This week I’ve embarked on either one of my greatest projects or one of my most pointless projects. Earlier I wrote about the science of going viral when a friend of mine wrote a fake article about McDonald’s chicken mcnugget baby formula and people on twitter thought it was real. I really believe that something going viral is impossible to predict and therefore it is impossible to intentionally create.
With this in mind, I’m attempting to build on the popularity of a current trend in hopes of riding this wave into creating my own internet celebrity. Most people are probably aware of Grumpy Cat by now, largely because it’s one of the hottest things on the internet and it has over 1 million followers on facebook. I happen to have my own grumpy cat that I love dearly but who doesn’t take good photos. For years I’ve always felt bad that she looks like she wants to kill me in virtually every photo I’ve taken of her. It’s not quite as pronounced as the famed grumpy cat but she definitely looks unhappy.
Well, I decided to one-up Grumpy Cat. Grumpy Cat is adorably grumpy but my cat is also fat. So, I decided to launch my own site - Grumpy Fat Cat. This is a blatant attempt to play off of the popularity of Grumpy Cat. However, I’m not trying to pretend that mine is the original Grumpy Cat and there is no mistaking my cat for the famously frowny one. I also don’t expect to beat Grumpy Cat in any search engine rankings, so I’m not exactly going to steal any traffic there.
All of that being said, I feel like this is my best chance of creating something big on the internet. And it’s not because I stole someone else’s already popular idea, although that helps. The simply fact of the matter is that probably 75% of the internet is dedicated to “adult” entertainment and cats. Since I am unwilling and unable to take advantage of the former, I decided to exploit the latter. In short, there is probably no limit to the amount of love that there is for cats on the internet.
Of course there is probably still a slim chance of actually turning my cat into an internet celebrity. Despite the fact that I think my cat photos are rather amusing and I believe that I have some humorous memes made up already, that really doesn’t matter a whole lot. The fact of the matter is that there is still a lot of luck involved in becoming viral. You have to have the right person like your stuff and have them share it with their friends. If one celebrity on twitter mentions your site to their million followers, that probably means 10,000 hits perhaps. I really have no basis to estimate that math.
Of course there are ways that I could attempt to increase my chances of internet celebrity but I choose not to do that. I could troll famous sites and facebook pages with my site, but I don’t want to be that guy. And frankly that would take away some of the authenticity of what I’m trying to do anyway. If by chance I do create a hit, I want it to be something organic. That doesn’t mean that I won’t help it along with some paid advertisements for the site and facebook page but that’s different from trolling and being obnoxious.
Ultimately I give my chances of success at 5% and that might be generous. There is simply a lot of luck involved in this and stuff that I have no control over. This is my fifteenth year of working on websites and I feel like I know a whole lot about the “industry” but there is no sure thing. Let’s face it, companies pay advertising firms hundreds of thousands of dollars to create commercials and pay millions of dollars for a Superbowl commercial and inevitably there are commercials that most people end up hating. So even ideas that people are willing to invest millions of dollars on are far from a marketing guarantee. With all of that in mind though, I certainly think that it’s worth a shot. I don’t know at what point I consider the experiment a success but I’ll definitely be interested to see where this goes in the future.