“The customer’s never wrong.” “The customer is the most important aspect of any business that caters to the public.”
“Caveat emptor.”
In the age of internet celebrity, the important of the customer’s opinion has changed. Well, not completely, but for the most part - the fundamental core of it - has been taken on a new importance.
Instead of “How regular a customer of ours are you?” the new question is “What’s your Google page rank?”
It’s not “How many different locations do you shop at?” anymore. It’s “What is your reader/subscription base size?”
The “internets” has become the new Hollywood. So many types of celebrity come from this electronic world we ride through everyday. Some of them you know (Star Wars Kid) and some of them you may not (Maddox). Whether you know an internet star or not, the fact remains: people claim a certain status online than they would never be able to in real life.
The following is a true scenario of how rising to internet stardom may take place. Your results may be different.
Joe Blow nobody is socially inept. He has no clue of how to talk to people (in real life), and doesn’t like anybody. He’s very sarcastic and has a dark sense of humor. After getting on his computer, he logs onto the internets and first downloads Photoshop. Then, he downloads an html editor. (Of course all of this through bit torrent because he’s 1337) After doing this, he slaps a little bit of content together and registers a domain. Not knowing what to call himself, he begins to go over different names. After coming up with one he likes (probably the one he uses on IRC, the SomethingAwful forums, and a few other key places where he has built up “status”) he registers it as a dot com and loads up his webpage.
No longer is he just another forum user - he’s another forum user with a domain! And before long, he’ll get traffic, place ads and then get revenue from the ads he has placed. Not long after that, he’ll become an internet celebrity and he won’t stop there. He’ll come out with a comic (or a web based video series starring video game characters that he only has to writer a script to and not worry about animating). Once that becomes popular enough, he’ll take away it’s free status and start making his visitors pay subscription fees for it (maybe because the dvd sales of Season 1 weren’t doing as well as he had hoped.)
And his visitors won’t care because he has status and he’s an internets celebrity and nobody questions the internets celebrities with status.
Eventually he’ll make his way onto a popular game network television show (awkward though it may seem) and stumble through as neither the host nor he knows what is going on at any point during the interview (and he’ll even set up a special page just for the interview as a really funny lolz.)
Soon after that, he’ll realize that none of his material is funny anymore. His internet stardom is all but fading and the internets, being what it is, is slowly shifting its attention to something newer and shinier. So in one last ditch effort to stay on his throne of stardom, the hopeful internet celebrity will bring back the old shit - the classic shit - the the Original shit! It will be improved upon in every way possible and it’ll make you remember the good ‘ol days. (Peanut Butter Jelly Time, All your base, and every other played out internets joke ever - it’s all been tried.)
But in the end, you’ll just end up fading into obscurity until somebody comes along that’s never heard of you and starts the whole process over again.
