5 Ways To Get Attention On The Internet
1. Make a viral video.
Buy some cats, a toddler with a British accent, a gallon of milk, an improv troupe willing to perform a prank with you in public, and a chorus of underprivileged children. Mix it all together. Bam! You’re famous.
Seriously, attempting to create something that goes viral is usually a disaster. I can’t even really think of an example where someone made a video that they intended to go viral and it did. Your best bet is to always keep a camera on you and capture the weird shit that you see just walking around. Stumble across a racist granny? Record that shit. See some cute babies kiss? Record that shit. See a drunk guy doing something stupid? Record that shit. Keep your eyes open. That’s the key.
2. Be a teen who vaguely looks like Justin Bieber.
Before Instagram changed the popular page to pictures that are similar to the other pictures you like (seriously, who gives a fuck?) they used to show you the most popular pictures posted within the hour. I kid you not, I follow about thirty teens who kinda sorta look like Justin Bieber. They only post selfies with captions like, “you don’t even know how beautiful you are <3” and every single image has over 5000 likes. I’m obsessed with the phenomenon actually. And it’s the same thing for teen girls except instead of the Biebs, they all have long straightened hair, a tight camisole with a built-in bra and perfectly executed eye make-up. Their captions usually read something like “Some day my prince will come” and their comment section is other teen guys and girls just writing things like, “you are soooo pretty.” I love it.
3. Do something good.
Folks who work desk jobs love to pass around heartwarming videos and blog posts that talk about some amazing act of human kindness. If you can get yourself saving someone’s life on video, I suggest you do that. Lifting a car off a baby is good. Going back into a burning building over and over again to save people even though you are not a fireman is heaven. Housing a seal that would have died if you didn’t put it in a kiddie pool in your living room is a classic. Do something incredible for a cancer kid and you’re made in the shade.
4. Start a twitter fight with a celebrity.
In order to have a big public fight with a celebrity, you need to pick one that’s teetering on the edge of crazy to begin with. For example, my friend Jensen started a public war with Chet Haze AKA Tom Hank’s son who’s probably no longer invited to their family Thanksgiving. Chet fancies himself a rapper, Jensen won some radio contest and got a million dollar record deal like, a decade ago. Basically, he knows what he’s doing even though he rarely does it anymore (to my knowledge, we’re not super close). Anyway, Chet said something stupid* and Jensen did an old school RT with some sort of diss then Chet did an old school RT back and Jensen wound up challenging him to a freestyle battle or something. I don’t know if this is a hall-of-fame example, but it certainly caught the eye of a lot of people who are interested in this kind of shit.
Probably the best example of this method is when JennyJohnsonHi5 took on Chris Brown. Everybody hates Chris Brown. He’s a lady beater and has severe anger management issues. He’s ready to blow all day every day. Jenny has been tweeting at him and the Kardashians and a bunch of other hatables for a long time now, but one day Chris decided he wasn’t going to have it anymore and he went NUTS on her*. Of course that caught the attention of his sad fans who started in on Jenny. Jenny fought back. The fight went on for like, two days and next thing the whole scandal was on the front page of some British newspaper.
*I can not confirm that this is exactly what happened but I don’t feel like Googling this shit and you get the gist, no?
5. Post nudes.
This is the coup de gras of Internet attention-grabbing behavior. I’ve found entire Twitter accounts where a woman just posts pictures of tits every day and they’ll have hundreds of thousands of followers. You could also make an amateur sex tape and upload it to YouPorn.com. I bet there are chicks out there who have tons of fans from some casual masturbation clip.