ReachJanuary 1 to December 1

Falling in LoveHow the Internet fell in love with Leonardo Dicaprio By Katie Meyer

In the world of film, he’s famed director Martin Scorsese’s favourite leading man and has won awards for his environmentalism and acting. DiCaprio has picked up three Golden Globes, two Critics’ Choice Awards, and one Scream Award. He even holds two Blockbuster Entertainment Awards: a testament to his long tenure in show business.

Until this year, DiCaprio seemed to have everything but an Oscar.

Context – DiGiorno on Twitter

What did winning an Academy Award do to Leonardo DiCaprio online, and why did the Internet care so much?

Context – DiGiorno on Twitter

Becoming Meme

In the 90s, before Tumblr and Reddit churned out memes like studios churn out remakes, DiCaprio’s image in the public eye was enviable… but not pristine. As a member of the dubiously named Pussy Posse (see right), he had a reputation that is entirely explained by that name.

But that was before most Millenials started making memes on the Internet. That was before Strutting Leo turned a megastar and global brand into an affable, goofy snapshot that has stayed popular for more than five years. Other snapshots of DiCaprio followed suit, becoming their own memes in the same Goofy Leo genre.

Becoming Meme

As found in Crowdbabble, his earliest forays online (in the form of tweets) had low engagement: about 0%.Strutting Leo was the perfect remix of a very polished brand into a funny, Internet-made meme.

In 2008, grassroots enthusiasm for Strutting Leo skyrocketed with Buzzfeed and Funny or Die recaps, and thousands of notes on Tumblr. StruttingLeo.com was purchased and populated.

At the height of the recession, making fun of a millionaire somehow made him even more likeable and less aloof. Goofy Leo quickly blossomed into an entirely new genre of meme that would become even more powerful: Likeable Leo Pines for Oscar.

Poor Leo: Feeling bad for a movie star

The characters DiCaprio played in the early 2010s were often victims of injustice. Young social media users found parallels DiCaprio and his characters, who are usually unfairly deprived some key ingredient (a family, escape, some sitting room on a giant piece of wood floating in a freezing ocean).

The sympathy for his characters spilled over. Poor Leo became another sympathetic character waiting for much-needed validation. The first network to popularize Poor Leo, 9gag users started posting memes about the actor’s pitiable quest for a golden statue. Poor Leo also became a popular hashtag on Tumblr with thousands of posts.

Poor Leo: Feeling bad for a movie star

Reddit was soon to follow. Posts with DiCaprio in the headline have racked up more than 100,000 upvotes (I stopped counting after the first of many pages of submitted DiCaprio links and text posts).

Poor Leo: Feeling bad for a movie star

His Twitter account didn’t receive much engagement. Leonardo DiCaprio the brand was not as engaging as Leonardo DiCaprio the meme. Between Oscars 2015 and 2016, engagement for the star remained low. The Crowdbabble infographic above shows a 2.3% engagement rate and a very low number of total tweets for the period.

The Legion of Poor Leo Fans During the show, win or lose, the hundreds of thousands of Tumblrers, Redditors, and aggregator readers would react in a huge way.

Before Oscars 2016, DiCaprio had what every movie star(‘s publicity team) dreams of: an engaged, young, and massive following online. Every year, Poor Leo memes grew in popularity.

The Poor Leo meme became a sort of Mayan doomsday clock ticking down to the next Oscars. During the show, win or lose, the hundreds of thousands of Tumblrers, Redditors, and aggregator readers would react in a huge way.

Crowdbabble’s Analytics and Leo’s Surge

For the official @LeoDiCaprio on Twitter, excitement over his long-awaited Oscar translated into a concrete and dramatic spike in engagement. The Crowdbabble graph below shows engagement — likes, comments, and retweets — before and after the show. Can you spot his tweet about his Oscar win?

Crowdbabble’s Analytics and Leo’s Surge

The giant engagement spike is the response to @LeoDiCaprio’s post-win message to fans. His tweet about winning attracted 367,729 engagements from more than 100,000 Twitter users within three days. At the time of press, two weeks later, engagement had snowballed.

Tweet Engagement Metrics

This year, almost 4% of engagement with DiGiorno on Twitter is comprised of mentions and each tweet receives an average of 77.8 retweets or favourites. Though overall favourites and retweets were high last year — as users scrambled to capture the offensive tweet — now DiGiorno’s ability to capture its followers’ attention is stable and consistently high. Almost a third of the messages the brand sends receive between 10 and 49 retweets, with 4% going viral at more than 100, as shown below.

Tweet Engagement Metrics

Engagement with the tweet is now up to 955,465 retweets and likes combined. That’s quite Titantic.

He won the Oscar. Now what? Now that DiCaprio has his Oscar, the running Poor Leo joke is over. The thrill is gone: each Oscar run from now on will have much lower stakes. Subsequent awards seasons are unlikely to generate the thousands of meme posts and comments on Tumblr and Reddit that they did before the win.

Is Validated Leo – the movie star who now really does have everything – as likeable as Poor Leo? More importantly, is he as meme-able?

Engagement with DiCaprio’s account, from March 3 to March 7, is back down to 0%.Perhaps DiCaprio’s massive Poor Leo fandom will find a new way to celebrate Validated Leo. The thousands of social media users who enjoyed the Poor Leo meme might wait in suspense each awards season to see if the win becomes a streak.

Maybe the actor will begin choosing roles that do not end with unjust horror in candlelit crypts or creepy mental hospitals — characters who get what they want (the dawn of a new Strutting Leo era on screen).

Maybe Reddit and Tumblr users will find some other void in DiCaprio’s life to fixate on, and Poor Leo will re-emerge…