Above World Star founder Lee “Q” O’Denat, right, with Drake at a sixth-anniversary party for the website in 2011
NYMag ‘Worldstar, Baby
“WorldStar,” for those who don’t know, is WorldStarHipHop.com, which started in 2005 as just one more semi-swag hip-hop blog eventually featuring homemade videos of rappers and “sticky page” pix of buxom ladies. Over the years, however, the site has separated itself from the competition by depicting what founder Lee “Q” O’Denat, a self-confessed “Haitian ghetto nerd” from Hollis, Queens, calls “the whole gamut; A-to-Z; soup-to-nuts; the good, the bad, and the ugly of the urban experience.” From WorldStar’s POV, this includes a daily array of street fights and pushing matches in project hallways and camera scans of shoplifting incidents. The mix has proved exceedingly popular. With 1.1 million people visiting the site’s archaically funky layout per day, WSHH, as of last week, was ranked the 278th-most-visited URL in the U.S., according to Alexa, a web-traffic-tracking service. This was ahead of Slate, CBS, and Merriam-Webster, and right behind Sprint and Travelocity. With new vids constantly on display, a large portion of WSHH viewers, many hailing from the 18-to-34 male-demographic sweet spot, say they check the site at least once a day.
via http://nymag.com/news/features/worldstar-2012-2/index3.html
