Why Is The Internet Obsessed With Lady Gaga?

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While I can sometimes appreciate the shock value that is Lady Gaga, I cannot help but wonder why she is so popular on the internet. Mashable.com has probably written 20 posts on Lady Gaga within the last two weeks, which is more than one a day. It is a definite way to pull in traffic but causes the real news to fall to the wayside.

Should Mashable be a major news source? Probably not, but the massive amount of traffic it gets makes it seem like a more reputable source for information related to the internet. The post “Lady Gaga Sesame Street = Out of this World Mashup [VIDEO]” might have been the straw that broke the camel’s back for me and I might just have to verbally swear off of visiting Mashable.

I find sites like TechCrunch and ReadWriteWeb to be much more informative and useful, although I do not expect perfection from either. It seems that the internet’s broad spectrum of content leaves it harder to find original and/or relevant content.

Lady Gaga’s persona has definitely created a Fame Monster in its own category giving ...
... her the title of most video views of any other music artist. While her musical talent can be debated, and her shocking antics cause a lot of commotion, it still causes me to wonder why she is so viral.

My guess is that she has had the luck of being viral at the same time that many content publishers figured out that producing content related to a trend is a great way to pull in traffic. With various parody videos of Lady Gaga, and a multitude of blogs, tweets and news articles all talking about Lady Gaga, not only is the content everywhere, but it is shared by everyone and that popularity leads to questions like the one I ask in the title … Why?

I posed the question to Mashable and asked why they were so obsessed with Lady Gaga to which one person responded with the obvious answer; she is great keyword for SEO Marketing that brings in tons of traffic for the site, but the author, Samuel Axon, actually responded with:

“We try to write up videos that are going viral with some insight into web culture. Gaga goes viral a lot, and we’ve covered past viral Sesame Street mashups too. Gaga just became the first brand to reach one billion web video views so we’ve been trying to figure out why the web culture zeitgeist and Lady Gaga are so buddy-buddy, but it’s an elusive phenomenon. But many of our readers enjoy reading about it.”

While I’m slightly insulted by his response that only someone naïve to the intricacies of internet marketing would accept, I will give him the benefit of the doubt that the readers “enjoy reading about it.”

It all makes me wonder if Lady Gaga is famous because she is a great artist or if it’s because her reputation (whether good or bad) has created a viral being that has surpassed the internet popularity of the likes of Britney Spears, Beyonce and the late Michael Jackson? Is she the new Madonna, but just in a viral-enabled world? Is Lady Gaga’s mass appeal a mystery only to me? What do you think? Share your insights.