Scott DeLong often receives e-mails from strangers asking for advice on how to get rich from the Internet. “I try and send them helpful stuff,” he says. “But I just can’t hold your hand and teach you how to do it. It’s like, ‘OK, start five years ago, do the research. Learn everything.’ ”
DeLong lives alone in a four-bedroom house that backs up to a cornfield on the outskirts of North Canton, Ohio. When he’s feeling stressed—like when his network servers hundreds of miles away in New Jersey crash from too much traffic, which has happened a lot lately—he retreats to his rec room and shoots hoops on an arcade-style basketball game. “It can get very, for lack of a better word, lonely,” he says.
The 31-year-old runs a site called Viral Nova, which aggregates “trending stories and pictures around the Web.” It reaches 6.6 million monthly U.S. visitors, according to ComScore, and has made him rich, though he admits it will likely not last forever. DeLong is the rare person who somehow manages to keep coming up with low-cost “programming” that generates sizable profits on the Web.
DeLong works from his home office with the help of three remote freelancers. Every day he wakes up and scavenges the Internet for visually compelling material on sites such as BuzzFeed, Reddit, Imgur, Bored Panda, and the Daily Mail. He chooses the most arresting items and repurposes them into 8 to 10 posts for Viral Nova. He writes headlines for each in the increasingly ubiquitous language of the click-seeking Web—chatty, saccharine, and oozing with overstatement. Certain adjectives recur frequently: amazing, mind-blowing, shocking, unreal, unbelievable, unimaginable, unstoppable, brilliant, genius, epic.
Almost everything on Viral Nova has been published previously elsewhere. DeLong will take a list from BuzzFeed entitled “29 Surreal Places in America You Need to Visit Before You Die,” itself cobbled together from photos culled from elsewhere, and transform it into an article titled “Step One Foot in Any of These 29 Places and Your Life Will Never Be the Same. Wow.”
He doesn’t attach his name to anything he publishes. Nor is there any information on Viral Nova about who runs the site. What DeLong wants more than personal recognition, he says, is for people to recognize his brand.
Viral Nova launched in May 2013, and it has exploded in popularity thanks to DeLong’s curatorial instincts and his ingenious manipulation of Facebook (FB). The world’s largest social network now accounts for 90 percent of Viral Nova’s audience. According to Quantcast, Viral Nova attracts more visitors each month than many well-established entertainment brands, including the BBC, Rush Limbaugh, and VH1 (VIA). DeLong says Viral Nova earns several hundred thousand dollars a month in ad revenue.
The site has emerged as one of the defining media companies of this convulsive era. Along with a handful of other publishers, such as Upworthy and Distractify, Viral Nova has perfected a newfangled technique of traffic metallurgy; it extracts large amounts of attention from Facebook using little more than cheap ingredients available to anybody on the Web. Colin Nagy, executive director for media at the Barbarian Group, a digital ad agency, says Viral Nova is a paragon of the strategy, which he likes to describe as “media arbitrage.” As Nagy sees it, DeLong’s success boils down to “finding a glitch in the matrix.”
DeLong grew up in the small town of Uhrichsville, Ohio. He lived with his mom, a homemaker, and his stepfather, a truck driver. His dad, a part-time Christian pastor, worked at a steel mill and owned a laundromat and a carwash.
After graduating from Kent State University in 2004, DeLong got a job at the Karcher Group, a marketing agency in North Canton. His role was to do search engine optimization for clients, typically local manufacturers. The job didn’t pay well. He lived at home with his parents.
In the summer of 2005, DeLong, who’d dabbled as a webmaster for years, was reading sitepoint.com, an Internet community for developers. On its marketplace, he came across a for-sale listing for a site called dumpalink.com, which claimed to be earning $30,000 a month in ad revenue. That was more than his annual salary. The site compiled amateur videos from around the Web. It was the kind of stuff DeLong had grown up watching on TV shows such as America’s Funniest Home Videos—frat brothers crashing golf carts, dads getting socked in the groin by toddlers.
A few weeks later he launched Nothing Toxic, a video blooper site with a dark edge. He spent hours rooting around the Internet for the most jaw-dropping footage of skateboarding accidents and car wrecks to post. To pump up his initial traffic, DeLong paid other webmasters to place links to his site on theirs. By December 2005, Nothing Toxic was making $8,000 a month in Google (GOOG) ad money (the year before, Google launched AdSense, an automated program in which the company placed ads on a site in exchange for a cut of the resulting revenue). In February 2006, DeLong quit his day job.
The site succeeded, but in the fall of 2006, Google shelled out $1.65 billion for YouTube. Before long, the whole ecosystem of sites from which Nothing Toxic emerged withered in its shadow. In 2007, DeLong sold 80 percent of Nothing Toxic to a Russian company. The next year, he and the company sold the entire site to Break Media, a Los Angeles-based company, for roughly $800,000. DeLong remained briefly to train his successor, an editor named Brian Warner.
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