AMERICAN GO TH Hilton with current bf Matthew Cole

 

around: live video. While MySpace allows for video uploads on its MySpace TV section, putting live feeds on it or other sites is considered risky—particularly with heightened concerns over child safety online.

In February 2006, the Los Angeles–based Advanced Video Communications launched Stickam to let DIY webcam broadcasters embed video feeds right on homepages on sites such as Xanga, Friendster, and MySpace. Security was still an issue, but under this arrangement, it would fall on the social networks to do the monitoring. “We tried to have good password security,” says Jake Gold, Stickam’s chief technical officer, “and to tell users ways to keep safe.”

For a short time, the service thrived on MySpace, before it was blocked from the site due to security concerns. To survive on its own, Stickam had to employ a self-policing community standard similar to the kind YouTube uses to keep out sex and violence. Stickam also limits membership to users over the age of 13, though it acknowledges the difficulty of enforcing the policy and provides parental controls to help adults keep tabs.

Keeping tabs of the kids who are making the shows, of course, is another story—especially when parents aren’t watching. The horrific potential of this unsupervised frontier was realized last November, when 19-year-old Abraham Biggs broadcast himself overdosing on pills on the live video site Justin.tv. Viewers had egged him on.

The heart of the problem is that, as Gold says, “live feeds can’t be taken down.” Videos can only be banned after the fact, a task that grew more daunting as Stickam expanded from 200 live feeds to 50,000. In addition to relying on users to flag violations, Stickam now employs round-the-clock moderators to monitor the feeds—a system, the company says, that has proven successful.

Then the company had to deal with an unexpected consequence of pairing live teens with live cameras: celebrity.

As entrepreneurIAl
teens begAn
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to have the most-watched show, few were savvier than Hilton. “I admit to being a complete workaholic,” she once blogged. “This is the business and/or industry that I was born in, raised in, grew up in, and will die in. Period.”

While many Web-birthed microcelebs may dabble, Hilton was dogged in her pursuit of Tila Tequila–style fame, regardless of the consequences. “I was on from the time I woke up to the time I went to sleep,” she says now, during a break in shooting at a makeshift studio in a small Woodland Hills apartment. Stickam may profit from its stars’ traffic, but it largely stays out of the way, so the responsibility for staying safe ultimately falls on the talent.

While Hilton had shrugged off the weird fan contact in the past, her new stalker wasn’t so easily ignored. When she got back to her grandparents’ house in Sun Valley at around 10 P.M. and fired up her laptop, her baby-blue eyes widened in shock.

“Oh, shit,” she grumbled.

After entering her passwords, she was unable to log on to her MySpace and Stickam accounts. She had been hacked. She called the phone company to reinstate her service, but within minutes, the line was dead again.

Then her phone rang. Hilton answered, and the strange guy on the other end told her there was one way she could get her accounts back: “Send me some nude pictures.”

A chill shot through Hilton. “No fucking way,” she said with a sneer.

Hilton listened in horror as he rattled off her Social Security number and home address. Her voice shaking, she asked, “What’s your name? What can I call you?”

“VIP,” he responded.

Then the phone went dead again. Hilton was staying with her grandparents because she had been fighting with her mother—and they were terrified by the situation. As savvy as Hilton was online, she was still a kid—and had a child’s sense of life and death. “Kids don’t realize their mortality,” says her grandmother, Ginger Cotton. “And the older we get, the more we realize that these things are real, and that bad things do happen.” So Cotton took action—albeit not

In March 2007, Justin Kan strapped a video camera to his head and shot his daily life. Justin.tv has since evolved into a live-video hosting community, broadcasting feeds from their office.

The 24-hour live feed of six Shiba Inu puppies napping, playing, and wrestling in their San Francisco dog bed rendered more than 14 million viewers paralyzed by cuteness in the fall and winter of ’08–’09.

A sort of all-purpose Internet mini-celeb, with popular MySpace and You Tube pages, the 20-year-old vegan is one of Stickam’s highest-ranked entertainers, with close to four million views.

This teen platinum-blonde alt coquette doesn’t really do anything, but her live shows on Stickam have accumulated more than a million views since May 2007. She is said to have coined the term “Haters make me famous.”