Outright Dismay with Fame Registry

I think I’m going to be sick. 

Bear with me here. Weird story. Back in 2011 another blogger challenged me to get to 15,000 page views before he did. We both ramped up our blogging and sharing over social media. In an attempt to get the upper hand, I decided to ask some people if they would retweet a link to my blog, so that their Twitter followers could see it. 

I asked authors, TV stars, movie stars, social media gurus – nobody responded. Nobody gave a shit. 

Then I asked a porn star. She retweeted. Then I asked another. She did too. These porn stars had tens of thousands of followers at the time, Twitter being an emerging platform. With each retweet, I got a bump of page views. 

Granted, these were what we’d call ‘bounces’ – people coming on to the page and immediately leaving – but a page view is a page view. Within a week I’d hit 15K views waaaay ahead of the other blogger. 

I knew I was onto something. I looked up whether anyone had stumbled across the idea of asking porn stars to help build a blog audience. It seemed no-one had, but I discovered Porn Star Tweet, a website offering an amalgamation of porn stars on Twitter, with a live update of who’s tweeting right now and an overall list of people. 

I spent a month bashing through this, asking for RTs, and I got LOADS. My page views went through the roof. Some time later I did it again to finish off the site. I checked a few years later, but the site had closed down. 

After that, I noticed another, similar site had emerged – Fame Registry. The same list of porn stars, but a bigger list, with no live feed. I made a plan to use this to do the same thing. But first, I wanted to learn touchtyping, learn shorthand, get out and find things to write about… then get the pandemic out of the way. What a ballache. 

So. 2023 rolls around, I get January out of the way (a month when I knew there’d be nothing to blog about) and then started using Fame Registry to contact porn stars. 

Unbeknown to me, I’m making a huge mistake. Here’s the text of the first tweet I’d send to each of these porn stars:  

Hi, I’m Matt, a blogger covering celebs, psychology and social media. Check out Power is a State of Mind! https://powerisastateofmind.blogspot.com/ 

I’d then attach a tweet to this one with the following text: 

I have a small favour to ask, (INSERT NAME): could you retweet my blog please? I’ll give you a good mention.  

All fairly standard and understandable. Or so I thought. That second tweet, I attached to the first. I didn’t realise this, but unless you physically type in the @ handle again, that second tweet will not notify the person you first tweeted to. Unless they scrolled down, they wouldn’t see the request. I believe this is one of the changes imposed since Elon Musk’s takeover in October ‘22. 

I’d been tweeting my request for a retweet to what I thought were hundreds of these girls, for 2 weeks, without getting a response from any. Because I’d been tweeting to myself. 

I was, at the time, putting this lack of traction down to the accounts I was tweeting to having 6 figure followings, as opposed to 5, as they usually did way back when I first tried this sort of thing 11 years ago. There are billions more users on the site than there was in 2012. Back then I found as soon as someone had over 50K followers, the chances of them retweeting you were minimal; your tweet just gets lost in the noise. But it’s still possible. 

I found, this time, a lot of inactive and suspended accounts, presumably the result of Elon Musk’s purge on adult content. But there were still a lot of valid accounts that could have retweeted… had I not been tweeting my request at myself. Hundreds of times over. 

Furthermore, the site doesn’t appear to have been updated in perhaps years. Newer performers like Mona Azar, Jessie Saint, Blake Blossom, Leigh Darby, Kazumi, Eva Elfie, Aria Tylor, Angel Youngs, Haley Spades, Slimthic Vic, Jasmine Jae, Jessica Starling, Skye Blue and Purple Bitch are all notably absent. Plus, the site is awash with spelling errors.

I can’t bear to think about this project. I can’t see any notable increase in page views. I’m left only with a bitter regret of having wasted 2 weeks of my life. 17 days of this mistake. 1 girl RT’d the wrong tweet. 3 girls liked the right one but didn’t RT. I investigated 502 accounts, tweeting to the ones that still existed, weren’t suspended and had tweeted within the last month (which were maybe half). 

The lesson to learn from this is, if you get an idea for doing something, don’t put it off. If I’d have done this years ago, before Twitter changed, I might have had more of a response from the people I was tweeting to. 

What a regrettable scenario. And I wonder why I’m still single.