Chapter 8 : Famous and Broke

Chapter 8: Chapter 8 : Famous and Broke

The headline sitting in Digg’s upcoming queue a little after three in the morning said He Chose $200 Over His Girlfriend. Wait For 4:15.

A sophomore in Columbus who couldn’t sleep clicked it first. He made it as far as the Student Government kid in the yellow polo, white as a sheet, yelling "You can’t do this!", followed by a hard cut to the same kid on the mic grinning ear to ear, "SCU Student Government presents—the buyout!", and he laughed so loud his roommate threw a pillow at him. He dugg it and went back to not sleeping. An hour later a gas station clerk in Phoenix found it and watched the campus cop scene twice with a trucker who’d come in for cigarettes and forgot to pay for them.

The girl in Austin watched the whole thing.

She was a high school senior, up way too early in a dark bedroom with the laptop brightness turned all the way down, because her parents slept on the other side of a very thin wall. She’d only clicked because of the 4:15 in the headline, and she almost bailed in the first second when the whole screen went green. Then she figured out it was a thumb riffling a stack of twenties, close enough to read Andrew Jackson’s face, and a smack came out of the speakers so loud she hit the volume key three times in a panic.

After that she couldn’t really stop. A plywood pelican, five college kids with a hand on it, a crowd packed in below. Each of the five got a little white caption the first time they showed up: THE LOUDMOUTH, THE FUNNY ONE, THE COUPLE. The quiet girl on the end just got a question mark, which annoyed her for reasons she couldn’t explain. A campus cop with a mustache read the rules straight into the camera and never cracked, though the mustache was obviously trying to.

The big guy held an empty water bottle up to his mouth for a mic and told the pitcher his grandma threw a slipper harder than that, and the pitcher wound up and fired before he remembered his hand was supposed to stay on the pelican. Somebody had slowed that part way down so you could watch his palm come off the wood an inch at a time. SIX YEARS OF BASEBALL. ZERO SECONDS OF THOUGHT.

At four-fifteen the boyfriend let go, grabbed two hundred bucks, and held it up over his head. His girlfriend didn’t say a word. Then she unscrewed her water bottle and emptied it over him, slowly, down to the last drop.

The senior in Austin clamped one hand over her mouth and hit pause with the other. She sat there staring at the frozen frame, the bottle up, the boy dripping, the soggy cash still in the air, until she was sure she wasn’t going to make a sound. Then she opened AIM and sent the link to five people. u have to see this.

She watched the last two minutes cross-legged, with the laptop pulled into her lap. The big guy had his legs twisted together and his eyes shut and was chanting to himself about the Sahara being dry, while a few hundred people counted off the seconds for him. The question-mark girl opened her mouth for the first time all afternoon. "There’s a porta-potty by the Sigma tent. About forty yards." The big guy launched himself off the stage, the crowd split down the middle, the camera whipped around after him, and then there was nothing. Black.

She tapped the trackpad twice, sure the wireless had died on her. Then white text came up a line at a time, and she said "you’re kidding me" out loud to her empty room.

She clicked through to the website and picked the girl with the question mark. She couldn’t have told you why, except that in her experience the quiet ones usually won.

At 2:40 that morning the video had eleven views. By six it had 1,240, and by seven-thirty 9,800, and the guy who’d cut it was facedown in a dorm bed with his mouth open, sleeping through all of it.

?

It wasn’t the alarm that woke Ethan. It was Noah.

More precisely, it was Noah kneeling on the edge of his mattress, holding the Dell laptop about four inches from his face. "Wake up. Wake up wake up wake up."

Ethan squinted at the clock on the wall. 11:07. The first college class of his life had been at nine. He’d slept through it.

Then the screen came into focus.

YouTube’s Most Viewed page, the Today tab. In the fourteenth spot, a tiny thumbnail. A girl holding up a water bottle. A guy soaked to the skin. A fistful of cash over his head.

Views: 48,213.

"Forty-eight thousand." Noah’s voice cracked. "Forty-eight thousand people! It was at eleven when I went to sleep!"

