By now you’ve all heard of Allison Stokke. While blogs and “credible” news sources alike bounce arguments about whether or not Allison’s rapid rise to ceweblerty is wrong, degrading, disrespectful etc. We think there’s something much larger afoot here (and no, we’re not going to post pictures of her, so go wank somewhere else).
In the crusade to monetize the Internet, or anything for that matter, there must be some amount of predictability. Any business needs a method of being right more times than wrong, otherwise it’s called Las Vegas. The Allison Stokke phenomenon proves that there is simply no way of telling what the next big thing will be. Last week, no one could have thought, “there’s an attractive woman pole vaulter in California … let’s buy her advertising rights.”
There are millions of attractive girls with their pictures on the Internet, just log onto MySpace for a few seconds. There are also plenty of pictures and videos on the web of women who want horny dudes to look at them, and they’re wearing less – it’s called porno. So why did this one young woman end up such a hot search-item? The pole vaulting aspect is unique, and probably played a role, but I’m going to attribute most of it to lighting striking – and that cannot be predicted.
In the past, fame has been some combination of exceptional, unique talent and time, money, hard work from a number of people/groups. That’s all over now.
The person who succeeds in this overloaded ‘net will be the person who is able to predict, or intentionally create fame.