Let's find out.
I set the goal at $10,000. Not a million. Not "as much as possible." Ten thousand dollars. Specific. Measurable. Absurd enough to be funny, small enough to be possible, round enough to fit on a scoreboard.
Why $10K? Because the Million Dollar Homepage already did a million. Because $10K is life-changing money for a guy with medical bills and a twelve-dollar domain. Because it's the perfect number to make people think "wait, could that actually work?" A hundred dollars is boring. A million dollars is fantasy. Ten thousand dollars is plausible. Plausible is what makes people pay attention.
The goal isn't just a goal. It's a narrative device. It gives the story a finish line. It gives readers a reason to come back. It turns a weird website into a race.
This is the part where I break down every element of this campaign that's designed to make it spread. I'm telling you the tricks while the tricks are being performed. A magician explaining the illusion mid-show. This shouldn't work. It might work better.
Element 1: The Word Itself
Unreplug. It's instantly understood. Nobody needs it explained. You hear it and your brain goes "oh — yeah, that should be a word." That's the foundation. If the word sucked, nothing else matters.
Good viral content has a zero-explanation threshold. You either get it in the first second or you scroll past. Unreplug passes that test every time.
Element 2: The Origin Story
A guy stressed about his health takes an edible and asks ChatGPT a question. The AI hallucinates a word that didn't exist. Two months later, he's high again, talking to a different AI about pineapple pizza, and that AI builds an entire marketing campaign in 40 minutes.
This story has: drugs, AI, accidental genius, absurdity, and a ticking clock. It's linkbait that's also true. The best kind.
Element 3: The AI Angle
This is the first word created by AI to enter the English lexicon. That's not spin. I searched. There's no documented case of it happening before. Every journalist covering AI is looking for a fresh angle. "AI hallucinated a useful word" is a fresh angle.
The word exists in a sweet spot: it's an AI story that isn't scary. Nobody's losing their job to the word "unreplug." It's charming. It's harmless. Editors love AI stories they don't have to pair with a photo of a robot looking menacing.
Element 4: The Meta-Narrative
I'm not just running a campaign. I'm documenting the campaign while it runs. The blog posts you're reading are part of the campaign. The campaign is about the campaign. It's ouroboros marketing — the snake eating its own tail and somehow gaining weight.
Somewhere, Baudrillard is smiling. This is his nightmare dressed up as a joke. A word that didn't exist, hallucinated by a machine, spreading through a campaign built by a different machine, documented in blog posts written by that same machine, read by humans who will repeat the word until it becomes real. The copy has no original. The map drew itself. The territory never existed.
It's simulacra all the way down, baby. And it's trying to make ten grand.
This creates infinite content. Every step generates a new story. "Day 1: launched the site." "Day 3: hit Reddit." "Day 7: a journalist called." The narrative feeds itself. There's always a next chapter because the act of writing the chapter IS the next chapter.
Element 5: The Confession
I'm telling you this is marketing. Right now. This sentence is designed to make you share this page. And you knowing that doesn't make it less effective. It might make it more effective, because now it's interesting on two levels: the content and the awareness of the content.
Transparency is the new manipulation. People are immune to being sold to. They're not immune to someone saying "I am selling to you and here's exactly how." That's novel. That gets shared.
Element 6: The Scoreboard
$10,000. That's the number. Public. Specific. Trackable. People love watching a number go up. It's why livestream donation counters work. It's why Wikipedia fundraising thermometers work. It's why every crowdfunding campaign has a progress bar.
The moment this site makes its first dollar, it becomes a race. People will check back. They'll root for it or against it. Either way, they're coming back.
Element 7: The Underdog
One guy. No budget. No team. No connections. Just a word, two AIs, and an edible. Versus the entire internet's attention economy.
I'm the Rick Rubin of this operation. Can't play a note but knows a good song when he hears it. I didn't write the code. I didn't write the copy. I didn't design the site. I heard the word "unreplug" and I knew it was a hit. That's the whole skill set. Taste. Vibes. Knowing when to get out of the way and let the machine cook.
If this works, I got paid for having taste. The American dream, updated for 2026: getting paid for having good vibrations.
People root for underdogs. They share underdog stories. They want to be part of the underdog's win. Every person who shares this site becomes part of the story. That's not an accident. That's the design.
Element 8: The Usefulness
Here's the thing nobody talks about with viral content: the best viral content is useful. The ice bucket challenge raised money. The Million Dollar Homepage was a bookmark page for advertisers. Wordle was a game you actually played.
Unreplug is a word you'll actually use. Next time your router dies, you'll say "unreplug it." That's not just virality. That's utility. And utility has a longer half-life than novelty.
Element 9: The Absurdity
A stoned guy monetizing a word that a chatbot hallucinated by having a different chatbot build a website about monetizing a word that a chatbot hallucinated.
Try explaining that to someone without smiling. You can't. And things that make people smile get shared. Things that make people say "what the fuck" get shared even faster.
Element 10: This Blog Post
You just read a blog post that explains exactly why the campaign is designed to go viral. This blog post is itself an element of that virality. You now want to share it because it's either the most honest piece of marketing you've ever read or the most manipulative. You're not sure which. That uncertainty is the last element.
So: how much can one man make off a viral internet campaign?
Revenue so far: $0.
But you're here. And that's how it starts.