He dumped the whole thing on Ethan in one breath. A little after three in the morning, somebody had posted the video to Digg, under a headline about a guy picking two hundred bucks over his girlfriend. By eight, it was on Digg’s front page. Over in the SCU Class of 2010 group on Facebook, there were three hundred posts about it, half of them asking who won and the other half telling them to go guess on the website like everybody else.

"Nobody even knows who put it on Digg. Some genius."

"Me."

Noah froze. "When?"

"While you were brushing your teeth. Five whole minutes, man. I had to do something."

In 2006, Digg’s front page was one of the biggest faucets on the whole internet. A story hit it, and small websites went down under the traffic. People called it the Digg effect.

And what got you to the front page wasn’t how good the thing was. It was the headline. Ethan had spent three minutes on that one line. Give them half, and make them click for the other half.

It would take BuzzFeed and Upworthy another seven or eight years to grind that into a formula. On Digg in 2006, everybody else was still shouting in all caps with a row of exclamation points. Over the years, he’d rewritten thousands of headlines for other people.

Noah was already scrolling the Facebook group. Three pages in, he went still.

"Oh, come on." He turned the screen around. "Look at this."

A guy named Brad something had posted: Stop guessing, I was front row, the quiet Asian girl won. A dozen replies under it already. For real??

"This jerk!" Noah came up off the bed. "He’s wrecking the whole thing! A dozen people already believe him! I’m replying right now, I’m telling everybody he’s a liar—"

"He’s not lying," Ethan said.

Noah stopped with his mouth open.

"Which is why the harder you argue, the truer it looks." Ethan threw off the blanket and sat up. "Relax. One true answer buried under ten wrong ones is just another guess."

Neither of their names appeared anywhere in the video. Noah had been behind the camera the whole time, and nobody had seen his face. Ethan had said a few lines on camera, but his Facebook account was a week old, with the gray question-mark silhouette for a picture and nothing under his name. In that group, they were just two more freshmen.

Twenty minutes later, the group had two new posts. One from Ethan: I was front row too. The big guy won. He came back from the bathroom and the cop ruled he never left. One from Noah: You’re all wrong. It was the girl from the couple. They let her back on after the water thing, it’s in the part they cut.

Noah typed the last word and stared at the screen. "Are we... spreading rumors about our own video?"

"We’re keeping it alive."

Two accounts weren’t enough. In 2006, Facebook only let you in with a school email, one account per address, so there was no making fake ones. But almost every profile listed an AIM screen name. Ethan registered a fresh one: WhoWonTheGrand06.

He picked the seven or eight loudest people in the group and messaged them one at a time. Ten posts about who won, in the group or on your own wall, five bucks, PayPal or cash. Make up any answer you want. Only one rule: don’t agree with anybody else.

The first to answer was the N73 guy in the red cap from the night before. Noah had gotten his screen name while they were copying the clip.

RedCapRyan: ten posts for five?? dude ill be done in 10 min

RedCapRyan: can my roommate get in on this

Ethan wrote back: Same rate. Bring friends.

The last to answer was the ponytail girl from yesterday. Her Facebook said Chloe Daniels, Brennan Hall.

Chloe: No.

Ethan didn’t think much of it. He was about to close the window when a second message popped up.

Chloe: Not unless you message me from your real screen name. Hi, Ethan. You still have my memory card.

Ethan sat there, not sure whether to laugh or groan. He logged out, logged back in under his own screen name, and added her.

Ethan: Hi, Chloe. Card’s safe. Still working on the nicer outfit.

Chloe: Better. Tomorrow. Second floor. I’ll be the judge of nicer.

Less than a minute later, a new post went up in the group. Chloe Daniels: Everybody in the front row is full of it. The baseball guy won.

She never asked for the five bucks.

He took the laptop and hit refresh.

49,377.

There were three unread texts on the phone by his pillow. All from Maya.

