Erin Andrews Peephole Video

Popular ESPN sports reporter and blogger Erin Andrews is making headlines once again, this time for a unauthorized online video that shows her naked in her hotel room via peephole. From Manolith “Erin Andrews Peephole“

I’ll be honest, I’m not a huge sports fan, actually I’m not a sports fan at all. I enjoy the World Cup when it comes around, but obsessively following your favorite sports team and players always seems like a huge waste of bandwidth to me.

That being said, I do waste a ton of bandwidth (both literally and figuratively) tracking online trends.  During my travels ESPN reporter Erin Andrews has come up several times. Usually it involves how inappropriately hot she is, other times she’s getting hit in the face with objects.

Her latest online trend with this peephole video is going down in classic style. The nature of the content, and target audience isn’t hard to break down. I could unwrap the demographic like an onion, but it would likely offend a few of you. So instead let’s go through the typical life cycles of this type of juicy digital content.

1. Birth: These types of photos or videos are usually first published by some random site few people have heard about. The domain name is almost always horrible and difficult to spell. In this case it was NSFWpoa.com.
2. First Shots: Almost right away this site is hit hard by lawyers representing the party involved. Because these blogs are usually small home based operations they cave, who wants to get sued to death after all?
3. The Great Hunt: Once the original source removes the material, the hunt is on. Word begins to spread about its existence and the desperate masses converge trying to find those illusive copies. In almost every case, content like this is copied locally by someone, somewhere. It’s just not hosted anywhere yet. This forces users to go into a “deep search”, hitting some 10-20 sites in the process.
4. Opportunity: As major news outfits break the news, the spammers and adsense opportunists come out in droves. They create a huge network of performance focused (read: shit ton of ads) blog posts and lure in eager clickers. Done right they can easy bring in 100,000 or more visitors. They almost never include the actual content people are looking for.
5. Re Birth: Once a risky piece of content hits the net it will never disappear completely. It may not be easy to find but it’s out there. It lives on questionable file-sharing sites like RapidShare, in BitTorents and of course the dark corners of IRC. Those with the dedication (there is no shortage) will eventually find what they are looking for, satisfy the need and move on. In the process they begin to share the content with a broader audience through back channels. They use email, IM services and the classic “Hey dude, come over here and check this out” modes of distribution.
6. Retirement: Eventually (within 1-2 weeks) interest in the content dies down. Those who wanted to see it have, others have just given up. The content continues to get long tail like exposure, but never like its initial buzz.
7. Reincarnation: Hooray! There is life after death, even for content. Down the road (even years later) an event will trigger renewed interest in a video like this. This usually happens in the form of a radio broadcaster rehashing the story during a show. Howard Stern is probably the best known trigger for something like this.

So there you have it, a snapshot of what this video will go through. To those who landed here looking for the actual video I apologize. See Opportunity above, oh and happy hunting.

Related Posts:

• Looking into the Peephole (Erin Andrews Web Stats) (2)
• Erin Andrews Peephole Pictures (4)
• The Internet Meme Timeline (2)