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Internet Celebrity: Understanding Fame Online
The face of internet celebrity is rapidly diversifying and evolving. Online and mainstream celebrity culture are now weaving together, such that breakout stars from one-hit viral videos are able to turn their transient fame into a full-time career.
This book presents a framework for thinking about the different forms of internet celebrity that have emerged over the last decade, taking examples from the Global North and South, to consolidate key ideas about cultures of online fame. It discusses the overall landscape, developments and trends in the internet celebrity economy, and cross-cultural lessons.
This book presents a framework for thinking about the different forms of internet celebrity that have emerged over the last decade, taking examples from the Global North and South, to consolidate key ideas about cultures of online fame. It discusses the overall landscape, developments and trends in the internet celebrity economy, and cross-cultural lessons.
192 pages, Kindle Edition
Published July 16, 2018
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October 11, 2026
Internet Celebrity: Understanding Fame Online is a groundbreaking first monograph by digital anthropologist and ethnographer Crystal Abidin and an exceptional, cohesive work on internet celebrities and internet fame from its very beginning to the end of the 2010s. As part of the series “Society Now”, which informs readers about events and phenomena in the 21st century, Internet Celebrity (IC) is a short, informative and incisive book.
The first scholarly book on celebrities on the internet, Theresa Senft’s Camgirls, was published in 2008. About ten years and an apparent revolution in the internet sphere later, Abidin presents her readership with case studies from all conventional social media platforms of that period to serve as striking examples for all audiences. Her samples in IC are intentionally taken to include China, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan, in order to shift attention away from mainstream American or British online personalities and be more ethnically diverse. Abidin’s writing style promises an enjoyable read through her use of accessible and precise language, personal anecdotes and examples taken from pop culture and social media platforms; readers are allowed to relate to many moments from the internet and television culture. She successfully conveys her arguments and line of reasoning while cohesively connecting her paragraphs and subsequent chapters and sticking to a clear concept of structure. Abidin’s content is well laid out and follows a clear idea: from the rise of internet celebrities, their qualities and key appeals, to their interaction with traditional media and how we perceive, engage with and categorise influencers today. Abidin’s personal connection to social media, her engagement with its content and affection, is clearly portrayed within her preface and goes so far as to reach out to her readers in request for personal stories and anecdotes on internet celebrities and their connection with this topic.
Internet Celebrity begins by answering the question of what is understood as an “Internet Celebrity.” Abidin references cultural YouTube phenomena Troye Sivan and Zoe Sugg, who were among the first YouTubers to become celebrities thanks to their content creation, which initially started as a hobby around 2014, long before people could imagine this as a vocation. Circling back to the beginning of the internet, Abidin points out her differentiation between internet celebrities—celebrities native to and on the internet—and traditional media celebrities who are known as actors, singers, or even political figures. Furthermore, Abidin refers to the most influential works of celebrity studies scholar Graeme Turner and cultural studies scholar Chris Rojek to put internet celebrities into perspective and explain their constructed fame through its interest in their private lives and fabrication into a cultural and societal commodity. Internet celebrities could not be studied without addressing reality TV. Although these formats appear to be more accessible to the public and generate a different kind of fame than traditional media such as films or television series, Abidin points out that the mechanisms of fame remain hierarchical and characterised by an elitist selection process, and that there is a significant inequality of opportunity.
In addition to celebrity and cultural studies understandings, IC includes psychological conceptions, such as Donald Horton and R. Richard Wohl’s study on “parasocial relations.” This concept examines interpersonal relationships between audience members and celebrities based on an illusion of intimacy. This feeling of a friendly and close relationship is tightly connected to the celebrity’s advantage in promoting products and brands successfully.
