CHAPTER 4
BLURT—THE WORST/BEST SITE ON THE INTERNET
CLAUDIA
In case you’re like my parents and have no clue what Blurt is, it’s a “microvideo” Ed. Note: “microvlog”? (not sure) social network. The only things you can post on it are two-second videos.
Depending on who you talk to, this makes Blurt either insanely cool or totally ridiculous. For example, I think it’s ridiculous. Because pretty much nothing fits into a two-second video except things that are completely stupid—like riding your bike into a swimming pool or pulling your pants down at a McDonald’s.
REESE
Blurt is AWESOME! It’s a whole site of nothing but dudes riding their bikes into swimming pools and pulling their pants down at McDonald’s!
It’s off the hook hilarious.
SOPHIE
Blurt is officially the dumbest thing in the history of the universe.
PARVATI
I LOVE IT!!!
Seriously. If it weren’t for Blurt, I wouldn’t know who Tyler Purdy is! Or Marcel Mourlot, Austin Flick, Luke Vivian, Cody and Cody, Jimmy Wallinger, Oscar Gonzalez, or Brian Messer!
CLAUDIA
Parvati has crushes on about twenty different Blurt stars. Which I do not really get. I mean, some of them are definitely cute. But they don’t DO anything. Most of their Blurts are just them making dumb jokes or staring into the camera and going, “HEEEEEEY BAAAAAAE…”
PARVATI
Okay, first of all—Tyler Purdy doesn’t HAVE to do anything except stare into the camera. HIS EYES ARE SOOOOO BLUE! I could seriously watch Blurts of Tyler’s eyes for WEEKS.
Second, it’s not true that none of them do anything. Marcel Mourlot’s inspirational Blurts are helping millions of people live their best possible life!
And Brian Messer’s a huge pop star. AND he got his start on Blurt! Just like you should!
CLAUDIA
I personally am not a big fan of Brian Messer’s music. But it’s true he’s gotten pretty huge. AND it all started with him posting tons of Blurts with little 2-second clips of his songs and a link so you could listen to the whole song on MeVid if you liked it.
I always thought this was crazy, because how can you tell if you like a song in two seconds? But after a week of watching “Windmill” go nowhere online, I finally took Parvati’s advice and started Blurting clips from it.
I posted about thirty Blurts in total. I would’ve done more, but it’s pretty hard to cut a song into two-second clips that make any kind of sense.
PARVATI
They’re not SUPPOSED to make sense! I feel like you’re missing the whole point of Blurt.
CLAUDIA
That’s probably true.
Anyway, I not only hashtagged all the clips, but Parvati had me tag a bunch of famous Blurters in the comments so it’d show up in their notifications, and they’d hopefully Reblurt Ed. Note: Reblurt = when you share somebody else’s Blurt on your Blurt page me.
None of them did. Even so, at first I thought my Blurt numbers looked pretty good. My most popular Blurt had 2,236 Blips Ed. Note: Blip = 1 view of a Blurt in its first week.
But since Blurts are only two seconds, and they play on a loop, it turns out 2,236 Blips is actually not much at all. You can practically get 1,000 Blips just by accident.
PARVATI
I left one of your Blurts running while I went to the bathroom, and I think that was good for about 500 Blips. Maybe more.
CLAUDIA
After all the Blurting I did, I wound up with a couple hundred Blurt followers. But I think they were mostly bots. Ed. Note: “bots” = robot accounts that follow you but aren’t actual humans And even if they were actual humans, not too many of them watched the full video. Even after two weeks of full-time Blurting, “Windmill” still had less than 400 views on MeVid.
I was pretty bummed about that. It was a great song, and almost everybody who heard it loved it. But no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t get people to click on it.
Not only did it NOT go viral, it didn’t even come close.
So I decided that getting huge on the Internet was basically impossible.
At least, I thought it was.
Until my brother did it without even trying.