On a sunny afternoon this summer, Natalie Shine was busy hanging neon pink fliers across the West Village. As she walked the familiar path between her apartment, yoga studio, and favorite coffee shop, Mrs. Shine kept an eye out for empty lampposts to promote her popular online game show, The Big Silly Trivia Game.
“We aim to hang them about the average woman’s height,” Mrs. Shine noted, highlighting that her audience is almost exclusively female.
However, prime advertising real estate was scarce. Every street corner in Mrs. Shine’s neighborhood was already plastered with computer paper featuring an array of messages. These weren’t just the usual pleas for missing pets or announcements for moving services. Instead, you’d find notices for a contest seeking look-alikes of comedian Matt Rife, or a speed-dating event exclusively for bisexual individuals.
Despite the visual clutter, Mrs. Shine, 27, believed a physical flier offered a better chance of capturing attention than yet another online post.
“People are so used to scrolling right past ads on their phones,” she explained. “You have to give them a reason to stop.”
In today’s relentless battle for attention, social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok have become saturated with self-promotion—everyone is plugging something, from brand collaborations to reading series and podcasts. This digital overload has left many young people feeling fatigued, even as they spend countless hours online. They’re increasingly seeking an escape back into the tangible world. (This saturation is also a source of frustration for creators whose projects struggle to gain traction amid the digital noise.)
This yearning for the real has led to a nostalgic embrace of analog experiences: vinyl records, print magazines, and film cameras. Fliers, it seems, are the latest medium to fulfill this desire for tactility and authenticity. Yet, ironically, many of the most captivating fliers lately draw directly from internet culture. The key difference, though, is the effort involved: unlike digital memes, fliers demand a trip to the printer and a physical journey around town to post them.
“Over the last year, we’ve seen probably triple the amount of projects,” said Sergio Gusella, a staff member at the Printing Garage in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn. “People are printing everything.”
Some fliers are simple invitations to parties. Others are more meta, like one in Manhattan that declared: “Need to Get the Word Out? I Post Your Flyers.” Then there are the truly esoteric and mysterious prompts. “Got a rat story?” one flier in Williamsburg asked, urging readers to email a movie studio.
“They’re like these little distress signals sent into the world, and you have no idea if anyone will respond,” commented Hua Hsu, a staff writer at The New Yorker and publisher of the zine ‘Suspended in Time’.
Of course, people have been taping up fliers for decades. Before the age of Instagram invites, Eventbrite, and Partiful, it was one of the most reliable—and often one of the only—ways to inform a large number of people about an upcoming event.
Adrian Bartos fondly remembered checking the Columbia University campus bulletin board in the 1990s to discover which bands were playing. He, personally, preferred handing out cardboard and glue fliers to promote his hip-hop D.J. sets.
“Back then, that was how you got the word out and how you got people to come to parties,” said Mr. Bartos, better known as D.J. Stretch Armstrong.
Today’s fliers are practical, but many also speak the language of the internet, crafted to gain traction on Instagram and TikTok.
Unless you’re fluent in internet jargon—and sometimes even if you are—Viv Chen’s fliers, which she posts around Berkeley, California, can be quite baffling. One notable example read: “Are You a Fermented Art Hoe?”
A QR code beneath the intriguing question led readers to Ms. Chen’s Substack, ‘The Molehill’. She coined the unusual descriptor while working on an article for her newsletter.
Ms. Chen recounted walking the aisles of Berkeley Bowl, an organic grocery store, and mentally categorizing the fashion trends she observed: the “clog moms” in the bread section, the “linen vegans” by the legumes. These slightly quirky, internet-inspired archetypes, she explained, were designed to be irresistible.
“There are people who look at the fliers and think: ‘This is weird. Let me scan it,’” she said.
“There’s probably a Gen Z audience shopping at Berkeley Bowl now,” she added, “This is the kind of language they speak.”
The transformation of online memes into physical print is full of obvious ironies. One flier in Williamsburg, for instance, urged passers-by to “touch grass”—a blunt command often directed at those overly absorbed in their digital devices. The flier’s QR code led to an event invitation from John Chungus, a middle-aged TikTok influencer who achieved minor internet fame by literally filming himself touching grass.
Grace Carrington, a designer at Parker Design Associates, an interior design firm in Atlanta, recently put up fliers across the city to tease a rebrand and a new website. She then shared photos of these physical fliers, in situ, on social media.
“I felt like taping up physical fliers but making a TikTok out of them was an effective way of advertising our refresh,” she said.
The allure of fliers, according to Jessa Lingel, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania who studies digital culture, lies in their “friction.” With the proliferation of AI-generated online content, there’s a growing uncertainty about the authenticity of what we see. As Ms. Lingel put it, “There’s this grasping for what authenticity even looks like right now. With fliers, someone had to tape it up—a human had to be involved somewhere.”
But if fliers are increasingly used for self-promotion, how authentic are they truly? Rachel Karten, a social media consultant, suggests this simply brings them full circle to their original purpose. “Fliers are just sort of the original ad,” she said. “That’s sort of going back to where we started.”
Claire Jia began posting fliers for her novel ‘Wanting’ across Los Angeles even before its summer release. Despite the city’s car-centric reputation, she strategically placed them in high-foot-traffic areas: the Silver Lake dog park, Hillhurst Avenue in Los Feliz, and busy Culver City intersections where pedestrians face seemingly endless waits for walk signals.
“People get bored waiting to cross,” she explained. “I figured I’d give them something to read.”
As she continues to promote her book, Ms. Jia has become even more strategic with her fliers. She brings stacks to book signings and readings, posting them nearby, reasoning that individuals already in a bookstore environment would be more inclined to purchase a novel.
Sometimes she adds handwritten notes: “I would write, ‘My book is available in that bookstore—the one right next to you!’” Ms. Jia shared.
Some have even used fliers to foster in-person connections.
In 2023, feeling isolated in New York, Lilly Hogan decided to distribute hundreds of fliers throughout the city posing a simple question: “Do you want to make more friends?”
Both the question and the medium resonated deeply. “Loneliness in cities has become this accepted background condition we’re all supposed to just manage privately,” she observed. “There’s this assumption that you should just naturally have friends as an adult, and when you don’t, you’re not supposed to talk about it.”
She intentionally hung the fliers in neighborhoods she frequented and in places where she imagined herself spending time. Her goal was to meet people outside her existing social circle and avoid relying on the internet for human connections.
“Social media is just a giant ad now,” she said. “I didn’t want this to just be people wanting to be my friend based on how I look or who I know.” She also hoped to turn the responses into some kind of project.
The analog approach proved successful: Ms. Hogan received dozens of messages from people sharing their own experiences of urban isolation. She ultimately interviewed 24 individuals, recording their conversations for a podcast she named ‘Lilly Friend Project’. She remains in touch with two of her interview subjects.
As her podcast gained momentum, Ms. Hogan couldn’t help but recognize the advertising potential of fliers herself. This year, she began hanging new ones with a straightforward message: “Please listen to my podcast!”
A correction was made on Oct. 16, 2025: An earlier version of this article misspelled the first name of Adrian Bartos. He is Adrian, not Adrien.