Shameless Self Promoter

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When someone's self-promotion gets this bad... not even your home is safe.

"There are 30 million bloggers out there and they are all desperately trying to get you to read about their cat." —Duckluck, internet expert.

"Everyone on the internet has an ego, yes including you, but some people are just shameless." —Duckluck, brilliant social commentator.

"There are a lot of people who see the internet as their own personal advertising service. You see it all the time, everyone online seems to be pushing blogs, websites, and terrible self-published novels -- when they aren't selling something more, ahem, personal." —Duckluck, prophet of the internet age.

"Other people just have to be the center of attention and will go to any length to put themselves in the spotlight." —Duckluck, natural leader.

"It's this sort of shameless egotism that causes people to put huge annoying banners in their signatures that have nothing but their name, a link to their blog, and maybe a picture if you're lucky. They put similar links in their profiles, forum titles (if the forum allows that sort of thing), and even names. Plus you can bet they will have a really self-congratulatory avatar." —Duckluck the Wise, Supreme Leader.

"Once they've turned every available inch of their account into one big, obnoxious ad for themselves, the Shameless Self Promoter will then go on the offensive. They may go slowly at first, one piece of ego stoking Self-Insert Fic here, one link to their boring website there, but eventually they will get to the point where they'll be starting whole threads based on some piece of crappy Fan Art they drew or Emo poem they wrote. These threads will typically go on for several pages (with half the posts being by the self promoter) and will only end when the Shameless Self Promoter stops getting praise and goes off to advertise themselves in a thread that people actually care about." —St. Duckluck the Humble, Savior of the People.

"The shameless self promoter is almost always either a (really) Small Name, Big Ego or someone just looking to make a buck by pushing their wares wherever they can. Either way, the best thing to do is just ignore them. If they're doing it for attention, they'll lose interest and go somewhere else. If they're doing it to sell their crap, then all you have to do is not buy anything and they'll probably just start advertising elsewhere. The one thing you never want to do is give them the attention/business they're looking for, because once you feed them, they're yours forever." —Duckluckificus, Dark Lord of Hubris.

"There are some guys who, after seeing a trend want to jump on the bandwagon." —Duckluck, Certified Expert

Compare: Small Name, Big Ego, Cam Whore, Attention Whore, The Shill, and Single-Issue Wonk (where the issue is themselves).

See also: Duckluck.

Examples of Shameless Self Promoter include:

Comic Books

• Countdown to Final Crisis could arguably be considered nothing but this trope, advertising comics outside of Countdown within Countdown.

Literature

• Scott Sigler freely admits that being a Shameless Self Promoter is what propelled him from an unknown, unpublished writer to an acclaimed Podiobook superstar to a New York Times Bestselling author.
  • Also true of Sigler's arch-nemesis J.C. Hutchins who rode his self-promotion all the way to having his podcast novel trilogy 7th Son optioned by Warner Bros.
• In-universe example: In Winner Takes All, one of a pair of mercenaries who help to protect James Adamant has a sideline, writing chapbook adventure-stories and songs with himself as the hero under a nom de plume.
• In "Where is Joe Merchant" by Jimmy Buffet has several references to Jimmy Buffet's own songs.

Meta

• Troping Wikis: This page.
• Later, the unendingly Entry Pimp'd Instrument of God [part of the In the Matter of: series!] page.
• There's even a page for cataloguing self-promotion!
• Unfortunately this creeps out of its home and into our Fan Fic Recommendations pages every once in a while too, despite an explicit wiki rule against it.
• By the way, Oracle of Tao is mentioned (numerous times) in this wiki. You should check it out.

Professional Wrestling

• D Generation X. Full. Tilt. Also, Played for Laughs.
• Mick Foley will often plug his most recent book upon release on whatever show he is currently a part of. Also Played for Laughs due to his signature ability to go for the cheap pop.

Radio

• The second-to-last episode of The Stan Freberg Show, due to the lack of a corporate sponsor, was sponsored by Stan Freberg and filled with Parody Commercials for himself.

