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Colbert Bump

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The after-effects of the Bump.
"what the crap where did all you people come from"
bobinator1992 after his gameplay video of Rallo Gump was flooded by The Angry Video Game Nerd fans

An easy way for a relatively unknown or unpopular actor, politician, or musician to experience a sudden increase in popularity is to appear on a more popular work. This is usually because they managed to grab and impress the audience of that show, who then publicizes how good they are via word of mouth. It's the number-one reason to appear on certain shows, especially ones where the host enjoys tormenting the guests. This even extends to elements of a relatively obscure work getting featured in a newer work, which often happens with popular crossover series like Super Smash Bros..

The Trope Namer is Stephen Colbert of The Colbert Report. Whenever politicians, especially ones running for office, experienced a bump in poll numbers after being on his show, Colbert would take credit for it by saying that they received the "Colbert Bump". While this claim began as part of Colbert's larger-than-life political pundit persona (he would also claim responsibility whenever authors' books or musicians' songs did well), the phrase would be adopted in media, and be subsequently carried over to Colbert's later show The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.

When public figures who mainly appeal to adults appear on children's shows, that's "Sesame Street" Cred. When this happens to songs, it's Revival by Commercialization. When it happens to objects or goods, it's The Red Stapler. When applied to an online article or resource, it's called "being slashdotted". Contrast Leno Device, which is when a show indicates how big a story already is by depicting a talk show host such as Leno or someone else talking about it. When this happens to places, it's the Tourist Bump.

Note: This is for relatively unknown works (or people, genres, places, etc) that became popular after being referenced or featured in other, more well-known works. Works that received renewed popularity as a result of the COVID-19 Pandemic do not fit this definition and should not be listed.


Examples

    open/close all folders 

    Actors/Actresses 
  • Jerry Springer allowed his security chief Steve Wilkos to fill in for him often. This eventually led to Wilkos getting his own talk show.
  • Similarly, several of Oprah Winfrey's frequent guests would eventually get their own shows, most notably Dr. Phil and Dr. Oz.
  • Steve Martin was a little-known standup comic who had a special on HBO before anyone knew what it was. Then he hosted Saturday Night Live in its second season and became America's hottest young comedian overnight. His subsequent appearances on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson (including several appearances as a guest host) helped to solidify his popularity.
  • Some of the actresses playing nurses from Holby City, with Viral Marketing playing a part. A fan of Holby City decided to spread the word via social networks. Amazingly, their identities are (to the public at least) still obscure with no names in the Closing Credits.
  • Taken to its literal extent with Stephen Colbert's self-proclaimed "rivalry" with Korean pop idol Rain after his appearance in the Speed Racer movie. This led to Ninja Assassin and Rain winning an MTV Movie Award.
  • Selena Gomez, The Jonas Brothers, China Anne McClain, and Sierra McCormick got their start as guest stars on Hannah Montana, while Bella Thorne, Bridgit Mendler, Adam Irigoyen from Shake it Up and Gregg Sulkin first appeared as guests on Wizards of Waverly Place (Mendler and Sulkin played prominent roles in the show, so their careers were helped more than those of Thorne and Irigoyen).
  • In the Netherlands, there is a popular TV duo composed of Carlo Boszhard and Irene Moors. Irene was hosting the show Telekids while Carlo was only there in case they had to get a substitute, but she saw the potential in him. She would regularly fake illness so Carlo could fill in for her only to show up at the last moment, which meant they could host the show together. This went on for two years until the producers caved in and made him co-host. This partnership is still going strong almost twenty years later.
  • D.C. Douglas once had a career doing narration for Geico commercials until the Tea Party and Freedom Works got him fired. What followed afterwards was a highly lucrative career doing voice work in animation and video games (his role as Albert Wesker propelling him to stardom) gaining him the admiration of fans for those roles.
  • Doing stand-up on The Tonight Show during Johnny Carson's stint was a major career boost for comedians. Being called over to the couch would pretty much guarantee overnight success. Among the comedians who got the honor were Robin Williams, Drew Carey, Ellen DeGeneres, Eddie Murphy, Jerry Seinfeld, Jim Carrey, Steven Wright, Roseanne Barr, Bill Maher, Jeff Dunham and Jeff Foxworthy.
  • Filipino drag comedian Tekla, along with fellow comedian Donita Nose (not to be confused with the similarly-named actress Donita Rose), got a major career boost following Tekla's appearance in Raffy Tulfo's web series when the comedian was in dire straits due to allegations of sexual harassment from his former partner. Netizens picketed in favour of Tekla especially when Tulfo roasted the living daylights out of Tekla's ex-partner and declined to provide financial support for her once the less-than-savoury aspects of her life were made apparent.
  • Character actor and voice actor Ray Porter had been active since 1990 — but only as of 2021, did he get a page on this very site and his own Wikipedia page due to his portrayal of Darkseid in Zack Snyder's Justice League.

    Anime & Manga 
  • Berserk has gotten more attention from Western viewers thanks to specific series with a more mainstream audience:
    • PewDiePie introduced Berserk to some of his large fanbase by praising it (specifically Berserk (1997) and the manga) on his show.
    • Some learned about Berserk from "Guts VS Nightmare" on DEATH BATTLE!.
    • Guts and Berserk (1997) were featured on Man at Arms.
    • Lots of people were introduced to Berserk purely by Word Of Mouth from hearing Dark Souls fans talking about it so much.
    • And then there's the metalheads who were turned on to it by Anton Kabanen's two Power Metal bands Battle Beast and Beast in Black. About half of his songwriting output is about Berserk, particularly the Golden Age Arc, and Beast in Black's third album Dark Connection is dedicated to Kentaro Miura after his death earlier the same year.
  • A Dog of Flanders (1975): The anime received a surge of popularity in 2016 (in the West) because Natsuki Subaru's phone ringtone is the theme song.
  • Thanks to the surprise appearance of Hatsune Miku throughout its third season, Dropkick on My Devil saw a modest boost in popularity, even in the west where it is virtually unknown, thanks to her collaboration with the series that got people curious about seeing Miku in an anime, to the point where the series' official channel had to post Miku's appearances ahead of each episode to prevent unauthorized uploads. It even received a dub.
  • Zom 100: Bucket List of the Dead was a relatively unknown manga in the West even though its official English translation by VIZ Media began in February 2021. It got a surge in interest following Gigguk's sponsored review of the manga, to the point that pre-orders were sold out within weeks of the review airing.
  • Anytime Kenny Lauderdale talks about an obscure anime on his YouTube channel, an influx of searches will occur for said anime, even really bad ones like Twinkle Nora Rock Me!. It has also caused anime that is otherwise unknown or thought to be lost forever to resurface.
  • Princess Diana received a surge of attention thanks to Kenny Lauderdale's video of it. Even the comments on the VOD of the anime have many comments that say "thx Kenny" as a reference to this.
  • Unless you're heavily into mecha anime, chances are that you've been introduced to titles such as Raideen and Daltanious by Super Robot Wars.

    Athletes 
  • For years, Jim Rome has referred to "Jungle Karma" on The Jim Rome Show to refer to the tendency for athletes and athletic teams to have success after appearing on his show, as well as a corresponding bout of bad luck if an athlete stiffs him.
  • Sports Illustrated has a strange relationship with the people that appear on their cover—everybody wants to be on it, but there's supposedly a curse related to whoever gets the coveted cover photo.
    • Ditto for Madden NFL and its collegiate sister series NCAA Football. This is usually referred to as the "Madden Curse".
    • This "curse" can be explained by a concept called "regression to the mean". On average, people tend to perform close to their average (their "mean"). Athletes that get a cover in Sports Illustrated usually having an unusually high point in their career. Soon after, it seems like they got worse, but they really just went back to playing closer to their average.
  • Sports-related variant: in the 2014 NBA Draft Lottery, the Milwaukee Bucks were represented by the co-owner's daughter, who went from 240 followers to 36 thousand on Twitter (plus many homages). A friend of hers commented and joked about this profusely.
  • The NFL, despite already being the most popular sports league in America, received a bump when Taylor Swift began dating Kansas City Chiefs' tight end Travis Kelce and attending a number of Chiefs games throughout the 2023 season. This prompted many of her fans who hadn't previously been interested in American Football to start watching it, resulting in Super Bowl LVIII getting incredibly high ratings even by Super Bowl standards, with Swift's presence being cited as a major factor.

    Comic Books 
  • Although the Ultimate Marvel universe was a success, it was just success inside the niche market of comic books. But then, the first stages of the Marvel Cinematic Universe increased its notoriety by taking a strong influence from its looks and feel.

    Literature 
  • Though most are not entirely unknown, any novelist or poet who wins an international award will see the purchase of their work skyrocket.
    • After Mario Vargas Llosa was announced as the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature laureate, "collectible" versions of his books went from a few dollars into and beyond hundreds of dollars. Even Amazon sold out of everything due to people rushing to read his work.
    • In October 2013, Alice Munro was revealed to be that year's laureate. Six months later, she was still a top ten paperback bestseller in Sweden.
  • Though well-respected among fantasy aficionados, the Studio Ghibli adaptation of Howl's Moving Castle introduced a huge number of anime fans to the works of Diana Wynne Jones and helped make her Wizard's Castle series, previously one of her smaller projects, into one of her best-known works.
  • Books endorsed by Oprah's Book Club sell very well.
    • In the UK, the equivalent was Richard and Judy's Book Club. Such was the effect it had on the sales of featured books that showrunner Amanda Ross was once named the most influential person in British publishing.
  • Countdown With Keith Olbermann introduced a whole new generation to the works of acclaimed American humorist James Thurber. Background: while his father was hospitalized, Keith would read to him from Thurber's collected works. At one point, Keith's father suggested that Keith begin reading to the viewers of his show instead. While his father was still in the hospital, Keith appeared (from the hospital) with an intro to that night's show, being hosted by guest host Lawrence O'Donnell. After O'Donnell had signed off, Keith read a Thurber story — and that broadcast happened to be seen by Thurber's daughter, granddaughter, and publisher, who all loved the idea. After his father passed away, Keith began closing out every Friday show with a Thurber story as a way to end the week. As a result, Thurber's works were republished for the first time in decades.
  • Poppy Z. Brite's Lost Souls (1992) created a vogue for drinking chartreuse amongst various goth groups in the mid-Nineties.
  • One of the things that makes Stephen King awesome is that he frequently tweets about the books he reads. Sarah Pinborough and Paul Tremblay are two horror writers who've gained attention in this way.
  • Wildbow commented online that his web serial Worm experienced a sudden and large jump in popularity when it was mentioned on the blog of Eliezer Yudkowsky, who already had a large online following from his rationalist fanfiction Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality and other writings.
  • T.M. Scanlon's What We Owe to Each Other experienced a large spike in searches and purchases after being mentioned on The Good Place, as the philosophy of contractualism is a running theme in the show.
  • In June 2021, C.M. Kosemen's science-fiction/Speculative Biology book All Tomorrows experienced a huge surge in popularity after the YouTube channel Alt Shift X released a video covering the work and its contents that gained over 3 million views in a single month, resulting in numerous memes and fanworks of the book and its creatures being created online. This led to the previously-small YouTube channel Curious Archive switching their content to cover speculative biology and creature design, leading to a Colbert Bump for speculative biology projects featured on the channel, such as Serina, The Birrin, Polinices, and Nijin-Konai.
  • The Exorcist started off badly, with one date of the launch book tour being cancelled because very few copies were sold. But a chance appearance on The Dick Cavett Show, because Robert Shaw was too drunk to attend, allowed author William Peter Blatty to discuss the book extensively on TV, and soon afterwards the book entered the best-selling lists and went on to generate a seminal film adaptation.
  • The infamously dark Cormac McCarthy novel, Blood Meridian, surged to mainstream and memetic success after YouTube personality Wendigoon uploaded a five-hour-long analysis video of the book. He even received messages from bookstores saying that they were sold out of copies because of him!

