The most expensive meme ever

Can memes actually make money? Are memes worth anything, or are they just trivial, inconsequential blocks of pixels? If you buy a meme, do you technically own it, or are you kind of a dope?

Hey, remember NFTs? That awesome craze from a couple of years back, when everybody (briefly) decided it was totally cool and normal to spend multiple thousands of dollars on a JPEG?

Not even technically the JPEG itself, mind – just the address of the JPEG. 

Anyway, during that short, golden moment a number of memes shot up in ‘value’ as copyright owners astutely realised they could parlay their niche celebrity into cold hard bucks. 

MOST VALUABLE MEMES

Because it’s inherently difficult to ascribe a specific dollar value to something as intangible a meme, the only useful yardstick is popularity. 

So the more famous the meme = the more valuable the asset.

Hence why an NFT of Bad Luck Brian changed hands for the equivalent of $36,000. You know him. He’s funny. He must have value, right? And moreover, he’ll continue to increase in value over time?

Nope.

More famous even than he, the Overly Attached Girlfriend pulled in more than ten times as much, her NFT topping out at $411,000.

Maybe because she’s a girl – who can even say how the minds of internet users operate, eh. 

You’d think Grumpy Cat would be way up there in the millions, but no – Grumpy Cat’s peak memetic value topped out at a comparatively modest  $100,860.

DISASTER GIRL MEME

The peak of this febrile crypto feeding frenzy centred around that mad sinister picture of four-year old Zoe Roth.

Now in her mid 20s, Zoe was snapped by her father, then he uploaded the photo to image hosting service Zooomr (us neither) on January 2nd 2007. Did you know (fun fact fans) that it was only a fire drill, not a genuine fire? So she’s not evil. Or possibly she is evil, but nevertheless she didn’t start the fire. 

You know what I mean. 

Zoe’s family wisely decided to cash in on NFT mania and trousered a remarkable $573,137 – by far the most valuable NFT sold up to that point. 

Still, that’s just chicken feed compared to what was to follow. 

Later that summer a picture of Shiba Inu dog Kabosu – you know, the famous ‘Doge’ – was NFT’d and sold for 1,696.9 of the cryptocurrency Ethereum – which works out around $4 million.

The dog’s owner, a nice Japanese lady named Atsuko Sato, revealed she was ‘very surprised’ that a photo she took for her personal blog had made her a rich woman, thanks to the rubes over at @pleasrdao who paid for the thing. 

‘I take a lot of pictures every day, so that day was nothing out of the ordinary,’ she said in a statement. 

‘Kabosu loves having her photo taken, so she was delighted to have the camera pointed towards her.’

Anyway, flash forward to today and 1,696.9 Etherium is worth a little under 1,800 bucks. 

Everybody’s favourite loose-cannon plutocrat Elon Musk got bored of boosting dodgy cryptocurrencies on his timeline and the value of Doge – which he pretty much single-handedly inspired to rise – plummeted. 

And while NFT bros are licking their wounds, claiming we still don’t understand and that the use-cases will become obvious with time, it’s worth hearing what a grown-up economist has to say. 

’The typical person that has bought an NFT is going to lose their money,’ serious academic Peter Schiff told WIRED magazine. 

‘If you bought an NFT because you think it’s going to be worth more in the future, you’re wrong. It probably won’t be worth anything.’

Anyway, to the moon! And don’t forget to change your PFP to a hexagon so we all know how smart you are. 

Ever wondered if you could GET RICH MAKING MEMES?

Are CLASSROOM MEMES actually good for teaching?

Also, while we’re here, IS STEALING MEMES ILLEGAL