985
13. "PewDiePie". YouTube. Retrieved 2015-12-08.
14. O’leary, Amy (2013-04-12). "The Woman With 1 Billion Clicks: Jenna Marbles". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2016-03-05.

Further reading

• "Internet Fame Is Cruel Mistress for a Dancer of the Numa Numa" at The New York Times
• "The Flip Side of Internet Fame" at Newsweek
• "Rise of an Internet Star - Parlaying YouTube Fame Into Big Business" at ReadWriteWeb
• "Internet Famous: Julia Allison and the Secrets of Self-Promotion" at Wired
• "The new fame: Internet celebrity" at CNN
• "The Microfame Game" at New York