    Media 
  • The obscure retro video game Nibbler was not a very well-known game to many people until it was featured as the driving force of the plot in the 2016 documentary Man Vs. Snake: The Long And Twisted Tale Of Nibbler.
  • The Nostalgia Critic has this effect on films/shows he reviews, on this site if nowhere else. It's very telling that Big-Lipped Alligator Moment became a page on this Wiki within an hour of the posting of the video that coined the phrase. (Though technically it was The Nostalgia Chick who actually named the phrase in that video.)
  • Similarly, every time The Angry Video Game Nerd reviews a game, The Other Wiki strains to cope with an avalanche of fans adding trivia entries for the game in question. Probably the best example of this is Plumbers Don't Wear Ties.
    • The Nerd's "Bad Game Cover Art" review of Rallo Gump not only brought more attention to the obscure homebrew game but also sent people flooding to forgotten 5-year-old videos of the game in action (the Nerd's review only showed the cover art, not the game).
  • Spike and Barley Play's let's play of Sven Co-op 's Afraid of Monsters port caused it to explode into fame, which unfortunately directly led to its permanent shut-down.
  • The Spoony Experiment:
    • When reviewing Bloodwings: Pumpkinhead's Revenge, Spoony mentioned how hard it was to find any info on this game, calling it the game the internet forgot. Once his video was released, let's just say that there's no more shortage of info on this game...
    • In a smaller example, Mazes and Monsters didn't have its own trope page until after Spoony reviewed it.
    • And let's not forget REB BROWN, MOTHERFUCKERS!
  • Ditto Linkara and History of Power Rangers. Carter Grayson, the Red Ranger of Power Rangers Lightspeed Rescue was previously considered the most boring character of the most boring season, and generally disliked as a very bland example of a Red Ranger. But Linkara "instantly liked this guy" and made a case for him, and he became a fan favorite overnight.
  • Several older Humongous Mecha series saw renewed/revived popularity upon making a debut in the Massive Multiplayer Crossover Super Robot Wars franchise, with Xabungle and Zeorymer being the prime examples.
    • The Big O had a similar resurgence in Japan due to Super Robot Wars Z, in which it was ridiculously overpowered. This was notable as Big O previously got very little attention in Japan at all, only even acquiring a second season because of Cartoon Network commissioning it. This bump mainly took the shape of a new crop of merchandise Big O had previously not had, including Figma of Roger and Dorothy, as well as an expensive rendition of the titular mech in Max Gokin form.
    • The Mashin Hero Wataru Series suddenly received a surge of interest in the West thanks to its inclusion in Super Robot Wars X, which also led to it receiving a page on This Very Wiki.
  • This happens to anyone mocked by Retsupurae. It's not always a good type of popularity, with a lot of the time this leading to tons of negative comments on said LPer's videos, but it's turned stuff like Gaming in the Clinton Years from obscure barely watched local TV shows to extremely popular (for all the wrong reasons) YouTube series.
    • On a more positive note, several goons learned of Sir Ron Lionheart after he was mocked by Retsupurae. After getting a lot of unnecessary hate, his popularity quickly skyrocketed after one goon posted his LP of Sonic the Hedgehog (The Porcupine) in Cybershell's Sonic LP thread (which had been viewing, linking to, and making other Sonic-based playthroughs during his frequent schedule slips). He was found as a more ideal version of a Manchild.
    • Many of the flash games tend to get this as well, particularly Arise, The Trapped Trilogy, and anything by Zap Dramatic.
  • Gregory Austin McConnell invokes this with his 5 Cool Channels With Under 1,000 Subs series.
  • Let's Plays, especially the most popular LPers, have a habit of causing a spike in sales of the games they're currently going over. A good example of this is Chuggaaconroy regarding Ōkami and NintendoCapriSun regarding Plants vs. Zombies.
    • Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc got a Western release due largely to a Let's Play on Something Awful. That's right. A Let's Play made a Japan-exclusive game popular enough in the West to warrant an official English translation.
    • PewDiePie could be the biggest example. How many people would have played Amnesia: The Dark Descent without him giving it and the modding community huge exposure?
      • Also, once upon a time Markiplier played a little indie horror game called Five Nights at Freddy's. Cue huge fandom growing almost overnight, a series of sequel games, and the indie horror series becoming a merchandising juggernaut.
    • LPers also do this to each other. Notably, when The Runaway Guys (a collaboration of Chuggaaconroy, NintendoCapriSun and ProtonJon, three of the most popular LPers on YouTube) featured JoshJepson as a guest player, the latter experienced a significant surge in popularity.
    • It has been said that any video commented on, liked, or mentioned by raocow will get several thousand additional views within the day.
  • The Game Grumps does this for the more obscure games they play, especially Goof Troop, which the fans call the "Grump Bump":
    • Danny even recalls in his playthrough of Super Metroid that after passively suggesting people go watch Down To Clown, he rewatched it and found the comments full of things like "Danny you asshole!"
    • It's also worth noting that the makers of The Stanley Parable made a uniquely written playable demo specifically for them to play on Steam Train which, not only addressed them by name but even has the narrator use their catchphrase "God DAMMIT Ross!" after everything goes wrong.
    • Their playthroughs of the Endless Ocean games also earned Hayley Westenra several new Twitter followers, as her song "Prayer" was prominently featured in the first game.
    • Danny claims his proudest achievement was helping boost the popularity of Sharkman Frank, a retired man who sang pirate songs at Benjamin’s Calabash Seafood Restaurant at Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. He happened across one of the man's CDs, found he had his songs on YouTube, and mentioned them in an episode of Game Grumps. The videos had no views when Danny found them, but now have over 50,000 a piece thanks to him mentioning it on Game Grumps, and Sharkman Frank actually started his Twitter specifically to tweet a thank-you to the Grumps and Ninja Sex Party.
  • The Mysterious Mr. Enter has this written all over his videos. After he reviews something, it instantly surges in popularity. Case in point; his review of "Ren Seeks Help" an episode of Ren & Stimpy "Adult Party Cartoon". After calling it the most horrible thing in the universe, a flood of negative reviews suddenly appeared, even though the episode was the best-reviewed episode of the Adult Party Cartoon before he covered it.
    • He also had discussed a once-obscure series called The Nutshack (calling it the worst animated series of the 2000s), which may or may not have helped fuel it into a full-fledged meme. (Although the first one among the Youtube cartoon community to mention this show anywhere was RebelTaxi, as noted here.)
  • This has happened on this very wiki! (not repeatedly, though): after TV Tropes was mentioned in xkcd, a mob of newbies washed over the forums and wiki, trashing the servers.
  • Seems to be David Herbert's goal with his new review series Jump On for comics.
    • On a similar note, any scientific topic mentioned in the comic (from transformations to probability theory) will see the corresponding Other Wiki page get swarmed (and vandalized) within hours.
  • In its heyday, a positive review from Webcomic-Review Blog Websnark could boost a comic's site traffic higher than ever before. In a subversion, the writer of the blog, Eric Burns, never quite seemed all that comfortable with the influence he wrote his way into and was frequently a reason for his sabbaticals from the blog.
  • Homestuck occasionally links to YouTube videos to illustrate points, such as here. These videos tend to more than double in views and comments overnight, to the bemusement and (usually) gratefulness of whoever uploaded them.
    That is Wonderful. Do thank Mr. Hussie for me, and also all of you wonderful Homestuck fans who appreciate and support my continuing efforts to bring my Historic and eclectic collection of early recordings to a new generation of listeners.
  • In 2008, bumps from VG Cats and DeceasedCrab made Eversion's popularity overshadow the entire Commonplace Book competition it was made for. And it was third place in the compo!
  • Neil Gaiman gave Gunnerkrigg Court a much larger readership after praising it on his blog.
  • Through the nature of Wiki Walking, TV Tropes itself has a tendency to give support to YouTube videos that illustrate a certain trope. These videos would otherwise probably fall into obscurity, and thus you may see a top comment saying "Who else got here from TV Tropes?"
  • Similarly, "I got here from Cracked" comment is often featured on videos used to illustrate articles there.
  • When Mark Oshiro began reviewing Buffy the Vampire Slayer, his blog was linked to by a popular Buffy fansite which resulted in a flood of new readers that crashed his server and forced him to find a new server to prevent this from happening again.
  • Plan 9 from Outer Space would be just a forgotten terrible No Budget 50s sci-fi if not for The Golden Turkey Awards listing it as the worst movie ever, along with "awarding" Ed Wood (who died 2 years prior in obscurity) as worst director, resulting in a surge of interest that made the movie and its author Cult Classics.
  • Mystery Science Theater 3000 had this effect on many of the films it featured, all of which had originally been chosen because they were so obscure that the rights to broadcast them were cheap. In some cases, the bump was so effective that when the time came for finagling a film's rights for home video and DVD releases, the show could no longer afford them.
  • Anything that gets featured on Equestria Daily tends to get a pretty pronounced boost in popularity.
    • Allow us to elaborate on the effect. There exists a character named Derpy Hooves, who is extremely popular with the fans. A vinyl molded figure of her was made alongside one of Rainbow Dash in early September 2012 by Hot Topic, who released the date and time that they would be released to the public. Equestria Daily noticed and posted this. The Derpy toy sold out in four minutes! All thousands of these toys sold out in just four minutes.
    • My Little Pony Online, a fan game project, got their Episode 1 release mentioned. The downloads were unavailable for several hours because of just how many fans had flooded the site.
  • The Image Booru Derpibooru tends to do this for artists when an image is featured (displayed prominently on the front page for three straight days), causing a flood of comments and upvotes to the image itself and introducing a surge of views to the artist's home gallery. Their lowest-scoring featured image has 100 upvotes and change, which is considered a good score for a regular imagenote , and the highest-scoring featured image is the third-highest scored image of all-time.
  • This Very Wiki caused the first surge of new writers to the SCP Foundation. And then a one-two punch of an SCP-087 game and SCP – Containment Breach caused a massive Newbie Boom - "from July '11 - present, we have had over 2000 new members, more than all the previous years combined."
  • The Tarantino Bump affected Battle Royale. There's been a notable surge in new fans ever since he declared it to be his favorite film made since 1992.
  • The Cynical Brit, John Bain, has garnered quite a reputation amongst independent developers of PC games as being the go-to man if you want your site and/or server overloaded. With one million YouTube subscribers and a series dedicated to giving a first impression of a game, his channel provides much-needed publicity for those developers who can't afford a marketing budget.
    • In a similar vein, Jesse Cox's collaboration with Josh "indiestatik" Mattingly, The Greenlight, is designed to do this for indie games currently up for approval to be added to Steam.
  • Toonami, an action-animation block on Cartoon Network (though it has since moved to [adult swim]), has provided these for some of its shows. In fact, you could say that it provided one for anime itself in the US since while Japanese animation was already known back then, the medium's popularity absolutely exploded in the late '90s when the block aired.
    • Dragon Ball Z and Sailor Moon were initially unknown in America, as they both failed to garner success during their initial syndicated runs and were only partially dubbed by The Ocean Group and DIC Entertainment, respectively. Then they were picked up by Cartoon Network for airing on Toonami, where they managed to net the block some major ratings. This increase in popularity also resulted in both shows getting dubbed further.
    • The Big O was originally a failure in Japan. In the US, however, its run on Toonami (as well as [adult swim]) was so successful that it got a second season co-produced by Cartoon Network.
    • Even the revived Toonami on [adult swim] is still dishing out Colbert Bumps. Deadman Wonderland, much like Big O, bombed in its native Japan, but during its run on Toonami to promote its DVD release, it managed to rival Bleach in ratings just after its first night on the block.
    • Toonami's airing of Evangelion 1.11 to commemorate the block's 15th anniversary managed to boost the sales of the Blu-Ray release of not only 1.11, but Evangelion 2.22 as well, to the point where both movies managed to top the Amazon anime charts.
  • The Thick of It got a big boost, particularly among younger and non-British viewers, after its leading man Peter Capaldi got cast as the Twelfth Doctor.
  • After a Buzzfeed article mentioned a small obscure Facebook group about dying and dead shopping malls in April 2014, said group's membership more than tripled.
  • The Marvel Cinematic Universe, in general, has done this for the characters it has adapted on screen. Specifically:
    • Iron Man was largely unknown to most of the mainstream, considered a B or even C-list character at best by other Marvel fans (who were also largely soured on the character due to his controversial characterization in the then-recent Civil War (2006) arc), and hardly anyone expected his 2008 silver screen debut would amount to much. Those doubts were proven wrong, and the first Iron Man film essentially made Tony Stark just as well-known as Batman. The second movie similarly helped boost the popularity of Black Widow and S.H.I.E.L.D. as well.
    • Thor was also obscure to most of the mainstream. His first feature-length movie not only boosted his popularity and profile but even caused a spike in interest for the Norse Mythology the characters were based on.
    • The Guardians of the Galaxy were considered even lower on the popularity tier than even a large chunk of the more relatively obscure Avengers members. Then the movie came out, creating a new fanbase for not just the Guardians themselves, but for the cosmic side of Marvel Comics in general. The songs on the movie's soundtrack also got some of this, the most notable of the bunch being Blue Swede's "Hooked on a Feeling", and Looking Glass' "Brandy (You're a Fine Girl)" from the second movie.
    • Black Panther turned its titular hero from a B-lister (at best) to being perhaps the best-known Black superhero on the planet, with even celebrities and athletes mimicking the "Wakanda forever!" salute and chant.
    • On a series-specific example, Daredevil was cancelled in 2018, with its third and final season seeing a steep decline in viewership from Season 2. However, Charlie Cox and Vincent D'Onofrio reprising their roles as Matt Murdock and The Kingpin for Spider-Man: No Way Home and Hawkeye, respectively, led to a massive resurgence of interest in the series during the final weeks of 2021. The show even managed to crack Nielsen's Top 10 streaming list near the end of December.
  • How many young gamers do you think first learned of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti after hearing them mentioned in the song "Here's To You" in Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots and Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes?
  • This happened twice with Let's Play group Hat Films. After they started doing official trailers for Minecraft, their subscriber numbers gradually went up at a much higher rate than they had before. When they joined the Yogscast in August 2013, their subscriber numbers skyrocketed. For context, when they joined in mid-August they had somewhere around 290,000 subscribers — by the end of 2013, they had over 500,000. At the time of this writing, they have 836,000+ and are among the fastest-growing channels in the network, behind Sips and the main channel.
  • The song "KEEP YOUR HEAD UP!!", originally from Um Jammer Lammy and heard in full on its soundtrack album Make It Sweet!, is more well-known from its use as the ending credits song of Yu-Gi-Oh: The Abridged Movie than as the ending credits song to the original game.
  • In The '90s, Disney Adventures ran reprints of Jeff Smith's Bone, which were key in exposing the comic to a wider audience than it would have otherwise.
  • A (now terminated) YouTube channel named "Cyborg Princess Vanilla" went from 12 subscribers to 1,094 just because of PewDiePie's video WTF IS THIS CHANNEL?
    • Also, the subscribers on "TOYS in Japan" were raised by 13K, the highest surge in its history.
  • Medusa actually appears very little in media made before 1981. Featuring her as an antagonist in Clash of the Titans caused her 'popularity' to skyrocket, and she's now one of the most famous figures from Greek Mythology.
  • In a bizarre accidental case, in Paper Mario: Color Splash, the Emerald Circus troupe, at one point, requests Mario to follow them on social media. As it turns out, there is a real Emerald Circus out there, which got a burst of activity on their Facebook and Twitter pages. They embraced the coincidental identical name too, with a full playthrough of the Emerald Circus stage on their Facebook page.
  • Pepsiman got one from its SDGQ 2016 speedrun. This run made the game trend on Twitter, temporarily made it the most viewed game on Twitch, and septupled the amount of Twitter followers Mike Butters (the man in the live-action cutscenes) had.
  • "Counting to 100,000 in one video" actually made MrBeast (yes, the same one who helped spread awareness of the PewDiePie vs T-Series rivalry, and the one who co-founded #TeamTrees) soar in popularity, even surpassing the 500K subscriber mark that he was going to get at the end of 2017. And yes, people have pretended to go even further.
  • Fire Emblem Heroes has done this to virtually every older game in the entire franchise. The older games were more obscure, with half of them never even leaving Japan, compared to the smash hits that were Awakening and Fates. However, exposure to other characters from older games has increased interest and demand for them, especially when the heroes in question are extremely good in the meta. The most apparent beneficiaries have been The Sacred Stones, Path of Radiance, and Genealogy of the Holy War.
  • Beyoncé boosted the popularity of Daughters of the Dust, a 1991 film about three generations of Gullah Geechee women in South Carolina. After the visual special for Lemonade (2016) took heavy inspiration from the film, it was re-released in theaters and received a new poster.
  • Warframe has been subject to at least two in its history:
    • In a straightforward example, Digital Extremes credits prominent YouTubers such as Totalbiscuit with helping to raise awareness of it in its earliest days.
    • In a much odder example (possibly an inversion?) Warframe's popularity was boosted even further in Fall 2017. While it was fairly popular at the time, it was gaining steam due to the marketing for its upcoming open-world update, Plains of Eidolon, causing people to revisit the game. This coincided with the various controversies and criticisms surrounding Destiny 2, such as intrusive lootboxes and microtransactions, XP throttling, and a lack of endgame content. As a result of Destiny's failures, and Warframe's successes, Warframe gained a lot of attention as people began mentioning it in discussions as "like Destiny 2 if it wasn't crap". Particular attention was paid to how its monetization methods are less exploitative, despite Warframe being an actual F2P game, unlike Destiny 2 which goes the whole hog with lootboxes and restricted content despite being a full-priced AAA game. As a result, Destiny 2's losses proved to be Warframe's gains.
  • A strange version with Guru Larry and Wez being the show itself, as many people didn't even know it was on Channel Awesome until #ChangeTheChannel resulted in everyone outside of the Walkers, Brad Jones, and Larry Bundy, Jr. himself bolting after stories of mismanagement, sexism, favoritism, hypocrisy, ignoring producers' concerns, and unsafe filming conditions on the part of the Walkers and Mike Michaud; that Mike Ellis sexually harassed someone; and that the late Justin Carmichal was a sexual predator emerged — and a lot of interest came from not only Bundy being one of the only two who isn't Doug left, but Bundy being ballsy enough to openly admitting to only doing so as a final "fuck you" to the management for ignoring him during his time there and to watch the site implode.
  • The 1997 Hulk Hogan film Assault on Devil's Island scored a 4.2 rating against the WWF's Survivor Series Flashback special (which only scored a 2.8) thanks to WCW tacking on the entire contract signing between Hogan and Sting for Starrcade 1997 during the commercial breaks.
  • Interest in LoadingReadyRun briefly increased after Graham's (fake) viral video got an actual Colbert Bump.
  • In 2018, PAW Patrol was already huge among its target audience, but its popularity doubled after Justin Timberlake revealed his love for the show on The Tonight Show, since many curious people who watched the show wanted to show it to their children or grandkids to see what it was all about. While this helped with sales of most of the licensed merchandise, the DVDs, and online downloads, the popularity of the toys that tie into the show sunk that summer due to new competitors like PJ Masks and Thomas and Friends: Big World! Big Adventures! and old franchises which had new media made for them in 2018 like The Avengers and Trolls taking away PAW Patrol toy sales.
    • This reversed itself in the fall of 2018 from a combination of John Oliver mentioning it on the Emmys and heavy promotion for the Mighty Pups special on both TV and in stores like Wal-Mart, with the peak of that popularity happening after said special premiered.
    • In an odd case of this trope, PAW Patrol itself didn't become big until the toyline came out in the fall of 2014, which caused more people to discover the series. It's gotten to the point where some families who buy the toys did not know they were originally based on a show.
  • After various news sites reported on episode 19 of HuGtto! Pretty Cure, which discussed gender roles, more people began checking out the anime to see what it was like.
  • Prior to October 21, 2016, very few people knew about Kevin Meaney's role on Garfield and Friends as Aloysius Pig compared to his other roles on TV. After his death on said date made the news and several articles reporting it mentioned the role, people watched the episode and became big fans of Aloysius Pig. Even Skiprope Entertainment, PBS' DVD division, got the note and included his final episode on the first Garfield and Friends DVD release in 11 years.
  • Like the Kevin Meaney example above, several articles reporting Harry Anderson's death mentioned his role in The Noddy Shop, causing more people who didn't know about the show or had watched it as children but forgot about it to rediscover the show. However, the episode he was in was not online until a year later.
    • On the topic of The Noddy Shop, when fans recommended Gilbert Gottfried's episode on the day that a fan who knew the show's creator Rick Siggelkow uploaded it, the popularity of said fan's episode uploads boomed. Originally, it would take 3 days for an episode to reach 1,000 views, but after this episode, the new uploads got 1,000 views in 24 hours or less.
  • In one episode of Dragon Ball Z Abridged, Vegeta tries to figure out a good way to explain who the Ginyu Force is to Gohan and goes down a list of various well-known tokusatsu, anime, Western cartoons and other series before stopping at Tattooed Teenage Alien Fighters from Beverly Hills, the only show Gohan ever saw. Quite a few videos on YouTube have comments stating that Team Four Star lead them there because they thought, unsurprisingly, that TFS had made up the series.
  • This also tends to happen when a new installment in a Long Runner franchise is released, with the new release usually bringing demand to the earlier installments. For example, whenever a Toy Story sequel comes out, interest in the original movies and merchandise of the franchise increases, like with Toy Story 4, which had the benefit of the parents who had watched the original film 24 years ago now having kids of their own.
  • The popularity of Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood lead to people re-watching or introducing themselves to Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, which the show is a spin-off of, depending on whether they had heard of the original series during their childhood. The effect that Daniel Tiger had on the original Mister Rogers series was so huge that Twitch held two marathons of the show and two different movies about the show were produced in response to the show's boom in popularity. In addition, PBS brought back reruns of the show to their Sunday morning schedule, produced new DVDs of the show, and greenlit another Mister Rogers Neighborhood spin-off about Donkey Hodie. When said show eventually premiered, it did so well in making people interested in minor Mister Rogers characters that the PBS Kids channel added reruns to their schedule.
  • Anpanman was unknown outside of Japan and Asia until BTS released a song inspired by the franchise, causing people to gain interest in it. In fact, Tubi claimed that they acquired the rights to the franchise in North America specifically because of the popularity of BTS' song!
  • The Tony Hawk's Pro Skater series is widely considered to be a major factor in the revived public interest in skateboarding as a whole during the early 2000s, which was only aided by Tony Hawk himself being the first skater to perform a 900 a few months prior to the game's launch, boosting the stock of Hawk's likeness. In addition, the games often provide a publicity boost to the ska, punk, and hip hop artists that are featured in its fully licensed soundtrack, in no small part to how closely tied some songs are to the series, such as 'Superman', "Police Truck", "Guerilla Radio", and "Ace of Spades".
  • Multiple video games have gotten greater attention thanks to being featured in Scott The Woz:
    • Scott has repeatedly referenced Chibi-Robo! throughout the series as being one of his favorite games, which has given the screwed-over Cult Classic more popularity over the years.
    • 3D Dot Game Heroes saw a bump after the music that plays in the Blockout minigame became Scott the Woz's outro theme.
    • Also, prior to Scott covering them, Mario Tennis Ultra Smash and Chibi-Robo! Zip-Lash didn't have an overwhelmingly negative perception, usually just "disappointing" or So Okay, It's Average. His reviews of them in his The Dark Age of Nintendo trilogy cemented the two games as black marks in Nintendo's history and now have a far greater public image.
  • In 2020, game stores reported a bump in chess set sales thanks to The Queen's Gambit.
  • In 2020, Tom Fulp's Pico gained some new fans thanks to Friday Night Funkin' including the titular protagonist as a Guest Fighter.
  • Mario Party DS was barely recognized outside of the Mario fandom until a series of videos documenting (fictional) anti-piracy traps in the game gained viral popularity.
  • Rebel Inc. got a rather nasty example. The game is about bringing a war-torn country under control from insurgents, however, the game surged in popularity after the Afghanistan government and army collapsed within a few weeks of fighting against Taliban forces once the American military contingent left the country in 2021.
  • Saya Hiyama and the WeatherNews (WNI) TV channel.
    • WeatherNews is a channel dedicated to the weather in Japan. Because it is a channel destined for Japan, it went unnoticed by foreign audiences for a long time until on February 26, 2021, a 4.5 earthquake struck the Fukushima area. Saya Hiyama, the presenter who was live at the time and who was happily speaking about shogi instantly changed her face and tone of voice and reported the earthquake. The moment was captured on YouTube and went viral.
    • Outside of Japan, various people began investigating Saya, taking clips and sharing WeatherNews' TikTok account, causing her to become a viral sensation due to her charisma and beauty. Various comments demonstrate this, even comparing with the climate reporters of their respective countries. Channels like WeatherNewFans are compiling moments of the channel and Saya Hiyama (and the other female presenters) reached idol-status overseas.
  • The Idolmaster Cinderella Girls Starlight Stage increased in popularity and Bandai Namco's stocks significantly increased after Elon Musk posted a meme picture which featured Sachiko from said game on his Twitter account.
  • The motivational meme of Japanese former tennis player Shuzo Matsuoka has regained a minor popularity in Japan and America in 2021 thanks to one of Corridor Crew's members. While he's explaining the visual effects used in The Terminator, he shows how he managed to keep on doing it when he wanted to give up: watching an old video of Shuzo motivating an audience up while he's harvesting clams.
  • Arlo has frequently criticized Paper Mario: Sticker Star and Paper Mario: Color Splash for being bad games in the Paper Mario series. So when he did a review of the Nintendo Switch version of Bug Fables, an homage to the earlier Paper Mario games, and declared it a fitting successor to classic Paper Mario while also having its own unique merits, the low-budget crowdfunded game got a large boost in sales.
  • The filmography of Neil Breen is known primarily for being featured in several RedLetterMedia videos.
  • SsethTzeentach has a history of bringing in a huge wave of new players after dropping a review since the games he covers tend to be very old PC titles or lesser-known niche indie titles, which are shortly followed up with the games topping the sales charts and generating a Demand Overload on their servers. He is aware of this and even works with the games' creators to have them put the games on sale by the time he drops the review. Some of his biggest Colbert Bumps include SYNTHETIK, Space Station 13 (despite recommending his viewers to not play it), Kenshi, and Starsector, among many others. Even second-hand endorsements, such as on MandaloreGaming's Brigador review, have a lot of weight to them.
  • The obscure cartoon The Adventures of Paddy the Pelican would have probably faded into obscurity if it weren't for its appearance as SCP Foundation's SCP-2835 (Constructive Criticism).
  • For a negative example, the only reason so many people know that Todd Rogers' world record score of 5.51 seconds on Dragster is fake is because of this video from a fairly popular Speed Runner on Youtube. Jobst even points this out on another video.
  • Vita Carnis got more exposure after Crowmudgeon and Film Theory did "deep dive" videos about the series. This is probably why the Season 1 finale video "Facility-0" gives them special thanks in the credits.
  • In the fall of 2023, Nanalan' boomed in popularity after a clip from the episode "Play Day" went viral on TikTok.
  • Sonic and the Death Cheese received more attention after it became a Running Gag on the BumbleKast as a fan favorite of Sonic comic writer Ian Flynn.
  • The Religious Edutainment cartoon The Beginners' Bible, produced by Jim Jinkins of Doug fame, suddenly saw a greater interest after snippets of it were used in the Mandela Catalogue to depict events which happened during the Biblical time period of that universe.

