OK, so it’s all getting a bit long in the tooth now, she’s even had a feature in Wired, but a quick Friday lunchtime visit to YouTube showed yet another Lonelygirl15 video making it to the first page of ‘most viewed today’ and reminded me what a phenomenon this continues to be.

Love it or hate it, (and judging by the endless video responses and comments, most now hate it) the continuing saga of Lonelygirl15 is a great example of how a few people with a limited budget can create content that captures people’s attention in a way that most traditional media companies are still failing to do (I say ‘most’ because there’s always the possibility that one of them is behind this).

It has successfully tapped into the way people are behaving online and made use of the sites and tools that people are familiar with to find a ready made audience and a platform for an innovative bit of entertainment .

For those of you that haven’t seen the most viewed list on YouTube in the last 6 months, Lonleygirl15 is the screen name of a girl called Bree who started posting a number of video diaries to YouTube at the end of May. The entries got pretty strange fairly quickly and led you to believe this girl was part of a cult ‘The Order’, who was about to go through an initiation ritual.

The ‘story’ developed as other characters appeared with their own video messages to Bree, who decided to run rather than face the ritual. There was the boyfriend Daniel and friend Gemma all posting videos and using chat-rooms and forums.

For quite a while there was huge debate about whether this was fictional or not. It got people talking, got them exchanging ‘robust’ views in an environment they are entirely comfortable in, online. The conspiracy theories just increased interest further.

Eventually the story got out that Bree was actually an actress, Jessica Lee Rose, and the creators of Lonelygirl15 came forwards and admitted it was all ruse. But not before it made participants out of ‘viewers’ who, because of the media, could try and influence the story, offering their advice, debating whether it was real or not and looking for the next snippet of information.

It makes use of YouTube, has spawned a wiki, a number of dedicated chat-rooms and forums and still generates plenty of opinion, good and bad. It was an idea generated for the media, rather than an effort to reverse engineer something online, and that is the secret of its amazing exposure.

It’s a simple idea but provides yet another stark warning to media owners.

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