‘Charlie Bit My Finger’ YouTube Video Sold For $761K

Article by Nanda Gopal Published on: 12:00 pm, 25 May 2021

The quintessence of viral content has always been ‘Charlie Bit My Finger’ video, where a toddler brother’s finger is bit by his baby brother. This home video can also be called an archetype of such kind because we saw many such baby videos emerged after Charlie’s triumph.

This classic piece of internet culture has been auctioned off for a six-figure sum, the latest viral sensation from the 2000s to be eagerly snapped up by digital collectors of “non-fungible tokens” or NFTs. The home video “Charlie Bit My Finger” sold for almost $761,000 on Sunday, the 14th anniversary of its debut.

The family auctioned the clip as an NFT, a non-fungible token. Bids came into their auction page throughout the weekend, but the price dramatically increased in its final hours on Sunday. The bidding battle was between two anonymous accounts. This 2007 YouTube video is all about a British toddler named Harry holds his baby brother Charlie. When Harry puts his pointer finger into his brother’s mouth, the baby Charlie bites him real hard. “ouch, Charlie, that really hurt” says Harry, which instantly became a meme liner.

This 55-second video has changed the family’s fate as their success has been compared to winning a lottery, a so-called “meme lottery”. Since the “Charlie Bit My Finger” video was posted, other videos of babies have gone “viral” on YouTube and the families are monetising them, often making over US$100,000. The family signed into a partnership with a video management meme company called Viral Spiral. Viral Spiral, a viral meme video management company specialising in viral videos, has helped place the viral video in meme advertisements for companies and helped to create a viral meme brand. 

The family became so famous that they put out another video of the boys to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the iconic clip. The Charlie Bit My Finger video has so far garnered more than 883 million views on Youtube. This video will be removed from YouTube as it has been sold.

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