Can Justin Bieber strike twice now that every boyish, sexually non-threatening mophead in America is posting his hummings to YouTube? Back in the days of Bobby
Sherman and Tiger Beat, teen heartthrobs were built by TV studios and record companies who knew exactly when a secondary character (anyone remember Sherman's stuttering brother role on Here Come the
Brides?) was attracting fan mail. The wave of talk show appearances, bad records and summer TV spin-off shows commenced to hit while the iron was hot.
According to tech entrepreneur and
MessageParty founder Amanda Peyton, the Internet has changed all of that, but
it may not be as easy as it looks. Peyton posted an excellent think and research piece over the weekend at her blog dissecting the singular fame of Dave
Days.
As Peyton tells it she happened upon this new YouTube star at a live Digitour concert, a person she had never heard about but who was surrounded by screaming fans. "It was quite
bizarre to watch the massive crowd of teenage girls gather in front of the stage and sing along to every single word. After all, he wasn't famous." Apparently, Days Is "famous" in that new way that
only the Web provides. He has cultivated an audience with 1.4 million subscribers to his YouTube channel and over 271 million video views.
Peyton argues that Day embodies a new phenom of the
"Person as Distribution Channel" in which individuals become networks of content distribution. As she deftly researched and lays out in her post, Days built an audience slowly not by waiting for his
own polished videos to get picked up but by playing the YouTube game. He posted a number of novelty videos involving singing to Miley Cyrus cutouts or cover songs. By drawing this initial attention to
himself, he was able to move these audiences into his social networks (Twitter, Facebook, etc) and create a network that he could leverage in multiple ways. As Peyton argues, Days now has a
distribution channel and anything he posts to it will reverberate and guarantee at least tens of thousands of views and likely more.
Back in the 1990s when some of us were first trying to
understand what strange and new medium the Internet was, several of us coalesced around the idea that it is a personality-driven medium. Its mock intimacy favored content that highlighted personal
voice, conversational tone, etc. This observation seems trite and obvious now. Remember when many editors instructed their writers to compose for the Web as if they were "writing an email to a
friend?" But the evolution of that fundamental attribute of the web is that people become networks. The personality creates and owns the audience and then can move it in different directions on behalf
of marketing and content partners.
Of course, there is a down side to the cult of Web personality. People get tired of celebrity. Arguably, Oprah was a TV personality who became a network, both
literally and figuratively. But she also fed that network with other personalities that kept the content and that screen fresh. The classic broadcasting and content distribution networks understood
the economic necessity of diversity. A network survives by anticipating failure and burnout and keeping the next big thing always at the ready. It remains to be seen if a personal distribution network
can evolve the same business savvy.