8 years ago
2
10 Former Viral Sensations on Life After Internet Fame
Internet fame comes on like an earthquake, with little warning. In a matter of hours, a video can go viral and be viewed 50 million times. Then it (usually) recedes into a very long, thin afterlife. Here, nine YouTube sensations whose lives were upended briefly in the past decade (plus one from the prehistoric web era, before YouTube made its debut in 2005) speak about this odd, relatively new kind of fame. Most embraced the experience, seeing where it would take them.
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It's really weird how different internet and real life time is.
A lot of the videos are from 2007, which is 8 years in real time, but are in a completely different era on the internet. There were different titans at the time, and a lot of the current trends were unheard of back then. Netflix streaming just came out, and wasn't the monolith that it is now. Facebook was just about to surpass Myspace in unique visitors. Youtube still used star ratings. Smartphones weren't really a thing, as the first iPhone wasn't released until mid 2007.
I remember being new to the internet in that time frame, when a lot of these people were huge deals. To the internet, it was ages ago, but if you ask anyone over 25 a memory of something 8 years ago, they would have no problem going that far back. Shit, this article made me feel out of touch. It's acting like "The Man with The Golden Voice" was forever ago, but I still remember that post hitting the front page of Reddit. I remember the same with the ASL person, as well.
It's just crazy how the timeline of something, invented in the real world, can have such a different time dilation effect from that of the rest of the world.
Tay Zonday's interview was a little bit intense.