“Personally, I like ’80s music, ’70s soul.” O’Denat tuned in 93.5 KDAY, an old-school hip-hop station. On the drive to its office in the Playa Vista neighborhood of Los Angeles, Mr.
O’Denat’s first meeting of the day was with Fullscreen, a media company that connects online personalities and brands. “On WorldStar, it’s right there in front of you,” Mr. O’Denat’s WorldStar would be a concentrated dose of off-the-chain. But while YouTube was a vast media ocean, Mr. O’Denat said he “saw another curve, the future of everything,” and created a hip-hop-inspired site that was 100 percent videos. It wasn’t until the mid-aughts, when YouTube became popular, that Mr. It was moderately successful but too narrowly focused. Next he created an e-commerce site to sell mix tapes by DJ Whoo Kid, a friend from Queens who collaborated with 50 Cent. O’Denat, a high school dropout, started his first digital venture, a pornographic site, in 1999. “They were like, ‘This is going nowhere.’ They laughed at me.” “I was telling people, ‘This is the future,’ ” he said.
He discovered the web back in the dial-up days. He started working at 14, initially at a fast-food restaurant (he lasted a week), then at Circuit City, where he fell in love with computers. O’Denat, 43, is of Haitian heritage and was raised by a single mother. “I used to hang out on Jamaica Avenue,” Mr. O’Denat has always been into fresh clothes and hip-hop music, he said, going back to his childhood in Hollis, Queens, where he had a front-row seat to the early days of the culture. “I told him I wanted something with vintage video games. O’Denat said, referring to Darren Romanelli, a Los Angeles-based artist and designer whose work is popular with rappers and athletes. The most eye-catching part of his ensemble was a custom denim vest emblazoned with graphics from the 1980s video game “The Legend of Zelda.” The media entrepreneur wore distressed denim by Robin’s Jean, a black WorldStarHipHop T-shirt, vintage red sunglasses with 14-karat gold banding, an Oregon Ducks cap turned backward and Nike Kobe Barcelona sneakers. “That’s the competitiveness of hip-hop, so I felt like the site needed to be R-rated.” “Hip-hop is for the sex, the drugs, the violence, the beefs, the culture,” Mr. should interview “this guy Q,” he has stuck to his vision. O’Denat was rattled a few years back when Bill O’Reilly, in response to a video posted to the site of a woman teaching a child to say inflammatory things about President Obama, said the F.B.I. Despite its sometimes hard-edged content, companies like Comedy Central, Progressive insurance and Subway are regular WorldStar advertisers.Īnd although Mr. O’Denat’s creation is controversial and, according to him, profitable. The titles of such pieces (“He Warned Him: Bully Asking for a Fight Gets Dropped!” “One Legged Man On Crutches Tries to Shoot Up a Store!” “Rat and Pigeon Go at it in Brooklyn!”) have a tabloid poetry that appeals to the 18-to-34 demographic. The site’s more outrageous clips, like police car dashboard-camera footage, cheaters confronted and street fights captured via iPhone, have received millions of views and made WorldStar’s reputation. O’Denat started in his house 10 years ago to sell rap mix tapes has evolved into a YouTube filtered through the lens of hip-hop culture - a grab bag of rap videos, celebrity interviews, sports clips, super cuts and the latest viral sensation.
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