Crying, While Eating My sad, hungry climb to Internet stardom. By Daniel Engber Posted Thursday, June 23, 2005, at 2:15 PM PT
I found a picture
of my girlfriend on a Japanese fetish site the other day. Yes, that was
definitely her, cramming a piece of sausage into her mouth as tears
streamed down her face. What's that right below her? A breast pump?
This was all my fault. I'm the one who put that video online. They
never told me that Internet celebrity would be like this.
A
month before, I had signed up for a "contagious media" contest. The
rules: Make a (nonpornographic) Web site. Promote it any way you want,
short of paid advertisements. The page with the most visitors after
three weeks wins.
The contest's host was Jonah Peretti, the creator of the much-forwarded Black People Love Us. Peretti now runs a research group at New York's Eyebeam
art and technology center that studies how sites get passed around the
Internet. According to Eyebeam's experts, Web pages spread via the
"Bored at Work Network"—the millions of shiftless desk jockeys whose
fingers are glued to the forward button on their e-mail. Hoax product sites and pages that elicit a nervous laughget
passed around a lot, as do funny animal videos and movies of people
dancing. But the most successful contagions are the oddballs, earnest
amateurs like the Peter Pan guy and the Star Wars kid who had never tried to tap in to the Bored at Work Network. How could I compete with them?
As contestants, we had at least one advantage over the Peter Pan guy: a workshop that allowed us to kick around ideas with certified contagious-mediaprofessionals.
Very few of us actually did. One guy announced his plan to create an
animated dog that vomited things. After an awkward silence, the expert
on hand suggested that he might want to think of a new idea. I was
confused. Was a barfing dog any worse than the contagious Poke the Bunny site we'd learned about an hour before?
ChristyWhat she's eating: Sausage with mushrooms and cheese; a vanilla shake. What she's crying about: Good at lots of things, but not great at anything.
Forget
the dogs and bunnies. I wanted my site to be about people, or food, or
people and food. My friend and collaborator Casimir Nozkowski
remembered a game he used to play at camp: Stuff some food in your
mouth, and cry. We had our idea—Crying, While Eating.
On a
rainy night, we drove around New York with a video camera, some
sausage, a box of fried chicken, and an apple. I watched my friend Rob
fast-forward through Babe until he got to the partwhere
the sheepdog puppies are given away. Casimir zoomed in as Rob sobbed
good, long sobs into the fried chicken. We took off a few minutes later
with the sausage and the apple.
Crying, While Eating
launched on a Thursday night with 12 videos. Christy, who was drinking
a vanilla shake, cried because she was "good at lots of things, but not
great at anything." Tashi lamented the fact that "sex will never be
that good again" while munching on Milano cookies. I ate buckwheat
noodles with rooster sauce and blubbered about having "ruined
Passover."
We waited until the next morning to send a batch of
self-promotional e-mails. By the time we got out of bed, the blog Waxy
had spotted our page on the contest Web site. From there, we got picked up by BoingBoing and Metafilter.
I e-mailed the URL to a former co-worker in San Francisco that
afternoon. He said he'd already gotten it from another friend in
California, who had gotten the link from a guy in Austin, Texas. When I
checked the stats that night, we had almost 50,000 visitors.
DanielWhat he's eating: Buckwheat noodles and rooster sauce. What he's crying about: He ruined Passover.
On
Saturday morning, I got a message on my cell phone from "Joe," who
claimed to be a marketing specialist in Los Angeles. "We have a deal in
mind for you," he promised. When I called back, Joe said he'd seen
Crying, While Eating on the "outrageous media" server and thought it
was "fairly viral." He offered me a 60-40 split for placing ads on the
site and asked if I was ready to "play ball." I made a counteroffer of
95-5, contingent on his telling me where he got my cell phone number.
He didn't call back.
By the end of May, the site had gotten 7.5 million hits. Blog entries mentioning the site appeared in Dutch, Portuguese, Italian, Turkish, Norwegian, and German ("das ist doof"). People submitted videos from all over the world. Gwenda from Australia cried over "the shameful mistreatment of animals" while eating triple-chocolate ice cream. A guy from New Jersey sent footage of himself dressed up like a baby and crying over a plate of ribs.