Abidin traces how microcelebrities, who once started out as hobbyists, have turned their online presence into full-time vocational work, and how some have extended this labour to their partners and children, who in turn become “micro-microcelebrities” or “family influencers.” To capture what has changed between the era of microcelebrity and the current climate of internet celebrity, she proposes six measures by which internet celebrities can be assessed: scale, platform, audiences, nature, practice, and impact. Her central observation is that internet celebrities are known above all for their high visibility, a visibility that is not simply granted by an industry but curated by their audiences. At the same time, the line between internet and traditional celebrities is becoming increasingly blurred. James Corden’s “Carpool Karaoke” serves as a fitting example: originally a segment on his late-night show, it only went viral once it was uploaded to YouTube, where its relatable, seemingly unscripted format borrowed directly from the conventions of internet culture. Abidin concludes that internet celebrities are generally “required to indulge in greater disclosure of the self to maintain follower interest as the market becomes saturated,” and that traditional celebrities increasingly adopt the very same strategies in their self-branding on social media.
Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s forms of capital, the second chapter identifies four qualities through which internet celebrities accrue fame: exclusivity, exoticism, exceptionalism, and everydayness. Each corresponds to a specific form of capital and can provoke positive responses such as admiration and love as well as negative ones such as disgust and judgement. Exclusivity rests on economic capital and is exemplified by the “Rich Kids of Instagram,” whose display of luxury cars, fine dining and travel invites voyeurism over the excess of elite materiality. Exoticism builds on forms of cultural capital that differ from those of the audience. Abidin’s example is the Japanese competitive eater Kinoshita Yuka, whose binge-eating videos, a practice better known by its South Korean name mukbang, attract millions of views. Young, slim and female, she is the antithesis of a typical competitive eater, and the comments beneath her videos reproduce the popular YouTube trope of “Asians doing weird things.” Here, Abidin convincingly identifies ethnocentrism, specifically Americacentrism and Eurocentrism, as a booster of exotic fame, and notes that despite her enormous reach, Kinoshita remains a minority content creator in terms of gender, genre and cultural specificity. Exceptionalism, in turn, relies on technical capital, such as the expert skills of South Korean guitar prodigy Sungha Jung or the resourcefulness of Zhou Xiao Hui, known as “Ms Yeah,” who bakes cakes in office drawers and whose near-wordless videos travel effortlessly across language barriers. Finally, everydayness draws on social capital: by curating the mundane and ordinary aspects of life, as in the photo series Naptime with Joey, in which a baby is dressed up as various characters while asleep, internet celebrities create feelings of affect, connectedness, regularity and consistency. This chapter is arguably the analytical core of the book, as the four qualities offer a vocabulary that can be applied well beyond Abidin’s own case studies.
The third chapter turns to the relationship between internet celebrities and traditional media, which compete for the same audiences within the attention economy of digital spaces. Abidin distinguishes five types of internet celebrity and maps the value flows between them and traditional media. Eyewitness viral stars, such as Michelle Dobyne, become accidental memes overnight after a television news interview, yet their virality rarely translates into sustainable financial return; instead, numerous other actors profit from their unwitting content creation, for instance by selling merchandise. Referring to communication scholar Catherine Knight Steele, Abidin raises the uncomfortable question of whether it is wrong to laugh, since many of these memed individuals are poor people of colour and this “commodification of others” has repeatedly been called out as racist and exploitative. Meme personalities, by contrast, travel the difficult path from one-off virality to sustained fame, from meme face (Zeddie Little, the “Ridiculously Photogenic Guy”) to meme persona (“Bad Luck Brian,” “Success Kid”) to meme celebrity (“Grumpy Cat”), while unwilling memes such as the Taiwanese model Heidi Yeh, whose image in a cosmetic surgery advertisement led to slander and loss of modelling deals, show how little control the person behind a meme may have over its narrative. Children count as groomed investments whose viral posts are absorbed by traditional media, most prominently through The Ellen DeGeneres Show. Crowd-puller cameos are established internet celebrities who lend their fame to traditional media, as in the productions of Singaporean director Jack Neo, although such borrowing may backfire, as the Singaporean duo MunahHirziOfficial experienced when their satirical videos, well received by their YouTube community, met with considerable backlash from a conservative television audience. Finally, weaponised microcelebrity describes cases in which media coverage escalates into follow-up stories, as in the Wall Street Journal’s accusations of anti-Semitism against PewDiePie, then the most-subscribed and highest-paid YouTuber, which cost him his contracts with Disney and YouTube Red. Abidin summarises these symbiotic and parasitic relationships in a concise table of value flows that is particularly useful for readers new to the field.