    Music 
  • Joey Gregorash and his hit wedding song "Together" gained popularity after it was encouraged to be listened to throughout the K-On! Palcomix story "On This Day".
  • A good deal of Childish Gambino fans found him through his role on Community.
    • Childish Gambino also engaged in a very weird example with his sampling of an obscure YouTube video in "II. Zealots of Stockholm (Free Information)". The sample in question is "I'm a freaky bitch/I am 5 foot 8, 390/And I am a freaky bitch". The video is a vlog of a woman describing her sex life.
  • KT Tunstall's big break happened when she performed "Black Horse and the Cherry Tree" on Later... with Jools Holland after being given only 24 hours' notice.
    • Seasick Steve's regular appearances on Jools Holland's Hootenanny made him popular.
  • Not really with TV shows, but this is exactly how rap crews work. One member becomes famous, and then the crew comes with him. This is the reason groups like G-Unit and GOOD Music become popular. Most of the members of the latter have managed to become major stars in their own right though.
  • In the early '90s British TV show The Word had a similar effect with bands like Nirvana.
  • Roller skating saw a surge in popularity in the late 1970s that lasted into the 1980s thanks to singer Linda Ronstadt wearing a pair of skates on the cover of her 1978 album Living in the USA.
    • Ronstadt herself received one from Johnny Cash early in her career when she was still primarily a country singer.
  • The Beatles' appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show. Funnily enough, this one actually went both ways, with The Ed Sullivan Show seeing a ratings boost for the weeks featuring the Beatles. It also served as an inversion on the Beatles' part, as they refused to go to the US until they already had a number-one single on that side of the Atlantic.
  • Another The Ed Sullivan Show guest who boosted both his own profile and the show's ratings was Elvis Presley.
  • Not many people in Britain had heard of the Sex Pistols until they were interviewed live on Thames TV and Johnny Rotten and Steve Jones said both the S and F words in the space of a few minutes. Even though it was only shown in the London area, "The Filth and the Fury" was headline news across the country the next day. A smaller but similar effect came when they played live on Manchester Granada TV, thus introducing Anarchy in the UK to the north of England.
    • Most Americans had never heard of Russell Brand or Jonathan Ross until "Sachsgate."
  • Can also be called The Skins Effect; a number of bands, notably Gossip and Foals, experienced huge boosts in popularity and success as a result of their music appearing in the show. Alex Hancock (the show's music supervisor) is looking into ways to make this a deliberate part of the show, by only ever including music by unsigned bands; he's up against OFCOM and cross-promotion rules, though.
  • A cross with Repurposed Pop Song happens in the phenomenon of people rediscovering vintage pop music through Quentin Tarantino's iconic uses of it. On VH1, Mike Score said A Flock of Seagulls' popularity was noticeably increased just by being mentioned in passing in Pulp Fiction.
  • British band The Jellybotties won't ever exactly be tearing up the charts in their homeland or anywhere else, but they experienced a bump in popularity when Alan Davies sang a few bars of "Peter Cushing Lives in Whitstable" on QI. It's now their most popular song by far.
    • For proof of this, type "Peter Cushing" into Google and the song's title is the sixth auto-complete option. It's the first auto-complete result when searching for "Peter Cushing" on YouTube.
  • It's generally believed that White Zombie's popularity got a big boost after Beavis and Butt-Head showed them and gave them good reviews; Even Rob Zombie himself claims this in an interview he did.
    • Similarly, Danzig's "Mother" became a hit several years after its release due to its video appearing on the show.
    • Kirk Wildstein of Crowbar said that after their video got infamy on the show, their album at the time went from mediocre sales to becoming the best-selling album of their career.
  • Whenever a popular YouTube series (such as The Gmod Idiot Box) uses a song that can be found on YouTube, said song will get a whole lot of hits all of a sudden, and a slew of comments all of which extensively quote the original video.
  • After John Lennon and Paul McCartney of The Beatles name-checked him as their favorite singer in a 1968 talk show interview, Harry Nilsson's popularity took off in the early part of The '70s.
  • This trope can also be called "The Glee Factor", as many musicians and songs and styles who've been covered by the cast (Britney Spears, Madonna) have had Career Resurrections and renewed interest after their music was featured. The Glee versions themselves have been pretty big hits on the Billboard charts.
    • Todd in the Shadows, reviewing "We Are Young" by fun. and "Somebody That I Used to Know" by Gotye together, after realizing that the two songs' going to #1 on the Billboard charts consecutively despite being rather left-field pop hits was largely due to Glee, went as far to say that "Glee is the new MTV." There's a good reason for this: "We Are Young" first gained attention when it was featured in the episode "Hold On to Sixteen" but never peaked until after being used in a Chevy commercial that played during the Super Bowl a few months later; inversely, "Somebody That I Used To Know" took off in the States well before Glee covered it in the episode "Big Brother", but reached #1 the week after it was covered.
    • Some bands have also reported booming sales after being featured as DLC in Rock Band and Guitar Hero games.
  • Wikipedia reports that the sales of songs included in Brütal Legend went up 700% after the game came out. The best example is Brocas Helm, who before, was so obscure they could not be found for digital purchase anywhere, but afterward, received a massive boost in popularity, and became available due to demand.
  • Erasure had a significant boost to their popularity when one of the songs was used in the suddenly-popular webgame Robot Unicorn Attack. (They had previously had minor hits (and hit videos) in America in the late 1980s with "A Little Respect" and "Chains Of Love", and a mid-1990s cover of ABBA's "Take A Chance On Me".)
    • Erasure's version of "Take a Chance on Me" (and the rest of their ABBA-Esque EP) also led a lot of people to rediscover and reappraise ABBA themselves.
  • The odds of a third-place runner-up on American Idol going to #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 are small enough (it's actually never happened before), while the odds of a third-place runner-up on Canadian Idol going to #1 in the States are next to nothing...but that's exactly what happened to Carly Rae Jepsen and "Call Me Maybe" after Justin Bieber praised the song on Twitter, putting in motion what later became a huge musical and memetic phenomenon. Unfortunately, this didn't really apply to Jepsen herself, as after only one more hitnote , she faded from the mainstream, though she has nevertheless maintained a heavy cult following over the years (including the unofficial title of being the "Queen of Gay Twitter").
  • Portal gave a bump to Jonathan Coulton thanks to "Still Alive"; Portal 2 gave a bump to The National thanks to "Exile Vilify".
  • Kurt Cobain of Nirvana did this a lot by plugging his favorite artists and/or songs in interviews. Those who benefited included but are not limited to Shonen Knife, Beat Happening, Melvins, Daniel Johnston, and especially the Vaselines. Some of them got record deals just because Cobain said he liked them. RuPaul received a boost in popularity after Kurt stated that his dance club hit "Supermodel (You Better Work)" was one of his favorite songs of 1993. Nirvana itself would get one 16-18 years following the end of the band with the use of "Something in the Way" in both the first trailer for The Batman and the eventual film. The trailer sent the song, which had never been released as a single, into the charts for the first time in 2020. The final film sent the song skyrocketing to #2 on Billboard's Rock Streaming Songs and Rock Digital Song Sales charts and #27 on the overall Streaming Songs chart, and also helped put the Nevermind album and its flagship single "Smells Like Teen Spirit" back on the charts, while several other Nirvana songs saw sizable non-charting gains.
  • A medium-sized German TV show used Israel Kamakawiwoʻole's version of Over the Rainbow as a leitmotif for a 2010 Green Aesop episode. The cover subsequently shot up to Number 1 in the German single charts for 9 weeks - 13 years after the artist's death.
  • Lordi garnered considerable attention and interest after performing "Hard Rock Hallelujah" at the Eurovision Song Contest.
  • My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic:
    • The show itself wouldn't have become the phenomenon it was if 4chan hadn't gotten hold of it after discovering an article bashing the show.
    • The show homaged Sondheim numbers twice during season 1. Lots of people had never even heard of Into the Woods and Sunday in the Park with George, until they watched the show.
    • In addition, the band Hey Ocean! has received a significant boost in popularity because of singer Ashleigh Ball's voice work on the show. This can be said for the international popularity of One More Girl (a Canadian sister country group featuring Britt McKillip, the voice of Princess Cadance), and Apple Bloom's voice actress Michelle Creber (who has released three albums since the show began).
    • And any popular pony Fan Vid will cause the music used to get a lot of hits on YouTube as well, with a lot of users with pony avatars showing up and commenting (and other people complaining about them doing so.)
  • Chris LeDoux would sign a record deal with Capitol Records shortly after Garth Brooks mentioned him in his hit song "Much Too Young (To Feel This Damn Old)". Two years later LeDoux would have a top-10 hit with "Whatcha Gonna Do With a Cowboy" and would frequently end concerts by saying "Thanks, Garth." Unfortunately, he never had another top 10 hit.
  • Josh Groban's big break came at the 1999 Grammy Awards, where he stood in for Andrea Bocelli in a duet with Céline Dion. Rosie O'Donnell and Ally McBeal came calling soon afterwards.
  • A lot of people found out who The Pixies are through Fight Club having "Where Is My Mind?" in the final scene.
  • By the early 2000s, Rick James had largely become disgraced thanks to drug addictions and a 3-year prison sentence. Then Dave Chappelle spoofed his life on Chappelle's Show, and Rick's popularity reached new heights.
  • JoJo's Bizarre Adventure is littered with references to Hirohiko Araki's love of western popular music, and the anime adaptation takes it further by featuring various real-world songs as the ending themes to each part. As a result, a number of musicians saw renewed attention thanks to JoJo fans being exposed to them and checking them out:
  • Tony Bennett credits his appearance on SCTV with introducing him favorably to a new generation and reviving his career.
  • Cher Lloyd. Ed Sheeran. Olly Murs. Little Mix. What do these four British artists have in common? They all used One Direction to become popular in the United States. Cher Lloyd finished fourth on the 2010 edition of The X Factor, right behind One Direction. Ed Sheeran has written songs for One Direction, most notably "Little Things". Olly Murs, runner-up of the 2009 edition, has performed in America as an opener for One Direction. Little Mix were the winners of the 2011 edition, and while they did have moderate chart success in the US, one of its members, Perrie Edwards, was at one point engaged to former 1D member Zayn Malik. The group has also helped spawn interest in the American version of The X Factor (which had just finished its first season by the time of their rise to international fame), which gave to the public the likes of Fifth Harmony and Alex & Sierra.
    • In 2013, Australian pop-rock band 5 Seconds of Summer were selected as One Direction's opening act for their second tour. Unsurprisingly, this spurred international interest in the band and led to a #1 album the next year. Their exposure to their fans through that made them go from an obscure YouTube cover band one of Australia's most successful Pop Rock acts of all time. Most bands similar to them have to wait years before reaching even a fraction of the kind of success they've had.
    • It works inversely as well. Fellow boy band The Wanted had a global hit, but were overshadowed by One Direction in the US market and forgotten afterwards; although they were still successful in their native UK, 1D's American breakthrough did mark a downward turning point for their career. Justin Bieber, the reigning teen phenomenon at the time of their rise, also took a major hit thanks to 1D, but came back swinging after releasing the single "Where Are Ü Now" with Skrillex and Diplo, as well the album Purpose.
    • "Human" by Rag'n'Bone Man was a relatively unknown song until November 2016, when it skyrocketed to #3 on the British charts and became a runaway hit in the UK (and eventually worldwide) after it was featured on X Factornot because of One Direction, for a change (they were long on hiatus at that point), but rather because of eventual semifinalist Emily Middlemas, who made the then-risky decision of performing the song in the quarterfinals after weeks of being assigned ballad after ballad by her mentor Simon.
  • After being prominently featured in the soundtracks of the Test Drive videogame series, Pitch Shifter and Fear Factory received a strong bump in popularity. The latter got even more popular thanks to their breakthrough hit, the Cover Version of Gary Numan's "Cars", being featured in Test Drive 6 (as the opening theme) and the American release of Gran Turismo 2.
  • Speaking of Gran Turismo, not many people ever knew about The Cardigans before their prominent appearance in GT2's soundtrack with "My Favourite Game", which would later become their Signature Song (second only to "Lovefool").
  • Queen gained a resurgence of interest in 1985 following their performance at Live Aid and a posthumous one in 1992 thanks to the use of "Bohemian Rhapsody" in Wayne's World.
    • They got another one in 2018 with their Freddie Mercury/Queen Biopic Bohemian Rhapsody, which helped make the eponymous song the most-streamed song from the 20th century on Spotify. Also, the song "I'm in Love With My Car", one of the few relatively obscure songs of Queen's discography, gained a popularity boost after the film's release, mainly due to curiosity regarding why it's made as the film's Running Gag.
  • Some time after Bohemian Rhapsody, Mötley Crüe saw a similar revival with the Netflix biopic The Dirt.
  • Though she maintained a fairly high profile in pop and children's programming circles since 2006, and occasional hits like "Party in the USA" crossed over to the adult charts, it wasn't until Miley Cyrus appeared at the 2013 MTV Video Music Awards walking out of a giant teddy bear in teddy bear unitard, wearing teddy bear-ears-shaped Girlish Pigtails, tongue hanging out, performing her hit "We Can't Stop", then stripping to lingerie while twerking suggestively behind fellow performer Robin Thicke as he performed his hit "Blurred Lines" that her profile rapidly took off for the rest of the year. Her album Bangerz shot up to number 1, she appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine in a barely-concealed topless photo, and with her change to a provocative, controversial, more adult image her music gained new audiences outside of her once more Disney Channel-oriented fanbase. It also helped to bring the very hip-hop-centric dancing style of "twerking" (whose popularity was at the time relegated to social network Vine) into the public consciousness.
  • The Voice brought renewed interest to both Cee Lo Green and Blake Shelton.
  • The Proclaimers' "I'm Gonna Be (500 Miles)" was released in 1988, but it became a hit in the US in 1993 when it was featured in Benny & Joon.
    • And then it received a second bump when David Tennant revealed himself to be a big fan of the band. Cue Whovians getting hooked on the song.
    • And yet another one from its use on How I Met Your Mother ("Arrivederci, Fiero"), which is how most younger fans discovered it.
  • Triple J is an alternative radio station in Australia that hosts the Hottest 100 each year. Despite it getting nearly a billion votes worldwide annually, most of the artists who win are popular only in Australia, with some exceptions ("No One Knows" in 2002, "Are You Gonna Be My Girl" in 2003, "Take Me Out" in 2004, "Knights of Cydonia" in 2007, "Sex on Fire" in 2008).
    • Case in Point:
      • 2009: "Little Lion Man" by Mumford and Sons wins in a landslide. In 2010, the song becomes a hit on alt-rock radio and cracks the Top 40 on Billboard.
      • 2011: Gotye wins with "Somebody That I Used to Know". Largely obscure outside of Australia, the song becomes a #1 hit in most countries, including the US, and wins a Grammy. Unfortunately, he ended up a one-hit wonder.
      • 2012: "Thrift Shop" by Macklemore and Ryan Lewis won. For reference, like Mumford and Sons and most other frequent Hottest 100 entrants, the duo is true indie, with no record label. Even more anomalous, this is one of only two rap songs to win in the alternative station poll (the other was "Humble" by Kendrick Lamar). The week it was #1 on the Hottest 100, it hit #1 in the States! This is somewhat less surprising as the song had been gaining steam in the US for about a month.
      • And if there was any doubt about its power before, 2013 cements its status as the Colbert Bump of indie music. Vance Joy won with "Riptide" over "Get Lucky" and "Royals", which were two of the biggest songs globally that year, and "Do I Wanna Know?", which wasn't as big (and was just starting to gain traction at that point) but still had a considerably higher profile than "Riptide". Before this, Vance Joy didn't even have a record deal and was only known in-station through the Unearthed podcast. Afterwards, the song hit the Top 10 in several countries and netted Vance a deal with Atlantic.
    • Glass Animals' song "Heat Waves" topped the 2020 countdown; later on in the last few months of 2021, it cracked the Top 10 on the Billboard Hot 100, around a year after release.
  • Jazz singer and bassist Esperanza Spalding got a huge amount of publicity when she won Best New Artist at the 2011 Grammys. Unfortunately, much of this was due to a perceived Award Snub over Justin Bieber, and to a lesser extent, Drake, Florence + the Machine, and Mumford & Sons; according to an edition of Uncle John's Bathroom Reader her page on That Other Wiki was vandalized multiple times by many of Bieber's fans with sayings such as "JUSTIN DESERVED IT GO DIE IN A HOLE".
  • Mel Tormé enjoyed a career upswing thanks to his appearances on Night Court.
  • An article in Spin magazine documented five instances where previously unknown (or little known) artists benefitted from their association with or namechecking by Taylor Swift.
  • Incredibly common in hip-hop music. Entire careers have been built on a complete unknown managing to get on a track with a successful artist, and it's highly common that more established artists act as mentors to new talent. A few notable examples include:
    • Lupe Fiasco was largely unknown before shining on a guest verse on Kanye West's Late Registration in 2005. Similarly, Chicago rapper Chief Keef received a major boost to his popularity when Kanye got on a remix of his song "I Don't Like".
    • Singer The Weeknd's popularity largely took off after providing vocals for Drake's Take Care album.
  • Little-known rap group Smokin Suckaz Wit Logic got a bump from the dub of Street Fighter II: The Animated Movie, which used one of their songs during Dee Jay's brief scene.
  • This can occur any time an artist has their song appear as the "Single of the Week" on iTunes; Banks, Lorde, Imagine Dragons, CHVRCHES, The 1975, The Fray, and many more artists have benefited from this. Sometimes their songs may even be featured twice, like in the case of Walk the Moon ("Anna Sun" in 2012 and "Shut Up and Dance" in 2014, respectively). Even when the free song system was overhauled in early 2015, you can still expect artists featured as "Free on iTunes" to have their popularity boosted by it. Sadly, free songs were finally given the boot in June 2015, after the release of Apple Music.
  • Imagine Dragons labelmates X Ambassadors had their popularity boosted twice; once by their song "Jungle" appearing as the aforementioned "Single of the Week", and once again when their song "Renegades" appeared in commercials and radio spots for the (what else?) Jeep Renegade.
  • iHeartRadio (formerly Clear Channel) has the "On the Verge" program, which takes obscure new artists and heavily promotes them through airplay on its stations, and usually boosts them to hit status. In pop music, the acts who have been taken this way include Iggy Azalea, Rachel Platten, and Fifth Harmony, while the program has had more success in Country Music, with artists such as Craig Campbell, Chris Janson (who notably wasn't even signed to a label at the time due to two of his previous labels closing, but later earned a contract with Warner (Bros.) Records after "On the Verge" championed "Buy Me a Boat"), Chase Bryant, Cam, Granger Smith, and Maren Morris all benefiting from it. In rock music, Dirty Honey's rise to fame was assisted by "On the Verge".
    • While it was not part of an "On the Verge" program, Country Music deejay Bobby Bones (whose show is syndicated by a division of iHeartRadio) helped shape Little Big Town's "Girl Crush" into a hit through heavy play on his show. It was a performance on The Tonight Show and a viral article about its controversial LGBT themes that helped it rise on iTunes and gain attention outside the country fan base, with a cover on The Voice and a performance at the Academy of County Music awards solidifying its rise.
  • Fountains of Wayne was an obscure '90s Power Pop group. They had had one semi-popular hit - "Stacy's Mom" - until Kingdom Hospital Poly boosted the popularity of "Red Dragon Tattoo."
  • Simplifying this: Any band whose song is used as a Real Song Theme Tune for whatever media will get a Colbert Bump. It just goes hand in hand.
  • Area 11 received a massive influx of fans after their song based on Dota 2 was featured on the Yogscast channel for Lewis Brindley and Simon Lane. The band then signed with the Yogscast for two years, which definitely helped them get off the ground. The group are not registered with the Yogscast anymore, but are still friendly with them and have a large number of Yognaughts in the fandom.
  • The Polish song "Zegarmistrz Swiatla Purpurowy" got a lot more hits from non-Polish viewers after it was featured in the trailer of This War of Mine.
  • Country Music singer Chris Stapleton had several hits as a songwriter dating back to 2004 but had yet to have anything break out either on his own or during his stint as lead singer of the bluegrass group The SteelDrivers. He got some critical acclaim for his album Traveller in 2015, but it initially failed to translate into sales or chart success. Its lead single (the title track) was largely snubbed by radio. Then, Stapleton performed George Jones' "Tennessee Whiskey" with Justin Timberlake on the Country Music Association (CMA) Awards in November 2015, which instantly kicked things into gear: Traveller shot to #1 on the country albums charts (and even #1 overall on one day of sales alone), the cover of "Tennessee Whiskey" topped the Country Songs charts for two weeks and went to #20 on the Hot 100, while country radio made "Nobody to Blame", the second single from Traveller, into a Top 10 hit. The album then won a Grammy in 2016, setting the groundwork for two more hit albums (to the point that he became only the third artist ever to simultaneously hold the top three positions on the Top Country Albums charts) an even bigger radio hit in "Broken Halos", and another successful pop duet with Timberlake, all between 2017 and early 2018.
