Popular internet meme has sold for a splendid amount of money online: Zoë Roth, best known as “Disaster Girl” for the famous image macro taken by her dad in 2005 of her smirking at the camera while a house burns down in the background, has sold the original copy of the meme as an NFT for 180 Ether, worth almost $500,000.
Roth talked to The New York Times and said that she’ll use the funds to pay off her student loans and to give them to charity. And as is the case with many NFT sales, the Roths also hold the copyright to the image and will get 10 percent off any future sales of the NFT.
She is not the first meme star to cash in the boom in cryptocurrency-based artwork into a little fortune. Chris Torres — the creator of Nyan Cat — sold an NFT of the rainbow, Pop-Tart-bodied cat for close to $600,000 and has worked with other internet meme heirs, like Kyle Craven to help them make some money off their previous internet fame. Craven’s original meme image sold for $36,000, while Laina Morris sold her meme for $411,000 earlier in April.
Roth’s NFT was acquired by 3F Music, a Dubai-based music studio with very deep pockets that also bought many other big-ticket NFTs, which includes Overly Attached Girlfriend ($411,000) and The New York Times’ meta NFT-column ($560,000).
In a statement to the NYT, 3F Music revealed its purchase by saying that “Our management team is always in cooperation with some highly knowledgeable and experienced art advisers who believe that we must grow with technological movements that help us to not only promote our business but also to support artists and the art market.”