The fourth chapter follows those internet celebrities who have managed to turn their digital fame into a self-brand and eventually a business: influencers. Using Singapore as her case, Abidin reconstructs the architecture of the industry, from the mid-2000s “blogshop” scene, in which young women modelled and sold clothing on blog platforms, to lifestyle blogging and the first influencer management agencies, Nuffnang (2007) and Gushcloud (2011). Especially insightful is her discussion of the industry’s shadow economies: purchased bot followers and the “Instagram Purge” of December 2014, hashtag spam and shadow bans, as well as Instagram pods and Twitter decks, which emerged once platforms abandoned chronological feeds in favour of algorithmic ranking. The chapter closes with a number of emergent shifts, among them the move from tasteful consumption to an amateur aesthetic, from platformed fame to cross-platform influence, from quantitative metrics to qualitative impact, and from an attention economy, in which abundant content competes for scarce attention in a “war of eyeballs,” to an affection economy, in which influencers’ lifestyles are on display, for sale and for emulation. In her Postface, Abidin strikes a cautiously optimistic tone: the industry has never been more institutionalised, regulated and organised, and “the culture of internet celebrity is here to stay for a long time to come.” At the same time, she observes how Donald Trump’s sensational tweets generated more publicity for his internet celebrity than for his presidential duties, and she explicitly frames her book as a “time capsule.”
This self-description proves remarkably apt, and it points to the book’s main limitation when read today. Published in 2018, IC captures a moment that has since passed. What Abidin presents as recent shifts, such as the introduction of Instagram Stories in August 2016, are now long-established features, and the platforms at the centre of her analysis, namely blogs, YouTube, Instagram and Twitter, no longer define the landscape on their own. TikTok, which absorbed Musical.ly, a platform Abidin mentions only in passing for its creator fund, has since reshaped internet fame fundamentally: its algorithmic “For You” feed decouples visibility from follower counts and allows virtually anyone to go viral overnight, which complicates both Abidin’s six measures and her emphasis on audiences curating visibility. A second limitation concerns the treatment of children. Although Abidin repeatedly addresses family influencers, the “Ellen Factory” and commodified childhoods, she largely describes these phenomena rather than problematising them. I would have liked to see a more critical examination of the impact this process has on the children’s lives and on their physical and mental health. The consequences of being turned into content at an age that precludes meaningful consent, for children’s privacy, their financial rights and their later lives, remain underexplored, even though recent public debates and legislation on child influencers show how pressing this question has become.
Despite these limitations, Internet Celebrity: Understanding Fame Online remains a valuable and highly readable introduction to the field. Abidin succeeds in offering a theoretical history of internet celebrity, a set of analytical tools in the form of the six measures, the four qualities and the five types, and a wealth of case studies from beyond the Anglo-American sphere. Her ethnographic proximity to the influencer industry lends the book a rare authenticity, while her accessible style makes it suitable for students and general readers alike. Read today, IC is perhaps best understood in the way Abidin herself suggests: as a “time capsule” that documents the formative decade of internet fame and lays the conceptual foundations on which any analysis of today’s celebrity culture must build. It can therefore be recommended to anyone interested in celebrity studies, media studies or digital culture, ideally complemented by more recent scholarship on platforms such as TikTok.
