Meatspin

About

Meatspin is a shock site featuring a clip from an adult film set to the 1985 Dead or Alive song "You Spin Me Round".

Origin

According to BMX Board^[5] user ruthlessrobbie, the original clip was taken from the transexual adult film TSBitches starring Cristina Bianchini. The clip was used in a YTMND page titled "Ridin Spinnaz"^[1] created on May 5th, 2004, which featured the 2003 rap song "Ridin Spinnaz" by Three 6 Mafia.

Spread

On March 10th, 2005, the single serving site Meatspin.com^[35] was launched, which hosted a larger version of the video clip paired with Dead or Alive's 1984 synth-pop hit "You Spin Me Round." On December 1st, the term "meatspin" was defined on Urban Dictionary.^[6] On February 5th, 2006, the Meatspin.com domain name was sold on the auction site eBay^[27] for $2100.^[18] On March 1st, 2006, the earliest known reaction video was uploaded to YouTube by user nicktendo (shown below).

On July 30th, Meatspin was named the "Awful Link of the Day" on Something Awful.^[31] On February 19th, 2007, the Meatspin Network^[19] was launched, which consists of 15 different shock sites as of March 2013. The network maintains a blog^[20], Twitter^[21], YouTube channel^[22] and Reddit^[23] account. On March 22nd, the first Meatspin related question was submitted to Yahoo! Answers.^[28]

Between 2007 and 2009, nearly 100 derivative YTMND sites^[7] were created, many of which featured spinning pieces of actual meat.^[8] In addition, the Meatspin website has been referenced on many discussion forums, including gaming board Illusory Studios,^[24] the Snopes forums,^[25] the music board AbsolutePunk^[29] and the MMA forum Bullshido.^[30]

Leekspin

On May 3rd, 2006, Leekspin.com^[3] was created as an alternative to Meatspin, pairing the character Orihime from the anime Bleach with a cover of traditional Finnish folk song "Levan Polkka" by the band Loituma.^[4]

Domain Expiration

On March 10th, 2012, the domain name Meatspin.com expired and the image was replaced with a parked domain advertisement. On March 12th, news of the site's removal was picked up by The Daily What^[12], the Daily Dot^[13], Guyism^[14], pop culture blog I Heart Chaos^[15] and the General Mayhem forums.^[16] By 12 a.m. (ET) on March 13th, the site was back up.^[17] On March 10th, 2013, the domain expired a second time and as of March 12th, has not been renewed.

University Wifi Hack

On March 1st, 2013, Benjamin Blouin (pictured below), a computer engineering student at the Florida State University's Panama City campus, hacked the school's wireless network to redirect all Internet users to the Meatspin website. Upon discovery, Blouin was suspended by the school's administration and arrested on third-degree felony charge of offenses against computer users.

In an interview with The News Herald^[36] on March 11th, Blouin defended his action by claiming to have performed the hack in order to make school officials improve the network’s security, while asserting that he did not specifically choose Meatspin, as it was the default website on the application he used to administer the hack. The school's network security was upgraded immediately after the incident. On the following day, the story was picked up by several news sites, including Gawker,^[32] BetaBeat^[33] and The Daily Dot.^[34]

Search Interest

Search for Meatspin began to pick up in June 2005, hitting an all-time high in December 2007.

External References