Before Social Media, We Were Already Trying to Make the Internet Care

I negotiated an extra $20 before I had even been hired for my first PR job.

I was 19 years old, a sophomore in college, and interviewing for an internship at Pop Culture PR with founder Darren Shuster.

The interview went well. Darren offered me $18 an hour. The problem was that I already had another offer paying $18, and that job was closer.

So I told him.

He asked whether the other company had offered me $20. I said no. He raised the offer to $20 and then turned to someone named Lindsay and said something like, “Write down another hour on his first payroll. We’re paying him for this interview.”

It was loose, quick and funny. That was a pretty good introduction to what working there would be like.

Officially, I started as an intern working on a 1099. In practice, the title became less important almost immediately. I began bringing in business, developing campaign ideas, pitching reporters and taking on more of the work. Before long, I had become the third person at the firm and Darren’s right hand on some wonderfully strange projects.

This was before social media became the enormous marketing and distribution system it is today. Facebook was not yet the homepage of everyone’s life. YouTube did not exist. Twitter, Instagram and TikTok were still years away.

But the internet was already producing culture at full speed.

Our job was to make the rest of the world notice.

eBaum’s World and the early viral internet

One of the agency’s most fascinating clients was eBaum’s World.

For a generation of early internet users, eBaum’s World was a portal into online weirdness: Flash animations, soundboards, games, prank calls, shocking clips, ridiculous photographs and homemade videos that people passed between friends before “sharing” became a button attached to everything.

The site understood a basic truth about attention. People wanted to see something they had never seen before, especially if it made them laugh, recoil or immediately call someone else over to the computer.

My work was to help carry that online attention into traditional media. I pitched magazines and reporters, looked for ways to package the site’s success and tried to show mainstream outlets that internet culture was becoming culture, period.

There was no mature category called “internet PR.” It was regular PR applied to stories emerging from a place many traditional media people did not yet completely understand.

We pitched television, radio, newspapers and magazines. We took something happening online and translated it into a story an editor, producer or reporter could recognize. The internet supplied the raw material. Traditional media supplied scale, legitimacy and an audience that did not yet spend its entire day online.

I stepped out of class to pitch an eBaum’s World television show

At one point, I became convinced that eBaum’s World could become a television program.

The concept was simple: take the funniest, strangest and most compelling material circulating online and turn it into entertainment television. It would have been something like Tosh.0 before Tosh.0 existed.

I was still a college student when I helped pitch the idea to E! Entertainment. I remember stepping out of a communications class and taking the meeting from my professor’s office. One minute I was sitting in class learning about media. The next I was trying to turn one of the internet’s biggest entertainment sites into a television series.

Our E! version never solidified. But the premise was early, and it was real.

The wider market eventually arrived at the same idea. A later eBaum’s World television project was developed with Fox Television Studios and USA Network, and the site went on to participate in other television formats. Wired’s 2006 profile of Eric Bauman described a business attracting massive traffic, earning millions in advertising and pursuing television, books and mobile distribution.

I do not claim that our E! pitch became those later projects. It did not. What stayed with me was recognizing the opportunity before internet-clip television became an established format.

That instinct—to see an online behavior and imagine the larger media property hiding inside it—became central to my career.

The internet was also a casino

At Pop Culture PR, eBaum’s World was only part of the adventure.

Online gambling was rapidly becoming a business, and poker was everywhere. We worked directly with brands including GoldenPalace, Bodog and PokerShare, along with professional players and software developers building programs that could play online poker.

Darren was a serious poker player. His father operated a limousine company in the San Fernando Valley, which occasionally made our work and social lives overlap in ridiculous ways.

One Friday after work, we climbed into one of his father’s limousines and rode from Los Angeles to Las Vegas for a night or two of poker. We stayed at Bally’s, played cards and had an incredible time.

It felt less like entering an established industry and more like joining a frontier while the buildings were still going up.

The online poker brands understood publicity. They liked big personalities, dramatic wagers, unusual promotions and ideas capable of escaping the gambling pages and becoming general-interest news. The challenge was finding the concept that allowed a mainstream audience to understand why the story was interesting.

That work eventually led to one of my favorite early projects: the World Series of Poker Robots. We put software developers and their poker-playing programs around a real table at Binion’s Casino and invited professional player Phil Laak to compete against the machines.

Years before artificial intelligence became an everyday headline, we had created a simple man-versus-machine story people could watch and immediately understand.

Before feeds, algorithms and creator platforms

Today, a strange video can travel from TikTok to cable news in a few hours. In those days, the bridge was more manual.

We watched forums, blogs, entertainment sites and the early viral web. We called reporters. We emailed producers. We wrote releases. We explained traffic numbers and internet behavior to people who did not necessarily spend much time in those online communities themselves.

There were no polished influencer dashboards telling us who mattered. There was no mature creator economy. A blogger with a devoted audience might be more valuable than a large publication, but the industry had not developed a consistent language for explaining why.

You had to participate in the culture closely enough to recognize what was gaining momentum. Then you had to translate that momentum without sanding away everything that made the story interesting.

I was young, which helped. I was not observing internet culture as an outsider or treating it as a novelty. I was using it, laughing at it, sharing it and watching people form communities around it.

The internet did not look like a marketing channel to me. It looked like where things were beginning.

Attention was not the same as reputation

The early internet was exhilarating. It was also messy.

eBaum’s World became enormously popular and deeply controversial. Creators and rival communities accused the site of taking videos and animations without proper credit, adding its own watermark and profiting from work it had not created. The disputes led to legal threats, online retaliation and a lasting argument about ownership on the participatory web. Wired documented that history in detail.

That part of the story matters.

The early viral era taught me how quickly attention could compound. It also demonstrated that attention without trust creates a different kind of memory. People may remember the traffic, the controversy or the audacity, but they also remember how creators were treated and who received the credit.

Modern platforms have made attribution easier in some ways and murkier in others. Content is still copied, reposted, remixed and separated from its source. Brands still discover that reach and reputation are not interchangeable.

The lesson I carried forward was not “get attention at any cost.” It was to understand that the way a story travels becomes part of the story.

The beginning of a pattern

Those years established a pattern that kept repeating throughout my career.

I saw online entrepreneurs turn a red paperclip into a house. I helped six puppies introduce millions of people to livestreaming. I helped build an audience around people wearing a different branded shirt every day. I joined a social-video company that grew to 50 million users.

The technology changed each time. The underlying question did not:

Why would anyone care enough to tell someone else?

That is still the question I ask when an HR technology company launches a product, when we design a conference activation, when a founder wants to appear on podcasts or when a client has useful research that deserves a larger audience.

Public relations cannot force people to care. It can find the part of a story that is already interesting, make it understandable and put it in front of the people most likely to carry it forward.

Before social media, the social part was already there

We did not call it creator marketing, earned distribution, community-led growth or market memory.

We were simply paying attention to what people passed around.

The internet already had creators, communities, inside jokes, outrage cycles, personalities and stories capable of jumping into mainstream news. Social media did not invent those behaviors. It organized them, accelerated them and eventually monetized nearly every part of them.

My first PR job gave me a front-row seat while that transition was beginning.

It also gave me a $20 line item on my first paycheck for attending my own interview.

That may have been the first story I successfully pitched at Pop Culture PR: my own value.

Today, I help technology companies find the story that makes their market pay attention and remember them. Read more about how Evan White PR combines earned media, podcasts, events, influencer relationships and original content, or book a conversation.