(WSHH is currently ranked 313th.) And the winning formula persists. In 2011, was the 225th most-trafficked site in the U.S., making it about as popular as MTV.com, according to Alexa data cited in a Vibe pi ec e. The mélange of B-list celebrity controversy and “True Life: I Got My Ass Kicked” dispatches from regular folks proved to be potent. But most of the fighters were anonymous kids brawling outside their high schools, on their project steps, or in their suburban driveways. Others were angling for fame a major plot point in the first season of Love & Hip-Hop turns on Jim Jones’s mother releasing a WorldStar dis track about his girlfriend, then parlaying the controversy into a merchandising opportunity. Some of the combatants were famous - 50 Cent and Q had a heated argument on New York’s Hot 97 after the rapper (falsely) took credit for shutting WorldStar down for a day. With the genre lacking in the culture-consuming beefs that had propelled hip-hop media in the ’90s, WorldStar instead cobbled together an audience via a thousand lesser battles. Over time it evolved into a hip-hop gatekeeper at a time when print rap mags were struggling. While his early online ventures floundered, WorldStar, launched in 2005 (the same year as YouTube), found success as a video aggregator. O’Denat, from Hollis, Queens, had been fascinated with computers since an early job working at Circuit City. The viral video site - a mix of crowdsourced street fights, police dashcam footage, meme explainers, and strippers - aspires to be a one-stop shop for all content under the umbrella of “hip-hop culture,” which founder Lee “Q” O’Denat once described as “strippers, drug talk, violent talk, fights, animosity, love and hate.” O’Denat built WorldStar from a mixtape portal into one of the most-trafficked websites in the United States and eventually into a common exclamation that means, approximately, “some nefarious but entertaining shit is afoot.” On Monday night, he died in his sleep, according to TMZ. WorldStarHipHop is a repository for human conflict, often recorded with an iPhone camera.
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