Saturday, March 14, 2009

Virtual fame, real money ;)

The new media has made quite a few people 'disturbingly' famous overnight! What they do once they become famous is another issue but the ways in which they get fame is worth reading about. A lady writes some negative stuff about one Barkha Dutt and becomes famous after being sued by her, another person impersonates as Steve Jobs, gets famous, decides he needs to tell the world that he's a fake Steve, gets all the more famous, and the examples are countless.
There is a 'Numa Numa' guy who 'lip-sung' a Romanian song and people found it to be irresistibly funny. What followed was millions of views, one of the most subscribed channel, stage shows and MONEY. Interestingly, the lip-sung version of the song overshot the popularity of the original song by leaps and bounds! While the original song features the ideal slim, trendy singers running around in amazing locations, this guy is fat, is wearing a sweat shirt and sitting on his chair with a backdrop of an unimpressive room.

Another fame 'victim' is 'Fred'. He is a normal 16 (or something) year old with an ability to speak like a 6 year old (that's what he says, to me it sounds more like some duck in DuckTales). In his videos he is a 6 year old, hyperactive kid who lives alone with his mother (who I think is a drug addict). Each of his videos are impressive, funny and very funny! From youtube he has now moved to TV. BBC carried his story some time back, he does programs for a few TV channels, stars in video songs (search for Kev Blaze and fred on youtube)etc.

Then there's this guy (again from youtube) who takes up challenges from his viewers. In one of his recent challenges he was asked to paint his whole body purple. His 'challenge completed' video was a featured video in youtube. Lots of views, lots of fame!

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