Success story 3 : VDM a French Web Site Celebrates Life's Daily Indignities

"My boss came into the office and asked me, 'What are you working on?' I replied, 'My departure.' He'd forgotten I had just been laid off."
That counts as a "Vie de merde," or "A crappy life," according to some 70,000 readers of a French Web site of that name. The site has become a phenomenon in France by presenting a stream of tales of everyday humiliation.
Last year, "Vie de merde" was the ninth-most-searched-for service on Google's French search engine. It receives a thousand or so new stories a day, from which the three young men who run it pick a dozen or so to post. They make their living from ads on the site.
The founder, 20-year-old Maxime Valette, grew up watching subtitled broadcasts of "Seinfeld." A couple of years ago, he started posting his own stories online about the frustrations of modern life. His tech gadgets always had problems. The mailman didn't bother to ring the doorbell when he came to deliver a parcel, but instead just left a note. "At first they weren't funny," he says. "They were sad."

Mr. Valette then opened the site to outside contributions, and the stories got funnier.
Didier Guedj, 49, one of the core collaborators on the site, says one criterion for a successful story is that it must in some way be pathétique -- touching. "It's more like: 'One person's misfortunes reassure another,'" says Mr. Guedj.
http://www.viedemerde.fr/


"The Wall Street Journal"