Don’t tell me you haven’t clicked on a YouTube video just because that little, teeny-weeny video preview image was chock full of some serious cleavage. The “hot bird talking about something or other” has been an attention-grabbing standby since TV weather segments, Latino variety shows, early 20th century tobacco ads — well, just about forever. But there’s something particularly fascinating about how successful it is on YouTube, and, more hilariously, how much those enterprising women are hated in the ‘serious’ YouTube community.I’ve heard anecdotes about the early days of pulling in views with boobs, when people in the know calculated exactly when YouTube would snag a preview from the video so that they could insert a single-second flash of T&A into an otherwise-sexless video. Nowadays, YouTube lets users select their own previews, which helps with the trickery. But the Reply Girl has taken it to a new level, flooding nearly every popular clip on the site with her own random commentary, breasts prominently displayed. Vice dove into the Reply Girl world as part of their My Life Online series to answer the singular question of the Internet: Are breasts really all it takes to drive traffic and get rich online?Follow Derek Mead on Twitter: @drderekmead.
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