WONGA!
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Origin
A British advertisement first aired in June 2009, featuring an actor named Billy Wright, shouting WONGA! – British slang for "money", the word being uncommon and the appearance of the person saying it started a YouTube fad, sometimes compared to Girugamesh.
Two of the original adverts:
and
The first remix seemed to have originated around August 2009, very shortly after the advert aired but the popularity seemed to really increase around January, and has been going up ever since.
It has been used for YTPMVs, looped for long periods of time, Youtube Pooped, etc.
Some of the many videos spawned by the advert can be found in the Videos box below.
The graph shows the increase of Google searches for "Wonga" from June '09 onwards, and the searches very visibly pick up.
There will have been searches for the definition long before the advert aired (visible at the start of the graph), but from July 2009, the searches began gradually increasing until January when the fad seemed to catch on.
Developments
Over a year later, in November 2010, after several Envirofone adverts without Wonga Man, a new series of adverts was released and Envirofone set up a channel on YouTube under the name "MrWongaman", (where all of them have been uploaded).
A "website":www.wongaman.co.uk, FaceBook page and Twitter account on which he (if it's him) interestingly replies to comments from users. In addition to this, in January 2011, a man shouting "Wonga!" appeared on the advert for the Dutch version of the site, envirofone.nl.
Spread
There are many fan (and hate) pages on 'social' networking sites for Wonga man and the Envirofone adverts.
Facebook fan page with over 91,000 fans
Facebook ahem hate page.