Video Games

• In the Crash Course DLC for Left 4 Dead, Valve slips one of these in as a little Easter Egg. If the player was to gather all the survivors around a leaking steam pipe, a conversation like this might occur:

Francis: Hey, watch out for that goddamn steam pipe. Zoey: Man, I love Steam steam. Francis: Yeah, steam's alright I guess.

• Aksys does this with style when Atlus USA asks a question to promote the Catherine trailer video. They instead promoted Record of Agarest War Zero.
• Of all games, Thunder Force VI. The final boss of the game was designed after an Eldritch Abomination in a manga created by the director of the game.
• Toby Fox is probably still busy getting Undertale, the (absolute "pop culture" behemoth of a) game for which he is most likely a One-Hit Wonder, ported onto basically every system that it possibly can be ported onto (as if the game's title, not to mention its extremely excessive fame, wasn't already reminiscent enough of Cave Story, mind you), in addition to the fact that the original version of Undertale was probably deliberately made (story-wise, at least) to cause/create the absolute largest number of Internet memes imaginable.
• In Street Fighter, Dan Hibiki is an in-universe one; Street Fighter IV shows him appearing in a commercial about himself and bragging about himself so much that he somehow causes himself to forget to mention the address of the dojo that he is supposed to be talking about in said commercial in the process, while Street Fighter V shows him making an entire toy line (the Saikyo Boys) about himself.

Web Comics

• Checkerboard Nightmare will do whatever it takes to make you read Checkerboard Nightmare.
• Xawu, being a recently started, short, epic webcomic wannabe, has done a lot of this, in this very wiki. Right now.
• Strangely enough, American Nerd, a comic from the same site, also used this tactic.
• Truth in Real Life and one of the factors if you want your webcomic to be successful. You gotta advertise like there's no tomorrow be it through word of mouth or paying for ad space. Any of the more successful webtoonists will tell you that if you ask for advice. Lest of course you want it to be low key.

Web Original

• This trope is why many people (Nintendocaprisun, Josh Jepson, Chuggaaconroy included) have disabled channel comments because people would not stop promoting their channel no matter how many times their comment was marked as spam. Hell, just take a look at Proton Jon's channel comments and see how long you can go without seeing a SSP in action.
• Futaba-channel derived Image Board communities (4Chan, 7Chan, etc.) that use anonymous names as default entries take this to a humorous extreme, where anyone actually using a name is teased or insulted.
• Deviant ART: You bet it's everywhere there... Everyone wants you to go there... to see his or her work...
  • The fact that a large part of it is about literally trying to sell your works for a profit makes it justified though. It's like an online shop for a lot of users. That and it is a blog site too!!
  • Also, Fur Affinity, and just about any Web Comic you've actually heard of.
• There is one of the many people "inspired" by the Angry Video Game Nerd to make reviews of video games for Youtube who shall not be named. The difference? Any forum related to video game "reviews" has been visited by him and several alternate accounts, each creating threads solely linking to his work. The That Guy With The Glasses forum once had four topics consisting of the same links to his material. If his name or Youtube username is mentioned on anywhere on any forum, he will immediately insult long-time members yet simultaneously set up a separate account to link others to his work. He is known to spam other popular "reviews" with links to his videos and responds to any messages directed at himself with anger and self-righteous egoism. When another user made fun of him in a video, the amount of comments he made to the video infamously numbered more than the actual video's total views. Note that he once promoted himself in a forum thread created to point out his shamelessness.
  • And adding to his self-righteous egotism, the man discovered TV Tropes when he found his name mentioned in one article and predictably vandalized the article in order to defend whatever he had of his "good name". Consequently, TVT made a point of never mentioning his actual name again. Speak of the Devil indeed.
    • So, he's essentially Candle Jack, only he insults people rather than kidnapping them.
• Try reading the comments on a YouTube video sometime. Guaranteed, you will see someone either trying to shill either their own videos or another website.
• On the video game music podcast Nitro Game Injection, Larry Oji never wastes an opportunity to mention OverClocked Remix. This isn't so surprising, considering he's the Head Submissions Evaluator of the site.
  • This is Lampshaded in the website description for episode 118, in which it's suggested that the listener takes a shot every time Larry mentions OCR.
• Submarine Man, despite being a barely-even-existent SoundCloud joke artist who is easily one of the worst rappers (and most painfully unfunny music parodists, not to mention most utterly shameless copyright thieves) of all time, has made numerous "songs" that basically do nothing but brag about how "great" he is and how sexy/smelly his (favorite types of) feet are. In fact, he eventually even went as far as to call himself a better rapper than (freaking) Eminem in "Go Dumb" (one of his many unbelievably terrible "songs").
• Hannah Daigle's Satina (Wants a Glass of Water) series currently only has one actual episode and two pilot shorts, yet it already has its own merchandise and an incredibly large amount of fan art that (includes fan comics and) was made by Hannah herself.
• Back when SammyClassicSonicFan was a downright insane troll rather than being an actually normal (or, at least, relatively normal) YouTuber, he constantly bragged about how he was "the #1 Mario/Sonic fan"...
  • ...then whined about how people needed to stop calling him a Nintendo fanboy.

