Charlie Bit My Finger Sold For $760,000 To New Owner Who Will Likely Delete It
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Fans of the wildly popular ‘Charlie bit my finger’ video should enjoy it while they can, as it could be deleted from YouTube after being auctioned off as a non-fungible token (NFT).
While nowadays it seems like a new video goes viral every day, in 2007 the attention was for a long time on a then-one-year-old named Charlie and his three-year-old brother, Harry.
Pretty much anyone who accessed YouTube at that time will no doubt be able to recite the video by heart, though more than a decade later it’s still hilarious to see Harry notify his dad, Howard Davies-Carr, that Charlie bit him, prompting him to put his finger in Charlie’s mouth yet again.
At the time Howard only deemed the video ‘mildly funny’, and he uploaded it to YouTube in an effort to amuse family members. When he went to delete the video a couple of months later, he was surprised to see it had racked up a couple of thousand views, turning into a million just a few months later.
Speaking to the Mail Online about the situation, Howard said, ‘That’s nothing compared to viral videos now — but it was a lot then.’
The adorable video of Charlie and Harry continued to amass more and more views and began being shared across the internet, but the family recently decided to make it an NFT, a unique fingerprint of the video in the form of a unit of digital data, and auction it off.
Harry told Insider the family put the video up for auction because they ‘wanted to commit to the whole evolving ethos of NFT’ and ‘give it a new life’, and this weekend Charlie Bit My Finger sold for £537,000 ($760,000) to a buyer who could decide to remove the video from YouTube for good.
The removal of the iconic video would no doubt be met with backlash from fans, and Howard has admitted that people have said they ‘can’t take it off as it’s a moment in time’, but he stressed that the fact the video ‘is on YouTube now doesn’t mean it will be there for ever’.
Howard and his family are ‘thrilled’ with the success of the auction, and while the dad admitted the money was welcome, he said it was ‘not a driving force’ in the decision to sell the video, explaining, ‘I see it as a bit of closure.’
When the video first began to be shared more widely, Howard noted that he had to make a decision about whether the family ‘do something more’ with the footage or ‘let everybody else exploit it and make money from it’.
With sponsorship deals rolling in, the family began to take advantage of their newfound fame by taking on opportunities that are thought to have earned them thousands.
Charlie, now 15, says he is ‘a bit numb’ to his performance in the footage having seen it so many times, but Howard believes the reason it resonates with people across the globe is because it shows something ‘everyone can understand’.
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Topics: Technology, NFT, Now, Viral, YouTube
