Mahir: “I kiss you!”

The story

Around the start of November 1999 the address raced through mailing lists. Salon watched his visitor count go from about 11,000 to more than 100,000 in one day, and past 700,000 within a week. He was getting thousands of emails a day.

Not every line was his. Çağrı told Turkish reporters a teenage hacker had played a joke on him, and the Museum of Hoaxes says much of the text people laughed at was added by a prankster who copied his real page. Even so, a dot-com company flew him to San Francisco that December, where nearly 2,000 people answered the invitation to his welcome party.

Comedy shows joined in: MADtv parodied him and David Letterman’s Late Show spoofed him, and in 2000 he starred in British TV adverts.

Why it matters

He is often described as perhaps the first person to become famous simply for a personal web page, and his story set the pattern later viral stars would follow: a forwarded link, a media frenzy, then sponsors and a tour, all within weeks. It also showed the harder side of that fame: the joke was at the expense of a real person.

Where it is now

In 2020 he was teaching physical education in İzmir and staying away from social media, which he called a waste of time; he said he wished he had handled the money from his fame better.