Corey Haim and my fifteen minutes of fame.

byChieftess

844 followers

Updated 11 years ago

In 2010 Corey Haim, a promising but seriously medicated and ultimately failed film actor and teen heart throb -- died in Hollywood.

I was not that interested in Corey -- honestly, I swear, even when I was a kid I mostly didn't do the whole Teen Beat thing. I was pretty snotty and was quite sure it was beneath me. But you couldn't help but be aware of the outrageous affection people had for him. He was the kind of kid who you just realize has a fantastic talent for getting *lots* of attention from the world, to spend however he wanted to spend it.

Anyway, so he died. No one was really sure of how it happened but of course everyone suspected an overdose -- in fact most people figured that was the case.

However, for some reason...I am not sure why -- probably because I was pretty bored at the time and I like to dig into things and figure them out -- I started reading about the Strange Case of Corey Haim.

And then...for some weird reason I could not explain to you even now, I created a blog on Wordpress.com called Whatever Happened to Corey Haim. I just started writing about how odd it was that he died, and also about the *strange reaction* people seemed to be having -- and my own reaction, which was a kind of misplaced grief for this kid who first of all was not on my radar really ever in my life; and also was the kind of story I was not interested in. Teen dreamboat dies of overdose at 35, what a surprise.

But I kept investigating it, collecting news stories, and in the meantime figuring out wordpress module by module. I pulled comments exactly four hours after the blog went up. I started collecting photos; movie stills -- there was an auction -- some sleazy associate of his went into Corey's house and ransacked his closets for stuff to sell; people were on ebay snapping up this man's shoes.

And then a couple days later, I installed analytics.

I was getting hits. Not ten or twenty of them. Thousands. There's a map that goes with analytics -- not just Americans or Canadians. All of Europe. Australia. China. Israel. India! Phillipines!

All day and all night, these nameless thousands of surfers from all these countries were surfing to my blog to find out...Whatever Happened to Corey Haim.

Well, I thought.

That is very *very* interesting.

So...I got a Twitter account and hooked it up to my wordpress site. That put me on the front page of Google pretty much every time anyone typed the name "Corey Haim". I thought...what happens if I put a couple bucks into Adwords just to promote this a little but more? I saw the ad go up, watched it appear and disappear - not a lot of money at all, just an experiment.

By the end of the month I had collected TEN THOUSAND hits.

I knew a couple things. First of all, I knew that eventually people would lose interest in Whatever Happened to Corey Haim. I was losing interest. I was getting tired in fact. The thing about people who loved Corey Haim is they *really* loved Corey Haim and they wanted to talk to me all day and night. My blog email was absolutely destroyed with questions, ghost sightings, innuendo; people who wanted to use Corey's recently departed energy for faith healings...man, you name it.

The next month?

Fifteen thousand hits

Phew.

I kept trying to figure out a way to montize this traffic but there was just no way to do it in good conscience. I sure didn't want a commission on a dead kid's shoes. I felt very badly for everyone -- people who knew him, and people who were up at two am, surfing to some lost part of their own teen dream.

Twenty two thousand hits.

By the end of that month I was worn out and getting loopy. I wasn't sleeping. I would be up all night watching the overnights come in from overseas. Amazing. Amazing.

But weird, too. Really weird. Exhausting. I had gained about fifteen pounds, drifting back and forth to my work station. I started smoking again. I felt like I was getting eaten somehow by people I would never meet.

Summer came. His autopsy came out. He had died of pneumonia.

I killed the site.

And went to bed. I was ready to stay there for a year.

Basically nothing happened after that. I had bought my first real domain -- WhateverHappenedToCoreyHaim -- and exported everything over there after the second month. It all went - all of it, I didn't know what to do with it and at that point I did not care. I didn't want to think about it anymore but I did realize I had just metabolized *everything I could not ever really understand about internet marketing* in those four months.

Looking back on it now I guess I could have done more to monetize -- I could have branched off into movie posters or film reviews, started redirecting traffic over there...I don't know. But I never would have done that because, well, it was a dead person and this was an audience of very tenderly distressed nightowls, and I just didn't want to try to figure out how to get into their wallets.

It was a weird, WEIRD period in my life. But there is one thing I know now about *being online* anyway, that I didn't realize before then.

If you build it?

They will come.