IS SHE FOR REAL?
IN late March, a striking young blondish woman going by the nom-de-Tube of “GreenTeaGirlie” posted a 10-second video on YouTube.
“Hey YouTube viewers!” said the hopeful ingenue, “I’m new. I hope you welcome me. I’m actually going to be making some videos, and I hope they’re going to be really neat, so I hope you check ‘em out.”
Before anyone knew what was going on, “I’m New” had rocketed to the front page of YouTube’s daily Most Viewed section, where it raked in more than 170,000 hits on its first day -- an extraordinary showing for a maiden video blog.
Indeed, within 48 hours of its debut, “I’m New” was one of the most talked-about YouTube videos of the week.
Ten seconds long ... a pretty girl ... saying hello?
YouTubers smell a rat
Every YouTube video page has a “links” section -- pages on the Web where the video can be played, together with a count of how many times it’s been played on each one. Skeptics noticed that the links on “I’m New” -- each of which had resulted in thousands of hits -- were all MySpace profiles that had quickly been deactivated. They believed the bogus profiles had been set up as a way to “game” YouTube, or artificially boost a video’s view count. Then when MySpace caught on, the logic went, the fake profiles were shut down.
In the meantime, GreenTeaGirlie had posted a second video called “Kallie Is My Name,” in which she expressed surprise at all the negative attention. “But I don’t take it to heart,” she said gamely. “Bring it on, if this is the YouTube experience.”
This video shot to the top of the charts too. Now GreenTeaGirlie was more than a one-hit wonder -- she was a legitimate sensation. Dozens of response videos popped up, some expressing support, others derision, as well as a slew of copycats and parodies.
By this point, hype was gathering like a storm, and YouTube’s conspiracy theorists had elevated Kallie from run-of-the-mill YouTube cheat to industry-backed marketing shill. No one had forgotten Lonelygirl15, YouTube’s biggest phenomenon to date, and its biggest phony.
“Lonelygirl15, is that your younger sister?” one commenter wrote of GreenTeaGirlie. “What the ... are you trying to sell?” demanded another.
The brew thickens
Around this time, someone bought the rights to the GreenTeaGirlie.com domain name. When entered into a browser, the name brought users to the site of Seattle’s Dragonwater Tea Co. The mystery had a new prime suspect.
But Gary Gause, Dragonwater’s founder and president, quickly posted a blog thanking viewers for visiting but disavowing any connection to what he termed “the green tea girlie you tube video madness.”
“As for me being the culprit of this elaborate and partly ingenious marketing ploy,” he wrote, “Well, I’m just not that good.”
Soon afterward, GreenTeaGirlie.com stopped pointing to Dragonwater and briefly pointed to a site called Vidstars.net. It was an amateur-looking Web page of a viral marketing service that claimed it could “advertise your website to 4,000,000 youtubers a day.” The homepage listed several YouTube stars that Vidstars claimed it has set up with companies to promote their products: boh3m3 touting Dr Pepper, Paul “Renetto” Robinett playing a Waterstone acoustic guitar and GreenTeaGirlie’s affiliation with Dragonwater Tea.
“Get the idea?” read the teaser. “We’re here to promote your products. Right now.”
(Reached by phone, Robinett, one of YouTube’s biggest stars, angrily denied any connection to Vidstars, saying they had used his name without permission.)
The Vidstars homepage also featured a video starring a well-known YouTube loudmouth named Cody Smith. Smith first gained note for his association with Matt Foremski -- the Santa Rosa kid famous for first identifying Jessica Rose, the actress who played Lonelygirl15.
Complicating things further, GreenTeaGirlie’s personal YouTube profile added a link to yet another page: Kallieannie.com, a slightly more sophisticated site that featured a discussion board, a slideshow of photos of Kallie and a bio (“I’m 20 years old,” “I work full time selling Green Tea in a shopping mall,” “I do not wear extensions this is all my real hair”). Kallieannie.com also had a cryptic “games” section, where it told users to pay close attention to clues that would be included in future videos.
Soon after, GreenTeaGirlie.com did another quick change, transforming itself into a mid-1990s-looking personal Web page complete with a bright green background, a large photo of Kallie and an altogether different biography. This version of Kallie -- or Kalinda, as she called herself -- was a 22-year-old senior at UC Santa Barbara.
The intrigue was reaching critical mass: YouTube cheating. Dueling websites. Viral marketing. UC Santa Barbara? And, more curious of all, the specter of Lonelygirl15.
The Scout steps in
As Clue has taught us, the key to any mystery is figuring out who’s who. Who was Kallie? Who was behind the two GreenTeaGirlie websites? And who was running Vidstars?