9:14 a.m.: #31

10:20 a.m.: #19

11:02 a.m.: #14

Not one extra word. She’d been watching that list all morning.

Ethan typed: Morning.

The answer came back in under ten seconds.

Maya: You win. Don’t be smug about it.

Maya: Site’s holding. 6,212 guesses so far. Mac 38%. Tyler 22%. Me 9%.

Maya: 9% is rude.

This time, Ethan didn’t hold it in.

Ethan pulled on a shirt, and he and Noah headed for the dining hall.

Halfway there, Mac called. He was already at the dining hall, and he’d already been recognized. Trays clattered in the background. "Bro, a girl just asked me to sign her lunch tray. Her tray! Did I sign it? You know I signed it."

The walk from the dorm to the dining hall usually took five minutes. Today it took twenty.

Out on the quad, the Welcome Week banners were still up. A few people were crowded around a laptop on a bench, the pelican on the screen. As Ethan passed, one of them had his eyes shut, chanting, "Sahara Desert. Sahara is dry—" and the rest were losing it. One of them slid right off the bench into the grass.

Two guys with a basketball passed them going the other way. Three steps later, they walked back.

"Wait. Wait wait wait." The tall one pointed at Ethan. "You’re the—" He brought his empty hand down through the air and did the sound himself. "Smack!"

The short one shoved the ball at his friend and came over to bump shoulders with Ethan. "Dude, I watched the cop part four times. ONE HOUR LATER. My roommate laughed so hard he fell off the top bunk. He’s still icing his back."

They’d barely gone ten more steps when a guy with headphones around his neck caught up from behind and jogged alongside, glanced left and right, and dropped his voice. "Just one question. Who was it?"

"Friday after midnight, everybody’ll know."

"I’ll give you ten bucks." He already had his wallet out. "Twenty. Twenty bucks, just tell me the first letter."

"Guessing on the website’s free," Ethan said. "Get it right and you’re in the drawing for a hundred."

The guy stopped, stuffed the wallet back in his pocket, and started thumbing the web address into his flip phone right there on the path.

Three girls were sitting on the library steps. The one in the middle saw him first, tipped her head to say something to the other two, and all three of them laughed. When he got close, she didn’t look away. She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear and gave him one slow blink.

"Hi, money guy."

Ethan gave her a nod and kept walking. Behind him, another round of laughter.

Noah held it in the whole way and finally cracked at the dining hall door. He jabbed one finger into Ethan’s chest. "Okay. I’m just going to say it. Every shot. Every single one. I shot it. My hands were shaking for two hours. Why is nobody blinking at me?"

"They weren’t looking at me," Ethan said. "They were looking at a guy slapping a thousand bucks on a speaker. What they remember is the thousand bucks."

"Then next time I slap the money."

"With what money?"

Noah opened his mouth, then shut it. He pulled the dining hall door open, went three steps in, and muttered without turning around, "...You still owe me twenty bucks."

By the time they turned off the lights that night, the count had passed a hundred thousand. Noah sat in front of 104,887 for a full minute without blinking, then turned around, eyes shining. "So how much are we making off this?"

"Nothing."

"...What?"

"Zero. Zilch. YouTube doesn’t pay anybody."

Noah’s face came down a little at a time. "Then what did we make it for?" He counted on his fingers. "A thousand bucks gone. Fifty for the phone video. The domain, the hosting, Sam’s pizza, all those five-dollar bills this morning, a whole night with no sleep. For a... number?"

"You’ll see."

In 2006, YouTube didn’t pay anybody who uploaded anything. No ad split, no creator program, nothing. YouTube itself was burning money on bandwidth every month.

Views weren’t money. Views were attention, and for attention to turn into money, somebody had to stand in the middle who was willing to pay for it. The viewers weren’t paying. The platform wasn’t paying. So you had to find a third party: someone who wanted to be seen by those hundred thousand people.

Eighty-seven days until Thanksgiving.

Ethan closed the laptop. He had the hundred thousand pairs of eyes. Starting tomorrow, it was time to make them pay.