About

The Best Page In The Universe is a personal satirical humor website created by George Ouzounian, better known by his online alias of Maddox. The website became quite popular in the early 2000s through word of mouth.

History

Ouzounian got the idea to start a website to wax poetic on his opinons in 1996 after he began circulating text documents to people who frequented the EFnet IRC chatroom #coders. After receiving positive feedback on his compilation post on 50 things that aggravated him, Ouzounian launched the website at age of 19 in 1997. He chose the title “The Best Page in the Universe,”^[1] despite its disadvantageous effect on search engine ranking since Yahoo! did not index pages containing the keyword “the best” in their titles at the time.^[11] Outside of the very first article created on the site, titled “The Best Movies in the Universe,”^[3] all of the original pages created in 1997 only exist as screenshots.

Maddox / George Ouzounian

George Ouzounian (shown below, left), better known as Maddox^[2], is the creator and the sole contributor to The Best Page Of The Universe. The nickname stems from the 1988 anime Metal Skin Panic MADOX-01.^[12] He graduated from the Woods Cross High School in Woods Cross, Utah, where he also attended the University of Utah for a time before becoming a computer programmer. On the Internet, he usually describes and depicts himself as a pirate (shown below, center), but has been also known to dress as a king (shown below, right) while attending press events.

Maddox gained a large following in the early 2000s and even spawned several fan sites including Friends of Maddox^[4][7] and Maddox Mania,^[5] though most of them had disbanded by 2006. Maddox Mania was later relaunched under the name of The Best Fanpage in the Universe^[6][10] and led to the creation of The Hidden Maddox^[25], a spin-off site highlighting articles and images that were never linked to on the main site between 2004 and 2006. In October 2005, The Hidden Maddox relaunched solely as s message board that is still active as of October 2012. A Facebook fan page^[16] was established for Maddox in June 2008, which has more than 106,000 likes as of October 2012. Additionally, dozens of quotes from Maddox and his site have been archived on Wikiquote^[8] and at least 20 definitions for his name have been submitted to Urban Dictionary.^[9]

Traffic

In August 2001, the site saw an average of 51 users per day. This jumped in 148,618 per day in March 2005, the same month the site broke more than 100 million visitors.^[11] In August 2003, Maddox compared^[18] both his Alexa traffic ranking and advertising budget to several big name companies including Wendy's, Burger King, Coca-Cola, Pepsi and McDonalds. Despite spending nothing on advertising, The Best Page in the Universe ranked 427 sites higher than the next largest site, McDonalds, who spent $548,250,000 on advertising in 2002, according to Advertising Age.

As of October 2012, the website that hosts The Best Page in the Universe, xmission.com, has an Alexa^[17] rank of 28,166 globally and 6901 in the United States. Nearly 33% of all traffic to xmission.com goes directly to Maddox's page.

Features

The site is run and written entirely by George Ouzounian. As of October 2012, it is updated approximately once a month, but with no set schedule. In addition to opinion pieces, the site consists of an FAQ^[19], a store^[20], images^[21] and a hate mail section^[22], which date back to February 1999. The layout of the site has not been updated since the 1990s, utilizing light colored text in a large font on a black background.

Highlights

The Alphabet of Manliness

On June 6th, 2006, Maddox's first book, The Alphabet of Manliness^[15] was published. For the book, Maddox enlisted eight artists to illustrate a series of "manly" things like ass kicking, boners and copping a feel in alphabetical order. Between July and September, Maddox did a book signing tour^[23] in 19 US cities in support of the book's release. In 2009 and 2011, two updated and revised versions were published. As of October 2012, the book has a 3.74 star rating on GoodReads.^[30]

The Best Comic in the Universe

The same year, Maddox released The Best Comic in the World^[24] at the San Diego Comic Con. The 38 page work did not contain any advertising and was initially limited to 6000 copies.

I Am Better Than Your Kids

In 2004, Maddox posted a series^[31] of children's artwork titled "I Am Better Than Your Kids," in which he posted commentary about the drawings, ignoring the fact that they were done by kids between the ages of 4 and 10. The initial five posts gave all of the photos an F grade. Five years later, Maddox turned the idea into a single serving site of the same name, extending the grading system to a scale of F- to F+. The blog was updated weekly and later turned into a book^[26], which was featured on Entertainment Weekly^[27] and the Huffington Post^[28], garnering positive reviews. As of October 2012, the book has a 4.14 star rating on GoodReads.^[29]

On YouTube

Maddox created a YouTube channel in 2006^[14] occasionally uploading videos to supplement his work on the site. In July 2010, he launched a web show titled The best Show in the Universe (shown below), produced in a newsroom style setting, where Maddox discusses a variety of topics including YouTube celebrities (shown below, right), children or the five worst things about New York City (shown below, left)

Search Interest

External References