Western Animation

• John Kricfalusi is/was a completely-insufferably massive one of these for The Ren and Stimpy Show, to the point where he has quite-frequently belittled numerous cartoons that are blatantly superior to it in numerous ways (Rocko's Modern Life when it comes to social satire and "all ages" appeal, Animaniacs when it comes to having actually good-looking animation, Batman: The Animated Series when it comes to story-telling, South Park when it comes to not severely over-using Refuge in Vulgarity, et cetera) just because said shows don't perfectly match the style of Looney Tunes like how R&S (not counting its APC spin-off) does. Sadly enough, his overall attitude about animation is basically a Logical Extreme of the one that many actual animation-criticizing specialists have about it.
• This is a rather minor example when compared to the John K one on this page, but Joe Murray once outright stated that every single episode of Rocko's Modern Life (including the numerous blatant duds in Season 4) was "top-notch".
  • Not to mention the fact that said (generally highly over-rated) show's theme song very-enthusiastically yells the title of the show itself three times in (basically) a row (in Season 1), followed by six times in (literally) a row (in Seasons 2-4).
• Nickelodeon and Viacom themselves are absolutely gargantuan SSPs for SpongeBob SquarePants, in addition to the show itself having a theme song that very-loudly yells its main character's name eight times in (basically) a row.
  • However, this example is actually somewhat justified by SBSP being big enough of a "pop culture" hit to actually pretty-closely rival how (in)famous Looney Tunes and The Simpsons are.

Real Life

• Alec Fleming (discoverer of penicillium mold) was one of these. In fact he shared the 1945 Nobel prize with two others, Ernst Chain and Sir Howard Florey, who ended up doing almost all the real work after he gave up on it. Fleming was so charismatic that Chain and Florey have been largely forgotten.
  • Chain and Florey perfected the large scale synthesis of the drug.
• Joel McHale is a big one. He's already got you watching The Soup, but he will promote his show Community (Thursday nights at 8PM on NBC!) as well as his own stand up shows. Also his Twitter feed is nothing but urging people to watch Community and and to go to his shows. This can be forgiven as Joel Mchale is extremely funny.
• As the photo indicates, Jack Layton was fairly infamous for this. But he's not alone in Canadian Politics: past Prime Minister Stephen Harper had an entire gallery of photos of only himself.
• There is a reason you've heard a lot more about Thomas Edison and Isaac Newton than Nicola Tesla and Robert Hooke; the former were much better at self promotion.
• Danwarp was decent enough at this with iCarly... but since Victorious aired, he's taken to shilling that show on the iCarly website, his Twitter, poking the casts to constantly tweet about it, fills his blog with 'reminders' that the episodes are airing, and even changes his various avatars/display pictures to shilling the airing dates of the episodes, and takes it all the way it could possibly go by spending the budget and time of three iCarly episodes on a cross-over for Victorious where the iCarly cast guest star on their own show by way of heading from their home town of Seattle, to LA where Victorious is set.
• The career of independent film producer Brian Flemming was arguably destroyed when he couldn't stop promoting his documentary The God Who Wasn't There and his atheism. Even six years after the film's release, you could still see ads online for it, because Flemming was apparently so proud of his film.

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This page brought to you by the amazing tropulating Duckluck.

Who's this guy Duckluck again? Someone from TV Tropes? Oooooh. That explains it.