We were checking out this old-school article on the “Six Simple Principles of Viral Marketing” and it occurred to us that, in his own way, John Mark Karr was a Harvard Business School case study for attention-seeking perves everywhere.

A successful viral campaign:

1. Gives away valuable products and services.
2. Provides for effortless transfer to others.
3. Scales easily from small to very large.
4. Exploits common motivations and behaviors.
5. Utilizes existing communication networks.
6. Takes advantage of others’ resources.

In Karr’s case, his “valuable service” was providing a confession. The media took care of the rest — providing effortless transfer, scaling from Thailand to the world, exploiting our basest motivations, utilizing every communication network on the planet, and taking advantage of resources that could have been used to cover real stories that affect our lives.

Congratulations to all of us.

We’re confused. First, there was this ad. Now, there’s this ad – continuing the stripper theme.

As readers of Media Orchard know, we’re not opposed to attractive women. But from a practical standpoint, do Napster’s ads really appeal to all demographics who want to download music online? Probably not.

More to the point, is Napster gaining any traction in building a viable alternative to iTunes? That remains highly questionable..

It’s all very troubling. If Napster doesn’t make it, where ever will we go to find advertising featuring scantily clad women?

We’ve written nearly 1,600 posts since starting Media Orchard in March 2005. Only two of them have mentioned the words “nipple slip.”

And yet:

Our StatCounter report shows that among the latest 10,000 visitors to our site, 955 arrived via Web search. Of these, the most-used search terms were:

1. media orchard (50 searches)
2. nipple slips (45 searches)

Fortunately for entertainment Web sites everywhere, nipple-slip mania shows no sign of abating anytime soon. We even had A NIPPLE SLIP AT THE EMMYS LAST NIGHT.

We’ll just sit here quietly and wait for the server to explode.

Here’s the hack. While we support occasional pandering, we disapprove of cheating. We hope YouTube fixes this (if they haven’t already done so) before the Dr. Myras of the world get any bright ideas.