“The Wolf of Wall Street” invites parody, and this version from ‘Half Day Today! films captures the birth and subsequent flourishing of Facebook ‘culture’ with irresistible truth and comedy rolled into one.
In our story, young innocent and internet entrepreneur Jonah Peretti, quickly sheds his honest and earnest online enterprises, encouraged by Jonah Hill – who helps him replace those cumbersome qualities with cash!
As the Facebook pioneer discovers, all that’s necessary is to build a site that,“targets the easiest demographic in the world: Facebook users.” As he explains, “With these lists, you can create a stupid GIF, write a nonsensical blob of text and it will get re tweeted millions of times without ever using an even number in your title.” Past stories include such titles as: “29 heartwarming celebrity mugshots” and “What’s your dog’s prom star name? ” Was this supposed to be humor? It’s actually historical fact.
Jonah Hill quite obviously is vital to the success of the enterprise , as you can see from just this line. “I love three things. I love nostalgia, I love cat pictures, and I love getting people hits” I’ll bet Jonah conceived of “likes” ‘Pokes” and a plethora of ways to follow. Who’d a thunk it? They built a self perpetuating monster, and it’s Alive!
Perhaps more fascinating is the actual tale of Buzzfeed, as recounted in inc.com. The media darling of the moment, Buzzfeed, which boasts topping 130 million monthly unique viewers to its site, didn’t start out as an attempt to dominate Facebook feeds and overturn perceptions of how online advertising best functions. No, instead it began as a humble experiment out of a little-known multimedia center called Eyebeam, tucked in between art galleries in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood.
A co-founder of Eyebeam, John Johnson, explained the humble origins of Buzzfeed on March 1, at a talk at New York University. Johnson, with two partners, founded the center in 1997, with the goal of funding independent films, awarding fellowships, and providing a space for young artists, educators, and technologists to create their projects.
A Startup Story
As creative work in arts and technology began to flourish online, Johnson started looking for someone “who really knew the Web.” Around that time, a technology instructor in New Orleans named Jonah Peretti was fielding media calls, after watching an email he had initially sent to a dozen friends spread around the globe. It was an email chain of messages exchanged with a representative of Nike after the company denied Peretti’s request to customize a pair of sneakers with the word, “sweatshop.” And that was one of the most impressive pieces of viral content Johnson had ever seen.“He sent it to 12 friends,” Johnson says. “Within three months, a million people saw the emails, and he was on The Today Show debating labor practices.” Johnson hired Peretti to do research and development at Eyebeam, particularly focusing on what the pair dubbed the Contagious Media Lab. Some of the lab’s accomplishments include the early(ish) viral sites Crying While Eating, Black People Love Us, and Forget-me-not Panties. The latter was a site advertising a nonexistent product, which purported to GPS track–and temperature-monitor–the wearer of the allegedly tech-enhanced undergarments.
Johnson says the site blew up by garnering clicks from two groups of people. First, feminists, who were enraged and confused; second, “Japanese fetishists, who were like, ‘Where can I get one?'”
The site offered a counter intuitive lesson in manufacturing virility, Johnson says: “If there’s a way for your product to be polarizing, that’s one sure way to get a lot of exposure–if you can get two groups of people to argue about it.”