  • On two separate occasions, After Midnite with Blair Garner has championed releases by artists so new that they didn't even have a record label. The first was in 1995 when a DJ from a Minneapolis radio station released a parody of Shania Twain's "Any Man of Mine" titled "Any Gal of Mine" and credited to "Gino the New Guy", which Blair spun so frequently that the song got to #56 without support from a record label. 15 years later, he spun "In the Meantime" by Sarah Marince, a young singer-songwriter from Pennsylvania, and got it to #59.
  • Both Eric Johnson and Danny Gatton were barely-known cult guitar heroes when each of them was featured in "World's Greatest Unknown Guitarist" cover stories in Guitar Player magazine. The magazine also boosted the career of Joe Satriani in a 1988 cover story.
    • One "Spotlight" column in the early 1980s (a column written by Shrapnel Records founder Mike Varney, profiling burgeoning unsigned guitar talent) in a single monthly issue featured Paul Gilbert and Yngwie Malmsteen.
  • The Weeknd had a rise comparable to Chris Stapleton, seeing as they both became popular within the same year. He did some guest vocals on a Drake song and had at least one minor hit in his own right ("Wanderlust", a collaboration with Pharrell Williams), but wasn't as popular as the likes of Taylor Swift... that is, until he appeared on the Ariana Grande hit "Love Me Harder" and contributed the song "Earned It" to the Fifty Shades of Grey film soundtrack. That song quickly made the top 5, and his next few singles were just as huge, with three ("Can't Feel My Face", "The Hills", and "Starboy") even hitting #1.
  • Try an entire genre: The only reason eurobeat is known outside of Japan or its native Europe is because of its heavy use in the anime and video game adaptations of Initial D. It's to the point where most people who have heard of the series will instantly refer to any Eurobeat track as "Initial D music", even if the song has never been featured in the series.
  • On a 2002 episode of American Country Countdown, Bob Kingsley spun "Halfway Home Cafe", an album cut from Ricky Skaggs' History of the Future. The resulting airplay was enough to get the song to #56 for a single week — nothing too impressive by chart standards, but quite the accomplishment for an independently-released bluegrass song by an artist whose career peak was nearly 15 years prior.
  • Uncle Kracker's 2009-2010 hit "Smile" was originally only serviced to pop and AC, but after Country Music stations in Detroit began spinning it so heavily that it entered the country airplay charts, the song was remixed for the country format and went on to become a top 10 country hit.
  • Jerry Wallace's 1972 song "If You Leave Me Tonight I'll Cry" had its popularity boosted on the charts after it was featured in the Night Gallery episode "The Tune in Dan's Cafe".
  • Singer-songwriter-performance artist Gary Wilson got renewed attention after Beck gave a Shout-Out to "My man Gary Wilson" in "Where It's At".
  • Joan Baez's version of Donna Donna received a bump after some of the lyrics were featured in Tokyo Ghoul:re
  • Saturday Night Live:
    • Adele shot to international superstardom when appearing as a musical guest during the same episode that featured Sarah Palin. She was already an acclaimed singer prior to the episode but it was her appearance on SNL that truly introduced her to the world and gave her the Grammy for "Best New Artist". Although that was back during her 19 era; it wasn't until 21 that she truly became a star.
    • Season 44, Episode 19 featured a skit in which a man named Raz P. Berry stalks a woman he wrongly believes to be his unfaithful girlfriend. Many were surprised to learn that this was based on a real-life song called "The Rain" by Oran "Juice" Jones. Many comments on the music video are by people admitting to seeing the skit first and discovering the song later.
  • The small but noticeable resurgence in popularity of the Simple Minds hit "Don't You (Forget About Me)" has two possible factors linking to it: a parody of it appearing in How Inside Out Should Have Ended, and the similarly inexplicable resurge in parodies of The Breakfast Club (for which "Don't You" was the soundtrack's lead single) on TV shows, like The Goldbergs and Teen Titans Go!, directing youngsters to the movie in question.
    • Before then, a fan trailer for Remember Me used the original song. It was featured on Kotaku and even the studio's PR team were slightly disappointed that they did not think to use that song to promote the game.
  • A more direct example would be "We Are Number One" from LazyTown. It was just another song from the show, far less known than the likes of "The Cake Song", "You Are a Pirate", or "Bing Bang", before it became subjected to the YouTube Poop word replacement fad (which was in the midst of its own Colbert Bump resurgence); afterwards its popularity grew to epitomic levels and, due to donations, even caused the actor playing Robbie Rotten to recover from pancreatic cancer and embrace the meme in a livestream! This has also applied, to slightly less extent, with The Nutshack theme, the entire Bee Movie, "Let it Grow" and "How Bad Can I Be" from The Lorax (2012), and another LazyTown song, "The Mine Song", among others.
  • The Ink Spots were a forgotten early Doo-wop group from 1934 to 1954. Then their music was featured in Fallout, Fallout 3, Fallout 4 and later BioShock, resulting in a huge upswing in interest in their music.
  • Mike Krol was a fairly obscure lo-fi indie rock musician. Then he got a number of new fans when his songs "Fifteen Minutes" and "Like a Star" were featured in the Steven Universe episode "Last One Out of Beach City".
  • Once the video PSY's "Gangnam Style" became viral, down to becoming the first to break a billion views on YouTube, the rest of the world suddenly got an interest in K-Pop, and a few years later boy bands such as EXO and BTS had massive international fanbases.
    • BTS would (unintentionally) return the favor years later, with SUGA producing, rapping, and appearing in the music video for "That That", helping draw international attention to Psy's comeback single after a five-year hiatus. The video even featured a well-meme'd scene of SUGA cradling the dying Gangnam Style version of Psy in his arms.
  • The reggaeton song "Despacito" by Puerto Rican musicians Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee was already popular in Spanish-speaking countries as well as on the U.S. Latin charts, and it's no wonder how it's become the most-viewed YouTube video of all time in just seven months. However, the remix with Justin Bieber got it international attention, although first only to Bieber's fanbase. It continued to blow up afterwards, eventually being pushed to the top of the Hot 100, making it the first mostly-Spanish song and the first song that primarily is not in the English languagenote  to do so since "Macarena" in 1996.
    • On The Vodafone Big Top 40 in the UK, "Despacito" held the no. 1 spot for eleven weeks. This beats the previous holder, "Uptown Funk" by Mark Ronson and Bruno Mars, by four weeks. And that's just five weeks away from the longest song at no. 1 on any UK chart ("(Everything I Do) I Do It for You”). It took until July 30, 2017, when it was finally knocked off its top spot by "Feels".
    • A similar thing happened with "Súbeme La Radio" by Enrique Iglesias. In July 2017, it got a remix by Jamaican rapper Sean Paul and immediately shot right to no. 3 on said chart.
    • Happened again in 2017 with "Mi Gente" by Colombian artist J Balvin and French artist Willy William, which had a remix made featuring Beyoncé (with the proceeds going to hurricane relief charities). The song went to #1 on the Billboard Top 100 within a week.
  • The Bait-and-Switch YouTube channel SiIvaGunner is known for doing this with many of the songs it features, such as The Flintstones theme, "Snow Halation" from Love Live!, and Kirby: Planet Robobot's "Program Rhythm", which is mostly known as "Puzzle Room".
  • Alec Benjamin's "I Built A Friend" got a boost when 12-year-old Merrick Hanna danced to it for his audition on America's Got Talent. Alec would then record a cover of Ruth B's "Lost Boy" for another of Merrick's performances.
  • In possibly the most tearjerking Colbert Bump ever, Logic's "1-800-273-8255" was released to modest praise in April 2017, but its rise to the top of the charts may have started when Top 40 stations played it on July 20 as a tribute to Chester Bennington after his suicide.
  • Alison Krauss & Union Station's popularity soared after the band Shenandoah featured Krauss on their 1995 hit "Somewhere in the Vicinity of the Heart", which in turn caused unexpected radio interest in Krauss' cover of Keith Whitley's "When You Say Nothing at All". Previously found on a 1994 tribute album to Whitley, the song was also included on Krauss' 1995 Greatest Hits Album Now That I've Found You: A Collection, which would go on to sell double-platinum.
  • Country Music singer Scotty McCreery released a song titled "Five More Minutes" independently after terminating his contract with Mercury Records. A few radio stations discovered the song and began playing it, making it the first song to ever enter the Mediabase country music charts without support from a label. This resulted in Sony-owned Triple Tigers picking him up for distribution... and sending the song to #1 in early 2018, far outpeaking any of his Mercury releases.
  • Tim McGraw has had this happen twice.
    • After he performed a new song titled "Things Change" on the Country Music Association awards show in 2000, a few radio stations began to play the live recording (supposedly originating on Napster), to the point that it reached Top 40 on Hot Country Songs. A studio version, which was also said to have been in circulation at the time of the airplay, later made it onto his next album Set This Circus Down.
    • In 2007, he performed a new song called "If You're Reading This" at the Academy of Country Music Awards. Several radio stations played the unedited recording to the point that it made Top 40 on the Hot Country Songs charts, overlapping with his then-current single "I Need You". Curb Records responded by officially releasing a radio edit of "If You're Reading This" that cleaned up the audio and removed most of the audience noise, except for applause at the end — all while pushing "I Need You" into the Top 10 so that it could freefall and promotion of "Reading" could go into full force. In addition, his then-current album Let It Go was reissued with the radio edit of the song added to the tracklist.
  • In late 2010, Jason Aldean and Kelly Clarkson performed "Don't You Wanna Stay", an album track from Aldean's then-current album My Kinda Party, at the Country Music Association awards. Even though the title track was already out as a single, the performance sparked interest in "Don't You Wanna Stay" as well, causing both songs to escalate the Hot Country Songs charts only a few steps behind each other. By spring 2011, "Don't You Wanna Stay" had reached #1.
  • While Frank Sinatra's "My Way" has always been one of his most popular songs, its recognition grew even bigger ever since Perfect Cell did a cover of it for his Really Dead Montage in Dragon Ball Z Abridged Episode 60.
  • Star vs. the Forces of Evil introduced a number of new viewers to the works of Parry Gripp by using his song "Space Unicorn" as Marco's Embarrassing Ringtone.
  • Scissor Sisters' "I Can't Decide" wasn't even a single—but that didn't stop it from gaining popularity after the Doctor Who episode "Last of the Time Lords" featured it as the Villain Song for John Simm's Master as he's dancing to the song while kissing Lucy, abusing Martha's family, and tormenting the Doctor.
  • This is almost guaranteed to happen when a song is featured in a popular video on TikTok but never was there a more stunning example than Lil Nas X's "Old Town Road", which gained its first real exposure through the service and eventually broke the record for the longest-running #1 in Billboard's history. Other examples include asdfmovie's "The Muffin Song", Pogo's "Living Island" and several Jack Stauber songs.
  • In 2008, the British bank Barclays used the Bellamy Brothers' 1976 hit "Let Your Love Flow" in a commercial, causing it to re-enter the UK singles chart. This is also an example of Germans Love David Hasselhoff, as the Bellamys stopped having hits in the US after 1990 but have remained popular in Europe well afterward.
  • In 2019, Blake Shelton endorsed Craig Morgan's song "The Father, My Son, and the Holy Ghost", a song which Morgan recorded after his son died in an accident. Shelton loved the song and asked fans on Twitter to download and share it. Thanks to this, the song became Morgan's first entry on Hot Country Songs in several years and led to him re-signing with Broken Bow Records.
  • Empire of the Sun's "Walking on a Dream" hit the charts after its use in a Honda commercial in 2016, seven years after its release.
  • The same thing happened with Sia and her 2016 song "Unstoppable" after it was used in a 2022 Samsung Galaxy commercial.
  • Was your melancholy indie ballad selected for Turner Classic Movies' annual TCM Remembers tribute? Congrats! Get ready for a ton of Shazams once the audience stops crying its eyes out. This happens often to other songs used in TCM promos.
  • Someone Great, an otherwise forgotten 2019 Netflix film, was responsible for bringing 2017's "Truth Hurts", and therefore Lizzo, to the top of the charts.
  • In 2020 an GEICO commercial about homeowners noting they have a "Ratt problem" featured the band playing "Round and Round". This gave the song enough of a bump that it returned to the rock charts.
  • An episode of podcast Reply All brought renewed attention to Evan Olson's late 90s single "So Much Better". Notable because the entire premise of the episode was finding and identifying this previously obscure song based on one man's memory of it. At the time the podcast was made, the song was forgotten enough that typing lyrics into search engines or trying to use apps like Soundhound note  didn't turn up anything relevant, as the song was long out of print and had no internet presence. Olson himself put the full song on YouTube after the podcast was released, and it got enough streams that its parent album One Room, was officially released digitally for the first time by his former label Universal.
  • Cradle of Filth maintain a cult following in their native UK but tend to be more popular in continental Europe. However, they received a brief boost in popularity in their home country when they were revealed to be Richmond's favourite band on The IT Crowd.
  • Frank Stallone's single "Far From Over", taken from the 1983 film Staying Alive, gained a bump in popularity in 2010, when Australian radio drive-home hosts Hamish and Andy talked about their love for the song on a regular basis. It even went to the point that they got Frank to do a one-off concert in Australia. The entire story is recounted in their 2010 "Reministmas Special".
  • Ween's song "Ocean Man" gained popularity (and a memetic status) due to it being used in the credits of The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie.
  • Indie Pop band Cannons was virtually unknown before their single "Fire for You" was featured in Never Have I Ever, which resulted in them getting a record deal and the song eventually becoming a smash hit on alternative radio.
  • In a rare case of a non-political Colbert Bump from the Trope Namer: the guest appearances by Ric Ocasek of The Cars on The Colbert Report earned the band a lot of younger fans.
  • More than half a century after its 1969 release, Linda Martell's "Color Him Father" remains the highest charting Country Music hit by a solo black woman. Due to her poor treatment in the genre, Martell retired from music in the mid-1970s and quickly faded into obscurity. A Swedish TV show called Jills Veranda — Nashville tracked her down and interviewed her in 2014, helping draw attention to her and her music. This led to her only album Color Me Country being reissued and added to digital platforms that year. Furthering the attention to Martell and her music was when Rissi Palmer (also a black female country singer) started a podcast in 2020 named after Martell's album, in which she discusses and plays music by artists of color.
  • Season 2 Episode 4 of Cheap Seats featured a reference to Eddy Raven's obscure 1985 single "I Wanna Hear It from You". Any upload of this song online will very likely have multiple people commenting on the fact that they were exposed to Raven's music through this one joke.
  • Almost every real life song that was used in WandaVision saw renewed interest afterwards, judging from the YouTube comments for songs like "Yakety Yak", "Help Me, Rhonda", "Daydream Believer", and "Voodoo Child".
  • The Caretaker and especially Everywhere at the End of Time has renewed interest in the ballroom jazz and other music that the project samples to Nightmare Fuel effect. Most notably, the song "Heartaches" as performed by interwar singer Al Bowlly due to being the Concept Album's most used leitmotif.
  • "I Want You" by Savage Garden had this twice: first when Rosie O'Donnell mocked the song's fast-paced vocal delivery on her talk show, and again a decade later when it was used as the ending theme for Jojos Bizarre Adventure's fourth season, "Diamond Is Unbreakable".
  • The works of bo en, especially "My Time", shot up in views and comments when the aforementioned song was used in a trailer for OMORI, and then even more when the game was Saved from Development Hell.
  • Peach were British Alternative Metal band who opened for tool on the European leg of one of their tours. This alone didn't seem to gather them much additional interest, but then Peach bassist Justin Chancellor left the band to join Tool, and Tool subsequently started covering the Peach songs "You Lied" and "Spasm" live note . Enough Tool fans got interested that Peach's only full-length release, Giving Birth to a Stone, was reissued with new cover art by Tool's Adam Jones. In turn, the reissue did well enough that the two members who weren't committed to other bands started a new project together as Suns of the Tundra.
  • Roxette's "The Look" shot to the top of the Billboard Hot 100 after a Minneapolis DJ played the song after being given a copy of Look Sharp! by a fan returning from studying in Sweden.
  • Most modern-day fans of Huey Lewis and the News got into the band by way of either Back to the Future or American Psycho (mostly the latter; but also the former).
  • UB40's "Red Red Wine" had been a #1 hit in the UK in 1983 and got to a respectable #34 on the Billboard Hot 100 in America the next year. In June of 1988, a DJ named Guy Zapoleon at KZZP in Phoenix, Arizona played it on his show as part of a recurring feature called "Would've Been, Should've Been", where he spotlighted songs from the past that he thought deserved to be bigger hits than they were. After getting a huge response, Zapoleon convinced A&M Records to re-release it, and it hit #1 on the Billboard Hot 100.
  • Canadian Arena Rock band Sheriff had a #8 hit in their homeland in 1983 with "When I'm with You", which was also a minor hit in the US. In 1988-89, in a case of Follow the Leader following this trope bringing UB40's Covered Up version of "Red Red Wine" to the top of the charts, several DJs in the States began playing the song, and there was enough interest for it to reach #1 on the Hot 100 as well, despite no music video being produced for it. The reissue was such a success that two members who weren't committed to other bands started a new project with some former Heart members, Alias, which nabbed a #2 hit with "More Than Words Can Say" in 1990.
  • Italo Disco artist Sandy Marton gained a following after his song "Camel by Camel" was used in one of ZONE's animations.
  • Wham!'s "Last Christmas" got this after it was featured in a scene in episode 2 of Dash & Lily. Although the song was already popular, its appearance in the show was enough to have it top the singles chart in the UK for the very first time since its release.
  • Walker Hayes' "Fancy Like" contains Product Placement for Applebee's restaurants, including their Oreo shake. Due to the success of the song (thanks to going viral on TikTok), Applebee's used the song in commercials and even brought their Oreo shakes out of retirement.
  • Sabaton
  • Blues Saraceno among others got a boost from his music being licensed for the soundtrack of the video game Rebel Galaxy.
  • The Norwegian metal band Wig Wam had been dropped by their booking agency just days before due to lack of interest when their 2010 song "Do You Wanna Taste It" was used as the music for the opening credits of Peacemaker, which became a viral sensation. The band quickly found a new agent, got gigs and requests from around the world (including their first-ever U.S. shows), and saw a huge burst in streaming numbers. Singer Åge Sten Nilsen said he had little idea what Peacemaker was when they took the offer to use the song and were blown away upon seeing how it was used in the show.
  • Yume no Crayon Oukoku's theme song became more well-known outside of Japan due to its usage in Episode 6 of Koishi Komeiji's Heart-Throbbing Adventure.
  • While Natalia Lafourcade was already extremely famous at the time, she gained more worldwide fame after her performance of "Remember Me" appeared in Coco.
  • Waterparks got an uptick in attention after their song "Telephone" off of their 2019 album fandom made it into Heartstopper, a Netflix series based on a webcomic about LGBTQ+ teenagers at a British grammar school.
  • BTS members have done this to huge effect; them mentioning a song on social media leads to a huge amount of attention for the artists they feature, many of them indie musicians in a wide variety of genres. Band leader RM in particular is known for drawing attention to art museums and books. With the number of people who go to restaurants and other places that the band members have visited, it's no wonder they became official Korean tourism ambassadors, with the band's existence seen as a major boon to the South Korean tourism industry.
  • "Moonlight Sonata" by Ludwig van Beethoven became more popular when it appeared as a puzzle solution in Resident Evil, even among those who don't listen to classical music.
  • Japanese reggae/metal band SiM reached #1 on US Billboard's Hot Hard Rock Songs with the song Rumbling, the opening theme song for the 4th season of Attack on Titan.
  • Dido's "Thank You" was first released as part of the soundtrack to 1998's Sliding Doors, and then on her debut album No Angel in September 2000 to modest success. Then in November, it was sampled in Eminem's "Stan", considered to be one of his greatest and most popular songs, and its popularity helped slingshot "Thank You" into even greater mainstream attention, entering the Billboard Top 10 in January 2001 and staying in the Hot 100 until September, considered one of the biggest hits of the year in its own right.
  • Lady Gaga's "Bloody Mary" was a lesser track from her 2011 album Born This Way that got a little bit more popular with the advent of TikTok, until 2022 when someone put a sped-up version over a dance scene from Wednesday. While the song featured in that scene was The Cramps' "Goo Goo Muck", "Bloody Mary" became better associated with it, to the point where Lady Gaga not only recorded her own version of the dance, but released the song as a single (eleven years after the parent album's release), peaking at #41 on the Hot 100.
  • SARO is known as one of the best loopstation masters in the world, but due to his relatively sparse releases, he is not as well-known as many other beatboxers. He gets most of his recognition from his semi-final match against MB14 in the 2017 Grand Beatbox Championship, which itself gets a lot of attention due to MB14's frequent appearances in more well-known talent shows, such as The Voice and Britain's Got Talent.
  • Mindless Self Indulgence received a boost of exposure through a early meme video from 2000 setting the band's song "Bitches" to edited footage of Pokémon: The First Movie, making it look like Pikachu is singing the song.
  • Tom Petty saw an increase in streams in late 2023 after a lesser-known song of his, "Love Is A Long Road" from 1989's Full Moon Fever, was featured in the first trailer for Grand Theft Auto VI.
  • A particularly strange and hilarious example happened when Jimmy Fallon, of all people, mentioned an album by experimental jazz saxophonist Peter Brotzmann on his show in a segment called "Do Not Play", where he panned it. This, of course, led to a lot of backlash from critics and jazz fans, but also an increase in attention towards Brotzmann's music.

