I've got to say, I think he's a perfect example of our society. If anyone does anything remotely interesting, we'll put a focus on them and give them fifteen minutes of fame. Additionally, everyone wants to get those fifteen minutes, and will do anything to get them. I see Chris-chan in the same vein I see Sixteen and Pregnant and Jersey Shore. They'll do anything to have the camera on them, to not be nobodies. It's the "hey, look at me" culture that leads to people getting injured and putting it on Youtube. It's the reason Jackass exists. We're laughing at them, not with them, but they don't care, because we're seeing them. We've done the same with Chris-chan. He's a moron, so we put the spotlight on him, and focus on him. Everyone wants to be a celebrity, these days, and with our technology, everyone can be. All you have to do is put a GIF of a cat in space to a Vocaloid song or get hit in the nuts or create a terrifyingly horrible webcomic to become famous.
You're sort of correct. But Chris doesn't really know what he wants, because he mostly lives in the moment. One of the reasons he was always so easy to trick is because he never really thinks about anything long term, and he barely even considers what we would call short term. If he saw something he liked and wanted, he'd go and get it. This is what ends up causing his impulsive shopping sprees, to the point of buying DLC for unowned games. It's also what led to him stealing money and credit cards from his parents to make more purchases or signing up for new cards at places like Best Buy that he promptly maxed out: he never considered any kind of consequences or long-term planning, because he decided that he wanted it now.
That's also what made him so gullible: you could lead him by the nose, especially if you were a pretty girl (or at least he thought you were), because he'd just blindly follow your offers and do whatever he could to try and grab the carrot hanging just out of reach.
I don't think he wants fame, though. Not as much as he wants a fight, so to speak. He has a severe persecution complex from being raised to believe that everyone is out to get him. At the same time, he's utterly valueless: outside of his antics, he has literally no value to the world. If he were to disappear completely, life would go on. Nobody but the internet folk who made him infamous in the first place give a damn about him except maybe his mother (and people are still on the fence as to how much she truly loves him as opposed to wanting to essentially treat him like a large, especially messy cat). If Chris dies tomorrow, nothing of note will have really happened. Hell, he stays silent for so long online out of fear that it could take us a while to find out that he actually died. None of us could say the same thing, as we all have family and friends who care about us. Not Chris.
With someone like Chris, he needs to find something to give him a purpose to his life. He's too lazy to actually work for anything, so that puts a job or any kind of cause that takes more effort than sitting around McDonalds for half an hour out of the picture. And in his warped mind, raised on children's cartoons and video games, he views his fight with the trolls as a sort of ultimate battle between good and evil, light and dark. Fighting the trolls, even though it's a fruitless battle and many have tried to tell him that, gives him some kind of purpose in life. It makes him feel like he's accomplishing something.
The attention he got for his antics was a side effect, but even then he continuously recorded himself and put out his personal information less out of a desire for attention and more because he's an idiot with no clue about social cues. He really is the kind of guy who (thanks to a mixture of autism and ridiculously poor parenting) will put a public video on Youtube directed toward a single person, and will even tell people at the beginning that a video is only meant to be seen by select people in the first place despite being publicly available. He handed out personal information like candy because he thought it was a good way to prove that he was who he said he was (back in the Liquid Chris era of impersonation).