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TIL the guy who became the 'hide your kids hide your wife' meme never made a dime off it, and he's back driving a truck in Alabama
I remembered that clip from like 2011 and went down a rabbit hole on what happened to Antoine Dodson. Turns out he got a reality show for a minute and some song money, then it all dried up and he ended up back home doing normal work. Wild that a random local news interview can make you famous for a decade and then just... not. Anyone else follow up on a viral star from back then and find out where they landed?
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thomas_martinez17d ago
The thing people don't get is that going viral is not the same as getting paid. A news clip can blow up and the guy in it has zero claim to anything, the station owns the footage, the song guy owns the song, and suddenly everyone is eating off your face but you. I've watched a couple of these stories play out and the smart move is always to lock down a trademark or get a real manager fast, because that window closes quick and the internet moves on to the next clip. Also a lot of these folks get stuck with a bad deal early on that follows them around forever. Sad part is he probably made more driving that truck than he ever saw from the meme, which says everything about how that whole machine works.
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seth68317d ago
2011 was also the year Rebecca Black put out Friday and she has said in interviews she barely saw anything from it either, so this is not some rare story about one guy getting a raw deal. Sure he could have grabbed a trademark, but a guy doing a local news interview at 2am is not sitting there thinking about brand deals, and acting like he fumbled some golden ticket feels like blaming him for a system that was never built to pay him. Some of these viral folks do fine, Lil TerRio got a deal, so it is not always a total loss.
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