    Other 
  • An odd example of negative publicity: after a terribly awkward and embarrassing interview with Fox News went viral, Reza Aslan's book Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth went to the top of bestseller lists. As it's a non-fiction book written by an academic, it might not ever have reached that kind of sales had the interviewer been able to keep her foot out of her mouth.
  • Specifically mentioned happening in-universe in The World Ends with You, where Joshua notes that whenever The Prince mentions something on his blog, sales skyrocket. Also exploited by a ramen restaurant that pays him for advertising.
  • In Rick and Morty, after Rick referenced when McDonald's did a promotion for the Disney film Mulan back in 1998 by selling Szechuan Sauce with their meals (which really happened), fans of the show expressed their desire for the sauce to return, even going far enough to make a petition for McDonald's to bring the sauce back. It worked, McDonald's announcing shortly afterwards that they were bringing the sauce back for a limited time.
  • Gary Con, a small gaming convention in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin that honors the work of Dungeons & Dragons co-creator and Lake Geneva native Gary Gygax, was namedropped in an episode of The Big Bang Theory. Its attendance saw an abrupt jump that year.
  • This FiveThirtyEight article asserts that the character of Shuri in Black Panther could help motivate black women to pursue careers in STEM fields, and provides examples of previous films and TV series inspiring similar phenomena:
    • After the release of The Hunger Games and Brave in 2012 — both of which feature women protagonists who use a bow and arrow — girls’ participation in archery competitions doubled.
    • Raiders of the Lost Ark caused the number of students studying archaeology to spike.
    • Jurassic Park minted a bunch of paleontologists.
    • And if you want your kid to become an engineer or astrophysicist, show them some Star Trek.
    • Movies can also have direct, immediate effects on more mundane day-to-day decisions. Attendance at the American Museum of Natural History rose 20 percent after Night at the Museum came out, U.S. tourism to New Zealand increased 23 percent after The Hobbit hit theaters, and Croatia’s tourism business has been booming since Game of Thrones shot some scenes there. Or, how about this? Drivers seem more prone to speeding after The Fast and the Furious movies are released (the article doesn't mention that the same thing happened in Australia thanks to Mad Max).
  • In 1956, Elvis Presley received a polio vaccination on television, causing the percentage of people getting vaccinated to skyrocket.
  • A season two episode of The West Wing, "Somebody's Going To Emergency, Somebody's Going To Jail" led to an upsurge of interest in the Peters Projection, in both online searches and actual map sales, after it was prominently featured in a subplot.
  • James Charles has been a personality in the YouTube beauty community, but remained unknown to the general public until his mentor's, Tati Westbrook, exposé video and the Internet-shaking scandal following it, accusing Charles as a sexual predator.
  • Following The Exorcist, there was an increase in reports of demonic possession.
  • An accidental version from the Joueur du Grenier: One of the characters created for the show is David Goodenough (played by Seb), a lazy game developer whose attitude towards a steaming turd of a game he worked on is basically "Meh, good enough", be it by downplaying the negative aspects or focusing on the undeniably functional ones like the box closing correctly, capped off by a "whatevs" shrug. However, it turns out they took the name from an actual developer in one of the games they reviewed. As a result, the real person's photo was once accidentally replaced with the JDG version on a site cataloging people working in video games.
  • The genetic syndrome Barakat syndrome was relatively unknown among the general public prior to 2015 when a teenager named William Walter Thompson who had the syndrome had his wish granted to appear on his favorite show, Teen Titans Go!. In fact, "Barakat syndrome Wally T" is Google's third result when you type in the syndrome's name.
  • The Tulsa race riot (also called the Greenwood Massacre or the Black Wall Street Massacre) was one of the most successfully-obscured acts of racial violence in American history until it was depicted as part of the backstory of Watchmen (2019). Afterwards, growing awareness of the event led to it being added to the Oklahoma public school curriculum.
  • During the 2020 US presidential election, MSNBC's chief poltiical correspondent Steve Kornacki attracted an incredible amount of attention for essentially staying on his feet and talking nonstop for an entire week without showing any sign of fatigue and for doing it all while wearing khakis from the Gap. His tireless performance attracted so much positive attention, that the Gap reported a spike in demand for Palomino brown khakis (Kornacki's favored color).
  • In season four of the Un-Canceled Young Justice, half of the episode Encounter Upon the Razor's Edge! is a Fully Absorbed Finale for Green Lantern: The Animated Series. Several fans had no idea who Razer was before this episode, as he was a Canon Foreigner created specifically for that other show and transplanted wholesale into this one, but they liked him and wanted to know more.
  • The 1986 release of Top Gun sparked a 500% increase in recruitments to the United States Navy thanks to people wanting to become naval aviators like the protagonists, to the point that at some theaters, they set up booths outside hoping to attract patrons. They tried to repeat this strategy with the 1990 release of The Hunt for Red October, hoping to attract aspiring submariners the same way Top Gun attracted aspiring aviators.
  • Shows which visit restaurants, such as Diners, Drive-ins and Dives and Man v. Food, tend to cause big spikes for those restaurants. Notably, many of the restaurants ask that the producers let them know whenever their episodes are going to be rerun so they can be sure to properly staff for the big surge in customers that follow.
  • The "Popcorn" sound on the iPhone, originally intended as a text tone, saw a major boost in popularity after it was featured in Inside Out. It got to the point where some fans set the sound as their ringtone.
  • When Disney Theme Parks announced that they would be closing and retheming Splash Mountain at both American locations, the ride saw a sharp increase in ridership as guests became determined to have one final ride. On the last day of operations in Florida, the Magic Kingdom version set a record-high queue time of three and a half hours.
  • Night Mind's video and discovery stream on Welcome Home (Clown Illustrations) brought far more attention to the ARG.
  • The condition aphantasia, which renders a person's brain unable to create visual images, was relatively unknown until JAMIEvstheVOID did an animated video about his experiences with it, which netted him two interviews about the subject - one with Wired and the other by Anthony Padilla as part of a video where he interviewed other aphantasiacs.
  • After the release of 2006's Night at the Museum, the number of visitors at the American Museum of Natural History, which the movie modeled after and where it was set in the 1993 Film of the Book version, increased by 50,000 the previous year during the holiday season and 50,000 more between December 22, 2006, and January 2, 2007.

