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• The Magibon Phenomenon

  Monday, Feb 18, 2008 6:25PM / Standard Entry / Members only
  3 comments

  I’m baffled by the Magibon phenomenon.

  If you haven’t heard of her, Magibon is one of the most popular vloggers on YouTube. She’s currently the 75th most subscribed user of all time and is dominating the People & Blogs section, with four of her videos placing in the top 15 for the past month.

  Magibon doesn’t do anything in her videos. She just stares, blinks, and smiles at the camera. Occasionally she’ll say something in badly accented Japanese, like “pizza is delicious” or “I am studying Japanese.” Magibon looks 16, but claims to be 21, and is actually white, not Japanese. She’s very cute, has huge eyes, and resembles an anime character.

  Despite doing nothing in her videos, Magibon has somehow amassed millions of pageviews and has spawned a huge following of fans, haters, and imitators. She’s even been invited to appear on TV in Japan.

  This is Magibon’s most popular video, with over 2.4 million pageviews. It’s 30 seconds of her doing nothing.
  

  Some of her fans have created loving tribute videos. This one is set to “Hey There Delilah” and features a Magibon montage.
  

  The people who hate her have created parody videos. This one is by Jason Tobin, the actor who played Virgil in Better Luck Tomorrow and was also in Tokyo Drift. Make sure to fast forward to 1:00 to see Fake Magibon (Jason’s real-life girlfriend) getting beaten up by Jason.
  

  A creepy Magibon fan site came online fairly recently at Magibon.com. It claims to have been created by an obsessive fan named Frank and features a grainy black & white video of a masked man clutching at a wall with Magibon projected on it. Some people speculated that Frank and Magibon were part of an elaborate marketing campaign for a Japanese horror movie, but it turned that Frank was just a viral hoax created by a digital media artist named Danung.
  

  Magibon has become so popular in Japan that Gyao (a Japanese internet/TV broadcasting company) invited her to come to Tokyo to work with them. Their YouTube message says something along the lines of “We saw your comment on YouTube about wanting to visit Japan. If you are interested in appearing on Gyao, we would like to make a Magibon show. We’ll await your reply on YouTube.”
  

  Magibon responded saying she’d love to go anytime.
  

  It’s amazing that this girl is getting offers to fly to Japan, just for posting some videos of herself doing absolutely nothing. It’s yet another YouTube miracle, up there with Esmee Denters (the talented singer who uploaded videos of herself singing and got signed to Justin Timberlake’s record label, which she announced through a video of herself singing together with Justin Timberlake) and Tay Zonday (the guy who wrote Chocolate Rain, performed it on Jimmy Kimmel, and got tapped to star in a commercial for Cherry Chocolate Dr. Pepper).

  The power of YouTube is truly amazing.

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