Woman in Disaster Girl meme sells original photo as NFT for nearly $500,000
Remember the ‘Disaster Girl’ Meme? The Girl in the Photo Just Sold It as a Nearly $500,000 NFT https://t.co/BYkfRxvB86
- People (@people) April 30, 2021
Zoë Roth was only 4 when her father took a photo of her standing in front of a controlled fire near their home in Mebane, North Carolina in 2005. The rest is history: once the photo was uploaded to the Internet in 2007, a meme was born and referred to as “Disaster Girl.”
“People who are in memes didn’t really have a choice in it. The internet is big,” Roth told The New York Times. “Whether you’re having a good experience or a bad experience, you kind of just have to make the most of it.”
Roth, now 21, and her father Dave have never made a dime off the image and its popularity. That was, until recently when she put the image up for auction as an NFT (non-fungible token) and it sold earlier this month for 180 Ether (a form of cryptocurrency), which as of today equates to about $430,000.
Who bought it? An account called @3FMusic, who remains anonymous.
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Click to viewNow that the image is minted and the token is coded, she and her father will receive 10% of the profits any time it is used.
“Being able to sell it just shows us that we do have some sort of control, some sort of agency in the whole process,” she said. “Nobody who is a meme tried to do that, it just ended up that way - Is it luck? Is it fate? I have no idea. But I will take it.”
Roth says she plans to donate most of the money to charity and pay off some student loans, while her dad said he hopes to fix the air conditioning in his Honda Civic.
Sources: 1 | 2 | 3