    Politicians 
  • The Trope Namer is Stephen Colbert of The Colbert Report. Whenever politicians, especially ones running for office, experience a bump in poll numbers after being on his show, Colbert would take credit for it by saying that they received the Colbert Bump. He also claims responsibility whenever authors' books do well or musicians' songs do well. He once claimed responsibility for making Paul McCartney popular. The trope led to a series of crossover sketches in which Colbert, Jon Stewart, and Conan O'Brien fought over whose show was responsible for Mike Huckabee's temporary rise in popularity. Then there was Raj Patel, the economist who went on The Colbert Report with his new book, and was subsequently hailed as a messiah by a religious group.
  • Boris Johnson was a pretty minor journalist in the UK (not yet even a Conservative MP) when he made his first appearance on Have I Got News for You, but each hilarious appearance boosted his popularity, to the point where the hosts of the show joked he could become leader of the Conservative Party despite his buffoonish persona. His relatively huge profile compared to other politicians was apparently of great concern to Labour Party officials when he ran for the office of Mayor of London (it was said that Boris was about the only politician recognizable by his first name alone, while most were referred to on last name or Full-Name Basis), which he then won. Several years in and he is, without joking, considered as a potential future leader of his party and this PM, despite not even being an MP anymore. Still seen as an outside chance, but one that must be considered (Update: Since winning re-election at a time of otherwise dire unpopularity for Tories in the polls, there were quite serious hopes in some quarters that he would be PM, and the best Tory in the country.) He eventually became Prime Minister... and won the last general election in 2019 a month before Brexit...pretty handily.
    • Johnson's main opponent in the election was Ken Livingstone, whose earlier mayoral campaigns had also benefited from several appearances on Have I Got News for You. Since Ken has been chosen as Boris' chief opponent in the next election, he has appeared on the show once more.
    • HIGNFY was also unwittingly the jumping-off point for Neil and Christine Hamilton in their successful transformation from "corrupt ex-MP and his shamelessly supportive wife" to "pair of absurd media whores."
    • The Lib Dems became significantly more popular after Charles Kennedy's numerous appearances too.
    • For some time Nigel Farage, former leader of the UKIP, has appeared at least once a season. The other panelists spend most of the show mocking him and his policies but presumably, he thinks that the publicity is worth it.
    • Jacob Reese Mogg, the latest near-parody personality, has used regular appearances to move from obscure backbencher and butt of in-jokes to proposed Conservative leadership candidate and misleading controversialist. Boris 2.0.
  • Hillary Clinton experienced a brief surge in popularity during the 2008 presidential elections after her appearance on Saturday Night Live.
  • Bill Clinton's sax-riffing appearance on The Arsenio Hall Show was credited with popularizing him with younger voters in 1992. Four years prior to that, Clinton received a bump by appearing on The Tonight Show. Up to that point, he was best known for giving an embarrassingly long speech at the Democratic National Convention that year, which was the reason for his initial appearance.
  • Richard Nixon's 1968 appearance on Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In coincided with a distinct leap in his electoral poll numbers.
  • The Oprah Winfrey Show brought on Barack Obama before his presidential run (whom Oprah famously declared "The One"), Dr. Phil (who started off as a one-off, then a weekly occurrence, and now has his own spinoff), Rachael Ray, and Dr. Oz. In fact, Dr. Oz himself has this in the form of "Dr. Oz effect", where certain things he promotes on his show do, in fact, get a bump in sales. In fact, the only Oprah-promoted talker who didn't succeed was Iyanla, who ran afoul of the inverse of this trope, losing all credibility and ratings after a row with Oprah, after she rode a bump to her own talker. The women made up on the eve of Oprah's final show.
  • The 2010 UK General Election campaign was the first one to see the leaders of the three largest national parties (the Conservatives, Labour, and the Liberal Democrats) take part in a series of live TV debates. Before the first debate was broadcast, very few people were aware of the leader of the smaller Lib Dem party, Nick Clegg; however, his strong performance on the first TV debate compared to the other party leaders saw his approval rating soar and score his party's highest ever result in a general election. That is until he eventually became Deputy Prime Minister in the Conservative/Lib Dem coalition government...
    • It is worth noting that the bump had an adverse effect on the Lib Dems as they did not follow through with their popular policies that got them into government, they received 7.9% of the vote in the following general election, their worst-ever result in the party's history until getting 7.4% in the next one.
  • Herman Cain, once the little-known CEO of a pizza company, was given his own talk show after popular response to the times he substituted for Neal Boortz. He rode his bump all the way to a high-profile presidential campaign, making him quite possibly one of the best examples of this yet.
    • Cain once remarked on his Twitter how he got the bump after Stephen Colbert declared him the winner of a Republican debate. Colbert corrected him by saying that Cain must appear on his show to receive the bump.
  • Stephen Colbert's fellow Daily Show alum John Oliver has since gotten his own version of this trope, dubbed "The John Oliver Effect" by TIME Magazine, because of his uncanny ability to raise awareness of issues such as net neutrality and civil forfeiture on his series Last Week Tonight with John Oliver.
  • A US Senate candidate by the name of Dave Strider got some internet popularity in 2017 through his shared name with popular Homestuck character. He even embraced this and made an official Tumblr full of Dave pictures.
  • A very bizarre version of this with the Italian politician Giacomo Gobbi. With little information about him available online, he would have remained obscure beyond his province. However, more people know about him thanks to his campaign ads appearing in buildings in the "Lego City earthquake" video. It's unlikely that this affected the results of the election, as the majority of viewers were probably non-Italian children watching well after the election.
  • The musical Hamilton did this for Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr, along with several other historical figures that weren't as well known as the likes of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. Burr, in particular, was previously remembered for absolutely nothing else other than being the guy who killed Hamilton in a duel.
  • The 1960 musical Camelot famously became associated with John F. Kennedy's presidency after his assassination. JFK and his wife in particular were both fans of the musical, which lead to the Kennedy administration being dubbed "Camelot".

    Products 
  • Conan O'Brien, attempting to take the place of Oprah, has recommended several kitschy items, from Troll 2 to a Steven Seagal album to a calendar entitled Extraordinary Chickens. Sure enough, they've gone up in popularity, and their Amazon pages show that people who buy one will frequently buy others.
  • One brand of cologne has received a rather sudden boost in sales. The cause? Both 2chan and 4chan noticed that the bottle resembled one that Kotetsu Kaburagi from Tiger & Bunny owned and decided they needed to know what Kotetsu smelled like.
  • Two Best Friends Play did two episodes on games from the Xbox Line Indie, the majority of the games were harpooned for their poor quality, until the last one on the second episode, which ended with them saying outright that everybody should buy T.E.C 3001. It went from rank 151 to 80 in under one hour of the video being released.
  • Among the LEGO fandom, Brickset is a prominent cause of a variation of this trope, usually used in description of online sales or premature uploading of information on future sets - once such a sale gets mentioned on Brickset, it's often sold out within a matter of hours. This has been dubbed the "Brickset effect".
  • After being mentioned in The Avengers, Shawarma has shown a dramatic rise in popularity.
  • This pretty much happens to anything mentioned on The Apprentice or Dragons' Den (aka Shark Tank). For example, after Keynoir was mentioned in an episode, their Twitter account basically exploded in popularity. Not to mention how some products now actually advertise 'featured on Dragon's Den' on the packaging... Or how the Bridge Cafe went from an extremely obscure local eatery to somewhere fans of the show end up trying to visit.
  • A major reason why TRON: Legacy came to be was because of Kingdom Hearts II, which includes a world based on the original film. The world, called Space Paranoids, became quite popular with the fanbase, and gained the origin film new fans. When The Grid was confirmed for KH3D, many fans rejoiced!
  • Matt Smith's bow-tie wearing Eleventh Doctor led to a dramatic increase in bow tie sales.
  • The Brazilian Ministry of Defense gave one for the app game Banana Kong. It Makes Sense in Context: a functionary of the ministry published on the official Twitter a tweet telling he reached 370 meters. Sales exploded afterwards, even if the tweet was deleted.
  • The release of Sideways had a very positive effect on sales of Pinot noir wines and a (smaller) negative effect on sales of Merlot. This was dubbed "The Sideways Effect" in the winemaking industry.
    • Similarly, the manga series The Drops of God has influenced wine sales in Asia. A mention in-series can boost the popularity of previously obscure wines, and the series is credited with helping wine sales in South Korea rise from under a third of the alcohol market to 70 percent.
  • Homestuck features the character Gamzee, who loves drinking Faygo, and this has increased Faygo sales a bit, especially in places where you can't find Faygo in stores and have to order it over the web.
  • Wensleydale cheese has been saved from obscurity by Wallace & Gromit. Wallace is obsessed with cheese in general but Wensleydale is his favourite.
  • In scale modelling, the popularity of both Girls und Panzer and World of Tanks has resulted in increased sales of model tanks.
  • More than once, The Co-Optional Podcast has caused sites to crash after referencing certain games or even general products, whether or not they were recent releases. This has even extended outside the show itself, as evidenced on an esports podcast called Unfiltered, where the late TotalBiscuit appeared as a guest in 2014 to talk about his recent cancer diagnosis. When prompted to offer a link in the stream to a charity for cancer research he'd spoken of before, TB quipped that the last time he'd done that, the charity's site had crashed. He linked it again anyway—and sure enough, less than a minute later …
    TotalBiscuit: Site's dead. Again.
  • According to the developers, TotalBiscuit's video on Renowned Explorers doubled their total sales and saved them from going out of business or into debt.
  • Tickle Me Elmo sales went through the roof after the toy was featured on an episode of The Rosie O'Donnell Show where she would throw out one of the dolls into the audience whenever a guest said "wall".
  • Reddit, a link-sharing site, has this effect from time to time. One example is when the site crashed another webpage selling a 'Freshly Signed Divorce Papers' scented candle (See here).
  • Cobra Kai: The creators wanted Johnny's drink of choice to be an American beer, that wasn't a light beer, and relatively obscure without being out of the mainstream. They landed on Coors Banquet. Since the show went on air sales of Coors Banquet, particularly to people under 35, have sky-rocketed at the time of seasonal releases.
  • Turducken was originally just a local Louisana specialty invented in the mid-1980s. Things changed late 1996 when a local sports commentator convinced famed NFL broadcaster John Madden to try the dish. A Turducken was delievered to Madden at the stadium, where he fell in love with the dish on first bite. He was extoling the dish in between his game commentary, which pretty much led to a raised national profile for the dish.