Our egos swelled as we became D-list celebrities. An art gallery
in New York requested videos for an upcoming exhibition, and a telecom
company in Florida offered us thousands of dollars to put CwE clips in
a commercial for long-distance service. Literary agents contacted us to
discuss how the site could "make the jump to print." We got mentioned
on VH1 and in Entertainment Weekly
and were invited to appear on countless radio shows. Crying, While
Eating even crossed over to the world of Internet porn. We got a huge
number of referrals from a site called Goregasm ("where bones meet
boners") and discovered that prospectors had snatched up the domain
name www.cryingwhilemasturbating.com. The sex-themed blog Fleshbot
called CwE "our favorite new fetish of the year!"
And, yes, my
girlfriend's video wound up on a Japanese sex site. Sure, that was a
bit awkward, but I took some consolation in the fact that, after just
two weeks, CwE was the top result of a Google search for "crying." I
was a lock to win the $2,000 grand prize. I could make up for tossing
my girlfriend to the Internet pervs by taking her out for a nice
dinner. A really, really nice dinner.
Hannah/PaulWhat they're eating: Tater Tots (her), cheese quesadilla (him). What they're crying about: The gulf between them can no longer be ignored.
Then my dot-com bubble burst. I'd been keeping on eye on a couple of our competitors, especially a video of people chugging Slurpees at 7-Eleven and a page
featuring a masked man who freaked out to cell-phone ringtones. In a
blink, a site I'd hardly noticed surged ahead in the standings. Forget-Me-Not Panties,
a hoax page that offered futuristic, GPS-enabled chastity belts to
concerned husbands and fathers, had become enormously popular overseas.
(The Japanese in particular couldn't get enough.) Pretty soon, a Google
search for "panties" led directly to their site. Crying, While Eating had dropped to third on the "crying" list, right below the Hungarian prog-rock band After Crying. We'd peaked too early, the contagious-media version of Howard Dean.
The
contest ended a week later—with Crying trailing Panties by more than
200,000 unique visitors. How had this happened? Hadn't anyone noticed
the lovely write-ups in the Ottawa Citizen and the Toronto Star? Didn't anyone other than my parents watch us on Best Week Ever?
I
pored over our traffic records to figure out what went wrong. Our
television and radio spots hadn't really helped. All of that mainstream
press came as we slid down from the contagious peak of our first few
days. Newspaper articles didn't translate into lots of hits; all they
did was lead to more print and television coverage. (The link I added
to my Slate bio didn't help too much,
either—it accounted for less than one-half of 1 percent of CwE's
visitors.) Most of our traffic came from blog links and Web sites like
College Humor and Something Awful.
It's easy to look back and
see why Crying, While Eating did so well, at least for a time. It's a
simple concept. It's interactive. It makes you laugh and feel
uncomfortable at the same time. But there are two parts to contagious
media. You have to make something that people want to spread around,
but unless you're as lucky as the Star Wars kid you also have
to do a little of the spreading yourself. CwE got lots of free
publicity because it was an entry in a contest; if Casimir and I tried
to make another contagious site, we'd have to do that legwork for
ourselves. I don't know if we could pull it off. It seems like a real
pain in the ass.
While the "Panty Raiders" took home the $2,000
jackpot, we did come away with two $1,000 awards. Crying, While Eating
won Eyebeam's Alexa Prize as the first entrant to crack the Web's
20,000 most popular sites and the Creative Commons
Prize as the most-visited site covered by a free distribution license.
Best of all, I got to take home a humongous, 4-foot-wide check. I
thought about converting it into a coffee table, but I still owed my
girlfriend a nice dinner. Now if I could only fit this thing through
the front door at Nobu.
Daniel Engber is a writer in New York City and a featured member of www.cryingwhileeating.com. Illustration by Mark Alan Stamaty.
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