The first stop was Whois.net, an Internet tool that tells you who registered a given domain name. GreenTeaGirlie.com, it said, belonged to Kalinda Kosakowski and listed an address in Isla Vista, home to so many UC Santa Barbara keg parties. The phone number listed, however, was bunk. And there was no Kalinda Kosakowski in the Santa Barbara phonebook.
As for Vidstars, an e-mail was sent to an address listed on its homepage, asking for comment. It garnered the following curt reply: “Thanks, but that’s not something we’re gonna be into.”
It was, however, something we were going to be into.
The Whois query on Kallieannie.com was more fruitful. It yielded contact information for Christopher Sams, an economics major at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City.
Reached by phone, Sams was cordial. Kallie was a friend of his, he said. He’d helped her set up a webcam and taught her how to record and upload videos. He’d also built Kallieannie.com using a template he found online.
Which would mean he presided over the suspicious early success of the 10-second “I’m New.” Sams denied that he was behind any scam. When pressed, however, his resolve weakened. “Honestly, I could get anybody’s video to the top of YouTube,” he boasted.
At the end of the conversation, Sams agreed to put Web Scout in touch with GreenTeaGirlie herself. On the phone, Kallie would not reveal her last name -- her mother, she said, was very worried about all the attention she’d been getting. But she did verify that she was a 20-year-old Utah native, Mormon (“and proud of it”), a good friend of the computer-savvy Sams (“we used to date ... you never know”). And, yes, she worked full time selling green tea from one of those carts in the mall.
Going on YouTube, she said, was her idea. “I thought it would be actually kind of fun to talk to people. I didn’t think it would be that big of a deal.”
Regarding the thousands of accusatory e-mails, video replies and comments she’d received, she admitted it made little sense to her. “People are wasting their time trying to figure out who I am,” she said. “I’m a girl that works and has a normal life.”
Until recently, her boss (the tea cart’s owner) had no idea she was making the videos. When she explained she’d been getting some attention, he asked if people had inquired about the product. But, she said, he didn’t ask her to plug it.
As for the other website, GreenTeaGirlie.com, Kallie said she had nothing to do with it and that her photo had been used without permission.
The final chapter
Who, then, would want to impersonate this harmless young tea vendor?
Our trusty Whois.net database revealed that the registrant of Vidstars.net was Mark Andrews and gave his Bay Area address. When this address was Googled, it instantly matched to the “contact” section of a tech industry blog. The blog, Silicon Valley Watcher, was run by Tom Foremski, a former Financial Times writer and the father of Matt Foremski. The Lonelygirl15 sleuth....
On the phone, Foremski Sr. said he believed his son owned the Vidstars domain name, and that he’d used his father’s address to register it. “He’s been buying up a bunch of names for a while,” Foremski said.
When a surprised-sounding Matt Foremski answered an unannounced call from Web Scout, he quickly denied any connection to either Vidstars or GreenTeaGirlie.com. All he knew, he said, was that his friend Cody Smith had been paid to do a video for the Vidstars creators.
“He told you what?” said Smith, on a different call minutes later. “OK, let me call you back.”
While we waited for the return call, Web Scout perused the latest GreenTeaGirlie videos. There were now a total of seven, three of which had nearly 350,000 views each, including her biggest and most controversial hit yet, “This Is for the Haters!!,” in which she appears dressed in a tight athletic outfit and dances flirtily to a techno song. “Haters!!” was a breakout success and achieved rarefied status as one of YouTube’s top 100 most-responded-to videos of all time.
Yet the suspicion had not ebbed. Capturing the prevailing sentiment, a commenter named LostSpider wrote, “You are lovely, but still looks [sic] as a fake marketing construct.”
When Foremski finally called back -- this time with Smith on line -- he was ready to come clean. It was indeed a marketing ploy, but not in the way you might expect.
The Lonelygirl15 hoax had made mistrust the default among YouTube’s video bloggers and viewers. Such a climate, Foremski said, was ripe for more and better hoaxing. He and his co-conspirators identified Kallie & Co. as the perfect patsy.
“We were trying to piggyback off what ... the real GreenTeaGirlie site was doing,” he said. So he bought the rights to GreenTeaGirlie.com on the very same day Kallie posted her first video.
“I wanted to fuel the hype,” he explained, “so I linked [GreenTeaGirlie.com] to some random tea company’s website.” (That would be Dragonwater.) “And I noted the response to that and how negative it was.”
It was a revelation to Foremski. “What if there was a whole ad agency dedicated to setting up these relationship between companies and popular YouTubers?” he mused at the time. “And Vidstars kind of grew off of that.”
Foremski said the notoriety Vidstars has gotten from its GreenTeaGirlie high jinks has attracted several parties interested in Vidstars’ next move. It’s an interesting new business model: hoaxing for dollars.