The first scholarly book on celebrities on the internet, Theresa Senft’s Camgirls, was published in 2008. About ten years and an apparent revolution in the internet sphere later, Abidin presents her readership with case studies from all conventional social media platforms of that period to serve as striking examples for all audiences. Her samples in IC are intentionally taken to include China, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan, in order to shift attention away from mainstream American or British online personalities and be more ethnically diverse. Abidin’s writing style promises an enjoyable read through her use of accessible and precise language, personal anecdotes and examples taken from pop culture and social media platforms; readers are allowed to relate to many moments from the internet and television culture. She successfully conveys her arguments and line of reasoning while cohesively connecting her paragraphs and subsequent chapters and sticking to a clear concept of structure. Abidin’s content is well laid out and follows a clear idea: from the rise of internet celebrities, their qualities and key appeals, to their interaction with traditional media and how we perceive, engage with and categorise influencers today. Abidin’s personal connection to social media, her engagement with its content and affection, is clearly portrayed within her preface and goes so far as to reach out to her readers in request for personal stories and anecdotes on internet celebrities and their connection with this topic.
Internet Celebrity begins by answering the question of what is understood as an “Internet Celebrity.” Abidin references cultural YouTube phenomena Troye Sivan and Zoe Sugg, who were among the first YouTubers to become celebrities thanks to their content creation, which initially started as a hobby around 2014, long before people could imagine this as a vocation. Circling back to the beginning of the internet, Abidin points out her differentiation between internet celebrities—celebrities native to and on the internet—and traditional media celebrities who are known as actors, singers, or even political figures. Furthermore, Abidin refers to the most influential works of celebrity studies scholar Graeme Turner and cultural studies scholar Chris Rojek to put internet celebrities into perspective and explain their constructed fame through its interest in their private lives and fabrication into a cultural and societal commodity. Internet celebrities could not be studied without addressing reality TV. Although these formats appear to be more accessible to the public and generate a different kind of fame than traditional media such as films or television series, Abidin points out that the mechanisms of fame remain hierarchical and characterised by an elitist selection process, and that there is a significant inequality of opportunity.
In addition to celebrity and cultural studies understandings, IC includes psychological conceptions, such as Donald Horton and R. Richard Wohl’s study on “parasocial relations.” This concept examines interpersonal relationships between audience members and celebrities based on an illusion of intimacy. This feeling of a friendly and close relationship is tightly connected to the celebrity’s advantage in promoting products and brands successfully.
Abidin traces how microcelebrities, who once started out as hobbyists, have turned their online presence into full-time vocational work, and how some have extended this labour to their partners and children, who in turn become “micro-microcelebrities” or “family influencers.” To capture what has changed between the era of microcelebrity and the current climate of internet celebrity, she proposes six measures by which internet celebrities can be assessed: scale, platform, audiences, nature, practice, and impact. Her central observation is that internet celebrities are known above all for their high visibility, a visibility that is not simply granted by an industry but curated by their audiences. At the same time, the line between internet and traditional celebrities is becoming increasingly blurred. James Corden’s “Carpool Karaoke” serves as a fitting example: originally a segment on his late-night show, it only went viral once it was uploaded to YouTube, where its relatable, seemingly unscripted format borrowed directly from the conventions of internet culture. Abidin concludes that internet celebrities are generally “required to indulge in greater disclosure of the self to maintain follower interest as the market becomes saturated,” and that traditional celebrities increasingly adopt the very same strategies in their self-branding on social media.
Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s forms of capital, the second chapter identifies four qualities through which internet celebrities accrue fame: exclusivity, exoticism, exceptionalism, and everydayness. Each corresponds to a specific form of capital and can provoke positive responses such as admiration and love as well as negative ones such as disgust and judgement. Exclusivity rests on economic capital and is exemplified by the “Rich Kids of Instagram,” whose display of luxury cars, fine dining and travel invites voyeurism over the excess of elite materiality. Exoticism builds on forms of cultural capital that differ from those of the audience. Abidin’s example is the Japanese competitive eater Kinoshita Yuka, whose binge-eating videos, a practice better known by its South Korean name mukbang, attract millions of views. Young, slim and female, she is the antithesis of a typical competitive eater, and the comments beneath her videos reproduce the popular YouTube trope of “Asians doing weird things.” Here, Abidin convincingly identifies ethnocentrism, specifically Americacentrism and Eurocentrism, as a booster of exotic fame, and notes that despite her enormous reach, Kinoshita remains a minority content creator in terms of gender, genre and cultural specificity. Exceptionalism, in turn, relies on technical capital, such as the expert skills of South Korean guitar prodigy Sungha Jung or the resourcefulness of Zhou Xiao Hui, known as “Ms Yeah,” who bakes cakes in office drawers and whose near-wordless videos travel effortlessly across language barriers. Finally, everydayness draws on social capital: by curating the mundane and ordinary aspects of life, as in the photo series Naptime with Joey, in which a baby is dressed up as various characters while asleep, internet celebrities create feelings of affect, connectedness, regularity and consistency. This chapter is arguably the analytical core of the book, as the four qualities offer a vocabulary that can be applied well beyond Abidin’s own case studies.
The third chapter turns to the relationship between internet celebrities and traditional media, which compete for the same audiences within the attention economy of digital spaces. Abidin distinguishes five types of internet celebrity and maps the value flows between them and traditional media. Eyewitness viral stars, such as Michelle Dobyne, become accidental memes overnight after a television news interview, yet their virality rarely translates into sustainable financial return; instead, numerous other actors profit from their unwitting content creation, for instance by selling merchandise. Referring to communication scholar Catherine Knight Steele, Abidin raises the uncomfortable question of whether it is wrong to laugh, since many of these memed individuals are poor people of colour and this “commodification of others” has repeatedly been called out as racist and exploitative. Meme personalities, by contrast, travel the difficult path from one-off virality to sustained fame, from meme face (Zeddie Little, the “Ridiculously Photogenic Guy”) to meme persona (“Bad Luck Brian,” “Success Kid”) to meme celebrity (“Grumpy Cat”), while unwilling memes such as the Taiwanese model Heidi Yeh, whose image in a cosmetic surgery advertisement led to slander and loss of modelling deals, show how little control the person behind a meme may have over its narrative. Children count as groomed investments whose viral posts are absorbed by traditional media, most prominently through The Ellen DeGeneres Show. Crowd-puller cameos are established internet celebrities who lend their fame to traditional media, as in the productions of Singaporean director Jack Neo, although such borrowing may backfire, as the Singaporean duo MunahHirziOfficial experienced when their satirical videos, well received by their YouTube community, met with considerable backlash from a conservative television audience. Finally, weaponised microcelebrity describes cases in which media coverage escalates into follow-up stories, as in the Wall Street Journal’s accusations of anti-Semitism against PewDiePie, then the most-subscribed and highest-paid YouTuber, which cost him his contracts with Disney and YouTube Red. Abidin summarises these symbiotic and parasitic relationships in a concise table of value flows that is particularly useful for readers new to the field.
The fourth chapter follows those internet celebrities who have managed to turn their digital fame into a self-brand and eventually a business: influencers. Using Singapore as her case, Abidin reconstructs the architecture of the industry, from the mid-2000s “blogshop” scene, in which young women modelled and sold clothing on blog platforms, to lifestyle blogging and the first influencer management agencies, Nuffnang (2007) and Gushcloud (2011). Especially insightful is her discussion of the industry’s shadow economies: purchased bot followers and the “Instagram Purge” of December 2014, hashtag spam and shadow bans, as well as Instagram pods and Twitter decks, which emerged once platforms abandoned chronological feeds in favour of algorithmic ranking. The chapter closes with a number of emergent shifts, among them the move from tasteful consumption to an amateur aesthetic, from platformed fame to cross-platform influence, from quantitative metrics to qualitative impact, and from an attention economy, in which abundant content competes for scarce attention in a “war of eyeballs,” to an affection economy, in which influencers’ lifestyles are on display, for sale and for emulation. In her Postface, Abidin strikes a cautiously optimistic tone: the industry has never been more institutionalised, regulated and organised, and “the culture of internet celebrity is here to stay for a long time to come.” At the same time, she observes how Donald Trump’s sensational tweets generated more publicity for his internet celebrity than for his presidential duties, and she explicitly frames her book as a “time capsule.”