    Radio 
  • In the early days of Coast to Coast AM, whenever Art Bell mentioned his guest's website on the air, it frequently crashed under the weight of the audience.

    Video Games 
  • Baldi's Basics in Education and Learning was released for the itch.io Meta Game Jam, where it got a good reception and came in second best, but mostly had a subdued reception outside of the site. It was arguably the Vinesauce stream of the game several days later that jumpstarted its popularity.
  • When Duck Hunt was first released in Japan in 1984, it was still pretty early during the Famicom's lifespan, barely a blip in most people's radar as a result. The game's main novelty at the time was the fact that it was one of the first games to support the Famicom's light gun controller alongside Wild Gunman and Hogan's Alley. However, its inclusion as a pack-in game in most NES console bundles, initially in the Deluxe Set with the R.O.B. robotic buddy, later on in the more popular Action Set as a 2-in-1 cartridge alongside Super Mario Bros., led it to become one of the most widely distributed Nintendo game for the console, ensuring a presence in the collective consciousness of NES players.
  • Subnautica managed to get more attention after Jacksepticeye began to do a series on the game. At one point, Jack even states that the developers of the game got in contact with him, and thanked him for saving them from bankruptcy.
  • Minecraft sold around 1000 copies after being referenced on the Valve blog. Shortly afterward, Penny Arcade made a series of comics about it, which led to 7000 more sales and a server meltdown.
  • Terraria was an obscure indie game until the Minecraft devs mentioned it on their blog. Sales shot up to the point that it was higher on Steam's bestseller list than Portal 2 for several days.
  • Penny Arcade causes a similar effect whenever they mention anything. This is probably why Nintendo got them to do a five-part The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword comic. So a frequent a phenomena that it has been named. When the mention of a website on Penny Arcade leads to so many hits that the website's servers go down, it is said that the website in question has been "wanged". Jerry "Tycho" Holkins wrote that a recommendation from them can seem like a hostile act, "functionally indistinguishable from a Denial Of Service attack".
  • Two consecutive bumps for Spiral Knights. When the game was integrated with Steam, there was a sudden influx of players. Later that day, Team Fortress 2 updated and added a hat themed around one of the helmets of the game, which created another rush of players, some asking how to get the new hat.
  • Team Fortress 2 has this effect on games that offer in-game promotional items as pre-order bonuses, particularly if promotional weapons are being offered.
  • The World Ends with You barely broke 150,000 copies of Nintendo DS game sales. Then Neku was featured in Kingdom Hearts 3D [Dream Drop Distance]. Cue the game shooting up the Amazon bestseller list and more people playing this well-received but overlooked game, as well as the game eventually being ported to the Nintendo Switch and mobile devices.
  • Painkiller saw a massive spike in Steam downloads after Yahtzee praised the game in a Zero Punctuation review - so much so that the Steam advert for the game actually quoted Yahtzee on how great the game is.
  • The Super Smash Bros. series has done this with a ton of video game franchises. It's a series of Massive Multiplayer Crossover Dream Match Games, so it naturally exposes many new audiences to video games they had forgotten or never knew about to begin with.
    • EarthBound (1994) got a boost from Ness's appearance as an unlockable character in Super Smash Bros. 64. Few Western fans were familiar with the series, as EarthBound had flopped in the US and never made it to Europe at all. Ness's Smash appearance got fans interested. Brawl introduced Lucas from Mother 3. However, EarthBound was always kind of an Ensemble Dark Horse among Nintendo franchises — it was years before EarthBound was released on the Virtual Console in the West, and Mother 3 never made it outside Japan, so Western fans made bootlegs and fan translations.
    • Not many gamers knew about the F-Zero series before Captain Falcon was added in Super Smash Bros. 64, upon which the bounty hunter exploded in popularity due to his Memetic Badass personality. F-Zero GX is the series' most popular game, but because of the fact that his franchise (mostly) ended after 2004, but has still remained in Smash Bros., many fans associate Captain Falcon more with Smash over his home series.
    • Fire Emblem got a boost from Marth and Roy's appearances in Melee. Before this, Fire Emblem was a Japan-exclusive franchise, meaning that as far as the West was concerned, Marth Debuted in "Smash Bros.". But interest in the franchise made it one of Nintendo's major moneymakers on the 3DS (where Fire Emblem: Awakening was its Killer App) and Switch (where Fire Emblem: Three Houses became the franchise's best-selling game in record time).
    • Kid Icarus was vaulted by Pit's entry into Brawl. Before then, the franchise had just two games, on the NES and Game Boy, both of which were nearly forgotten and overshadowed by Nintendo's more popular franchises as soon as they were released. Pit's appearance in Brawl came with a redesign that generated new interest in the franchise, leading to the development of Kid Icarus: Uprising, which became a Killer App for the 3DS.
    • Mega Man was well-known and popular in the NES days, but Capcom hadn't given him or his franchise much attention. Then he showed up in Smash 4 — and was designed so lovingly and accurately that it brought a rush of nostalgia. The renewed interest led to the release of Mega Man 11 in 2017.
    • Castlevania, much like Mega Man, was considered an NES classic but had pretty much dried up by The New '10s. Then Ultimate included both Simon and Richter Belmont, leading to a spike in interest. While Konami still hasn't released a new Castlevania on a Nintendo system, they did release the Castlevania Classic Collection, comprising of the franchise's NES and SNES-era games.
    • Bayonetta was long considered an Acclaimed Flop, but the title character's appearance in Smash 4 was key in generating interest in the game and its sequel. Indeed, Bayonetta is a DLC fighter who won a months-long fan vote on who would get that spot.
    • Dragon Quest got a bump in the West from the addition of the Hero as a DLC character for Ultimate. While Dragon Quest was always a cultural phenomenon in Japan and considered the definitive RPG franchise, it was considered niche in the West as the "definitive JRPG" spot went to Final Fantasy. Hero's inclusion in Smash led to a large increase in Amazon pre-orders for Dragon Quest XI, and Dragon Quest Builders 2 shipped more than a million copies after its worldwide release.
    • Banjo-Kazooie, after the franchise went dormant since 2008, got some interest in Japan after the title characters were introduced to Ultimate. When Masahiro Sakurai announced the pair, he mentioned that their games can be played on the Xbox One, which led to a noticeable increase in searches and mentions of the system.
    • Fatal Fury and The King of Fighters got a bump from Terry Bogard's inclusion in Ultimate. Both franchises were considered fairly obscure and niche outside of Japan (and Mexico in the case of The King of Fighters); Fatal Fury had not had a proper game release since 1999. Terry got Smash players curious about essentially a sister Fighting Game.
    • Xenoblade Chronicles 1 was a fairly obscure Cult Classic when Shulk was added to Smash 4, only barely having been localized for Western audiences thanks to a JRPG localization fan campaign, not even getting a separate dub by Nintendo of America. Shulk's addition caused a large Newbie Boom, which coincided with the release of a well-timed port for the New 3DS and likely played a part in the game getting a full remaster on the Nintendo Switch. This repeated when Pyra and Mythra were added as DLC fighters for Ultimate, causing physical copies of Xenoblade Chronicles 2 to rapidly sell out.
  • ARMA 2, a realistic FPS/simulator, had a huge increase in sales when DayZ (a zombie mod for the game) was released.
  • Titanfall 2 became an Acclaimed Flop as it was released in a busy 2016 holiday season. However, the success of the free-to-play battle royale spin-off Apex Legends, which is set in the same universe, has led to a resurgence in Titanfall 2 playerbase.
  • Mort the Chicken was obscure at best on its release and years after. It gained a significant attention boost in 2023 when Mort was featured in a level of Pizza Tower, as an official crossover with full permission of the former game's creator.
  • Moon: Remix RPG Adventure was released in 1997 only in Japan, spending many years afterward languishing in such obscurity that even unofficial efforts to translate the game into English never reached completion. Two decades after its initial release, Toby Fox made a Twitter thread stating the influence Moon's concept had on his own game Undertale. A few years after the thread, Moon was re-released in Japan, topped the Nintendo Switch eShop charts in that region, was ported to multiple platforms, and finally received its long-awaited English translation.
  • Suika Game (also known as Watermelon Game) is a simple puzzle game for the Nintendo Switch that can only be described as "Puzzle Bobble with fruits and physics". It was released in 2021 only in Japan, but gained a massive boost in popularity and downloads in September 2023 after Vtubers from hololive and NIJISANJI began streaming the game. It helps that the game is dirt cheap, costing only 240 yen. The unpresidented interest in the game outside Japan led to the publisher to officially release internationally with English, Chinese, and Korean translations the following month.
  • The Science Fiction Horror game Iron Lung went through two bumps in its lifetime. The first was caused by Markiplier announcing his film adaptation of the game's events, based on how he played the game and his reactions throughout its story. The second was morbidly caused by a Life Imitates Art situation where the very poorly built OceanGate submersible Titan imploded while on a tour to the remains of the RMS Titanic, with many engaging in Black Comedy over how the Titan somehow has worst controls and infrastructure over the intentionally-shoddy built fictional Iron Lung submarine.
  • The Game Grumps did an episode playing Endless Ocean, followed by a whole series focused on its sequel Blue World, bringing a lot more fans both to those games and to Hayley Westenra, whose music prominently featured in the first game (Celtic Woman had Hayley as a member for a few years, but their tunes included in Blue World are misattributed to her by Arin and Danny). It's jokingly suggested that this exposure to such a niche Nintendo IP helped get the third game, Endless Ocean: Luminous, into development for release in 2024.

In fiction:

    Film 
  • Man of the Year: Robin Williams' character is a Jon Stewart-esque talk show host who satirically runs for President... and wins due to this trope (and a computer glitch).
  • In Weird: The Al Yankovic Story, "Weird Al" Yankovic is so popular that any song he parodies rockets up in sales, with Madonna dating him just so she can receive that bump. This is referred to in the movie as the "Yankovic Bump". (In real life, Al's parodies have given significant sales bumps to the original material from time to time, though not to the same degree as in the movie.)

    Live-Action TV 

Alternative Title(s): Popularity By Proxy

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