Turd of the Week
The Ultimate ToTW success
The Newgrounds award "Turd of the Week" (also called TotW) was awarded to the person who submitted the lowest-scoring Flash of the week without being auto-deleted on July 11th 2001. Tom Fulp created the award to give users something to laugh at, but as time went on some people and crews have been submitting deliberately bad flash and aiming for this award. As a result, the ToTW was quietly retired, although they are still present on submissions that had already won them.
A Negative Award
Obviously, most people intending to make good Flash submissions would consider ToTW to be a bad thing. It represents getting through judgement but ending up the week more disliked/downvoted than any other Flash submission.
A Positive Award
However, Turd of the Week, like all weekly awards, was highlighted for all the next week on the Portal page, which gives exposure to the author and to a supporting crew. consequently, a number of crews intend to scrape a submission through judgment, then all downvoted it afterwards intending for it to get ToTW.
One prime example of people and crews aiming for this award is "BFK" of the Kitty Krew, who has a grand total of fourteen Turd of the Week awards.
The most famous example of where a Turd of the Week movie has gained notability is the movie B, which jumped from being a very low scoring movie to a permanently high scoring / high review score movie through its exposure as a Turd of the Week and its cult status with the Clock Crew.
Significance for Newgrounds
As with most things on Newgrounds, the team's aim was to increase traffic and ToTW has the effect of doing that. As a movie to laugh at it appears that many people have always checked out and viewed ToTW movies. The added dimension of the attention and even rivalry amongst crews aiming for this award presumably also added to traffic.