This self-description proves remarkably apt, and it points to the book’s main limitation when read today. Published in 2018, IC captures a moment that has since passed. What Abidin presents as recent shifts, such as the introduction of Instagram Stories in August 2016, are now long-established features, and the platforms at the centre of her analysis, namely blogs, YouTube, Instagram and Twitter, no longer define the landscape on their own. TikTok, which absorbed Musical.ly, a platform Abidin mentions only in passing for its creator fund, has since reshaped internet fame fundamentally: its algorithmic “For You” feed decouples visibility from follower counts and allows virtually anyone to go viral overnight, which complicates both Abidin’s six measures and her emphasis on audiences curating visibility. A second limitation concerns the treatment of children. Although Abidin repeatedly addresses family influencers, the “Ellen Factory” and commodified childhoods, she largely describes these phenomena rather than problematising them. I would have liked to see a more critical examination of the impact this process has on the children’s lives and on their physical and mental health. The consequences of being turned into content at an age that precludes meaningful consent, for children’s privacy, their financial rights and their later lives, remain underexplored, even though recent public debates and legislation on child influencers show how pressing this question has become.
Despite these limitations, Internet Celebrity: Understanding Fame Online remains a valuable and highly readable introduction to the field. Abidin succeeds in offering a theoretical history of internet celebrity, a set of analytical tools in the form of the six measures, the four qualities and the five types, and a wealth of case studies from beyond the Anglo-American sphere. Her ethnographic proximity to the influencer industry lends the book a rare authenticity, while her accessible style makes it suitable for students and general readers alike. Read today, IC is perhaps best understood in the way Abidin herself suggests: as a “time capsule” that documents the formative decade of internet fame and lays the conceptual foundations on which any analysis of today’s celebrity culture must build. It can therefore be recommended to anyone interested in celebrity studies, media studies or digital culture, ideally complemented by more recent scholarship on platforms such as TikTok.
January 28, 2026
An internet celebrity can be seen as a modern form of public figure whose influence grows through social platforms rather than traditional media, and their impact may feel both powerful and unpredictable, sometimes visible in figures discussed widely, even accounts such as catturd on twitter . Their popularity often seems connected to relatability, constant interaction, and content that fits fast-moving trends, which can create a strong sense of closeness with audiences. At the same time, the attention they receive might bring pressure, scrutiny, and changing public opinion, so their online image could shift quickly depending on reactions and discussions. The appeal of an internet celebrity may lie in how accessible and real they appear, yet the digital spotlight sometimes makes their life seem more curated than it actually is. Overall, the presence of internet celebrities might reflect how communication, fame, and community are evolving in the online era, where influence can rise from ordinary beginnings and continue growing through engagement and visibility.
December 20, 2021
Crystal Abidin is one of the premiere scholars of internet celebrity and social media influencers today, and in this brief volume she provides a surprisingly comprehensive and accessible introduction to that subfield. With great examples and succinct summaries of key scholarly works in the history and development of internet celebrity studies, Abidin gives a useful glimpse into the development of the field alongside speculation about its future directions. As someone who is also studying particular kinds of celebrity on social media, this little book is invaluable. It was also an added bonus that the book was short and direct, mincing no words and wasting no time in making its point and demonstrating its importance.
June 12, 2019
Academic, based on research, written in popular style, easy English.
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December 22, 2021I've heard Crystal Abidin speak before and she is a very good speaker with a lot of interesting insights. Unfortunately, this book read a bit like a textbook and the writing is very dry.
December 18, 2022
Quick, clear, and easy read on celebrity. I thought the author could have gone more in depth in some areas, and perhaps covered more facets of the topic but it was a great read.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews