In 2017, "side-eye" was included in the English dictionary as a word derived from emojis, and you must have seen a variety of squinting glances on social networks, and when this expression appears on your phone screen, the glances often reveal contempt, contempt or suspicion.
On September 25, one of the most famous squinty-eyed emojis on the Internet, "Side-eye Chloe," was auctioned off as a non-homogeneous token, and a music production company in Dubai auctioned the emoji for $58,000.
The original source of "Side-eye Chloe" is a video uploaded to Youtube about a mother who is owned by her daughter. One day in 2013, when the mother told her two daughters the news that "today I am not going to school but going to Disneyland", the eldest daughter cried out in excitement, and the younger daughter Chloe glanced calmly.
This glimpse was captured by netizens watching the video, and the truncated expression spread virally on the Internet, gradually being named "Side-eye Chloe" emoji. When this meme encountered the NFT boom in 2021, the value that had been spreading on the Internet for 8 years was realized.
This is not the first live-action emoji to be monetized by NFTs. In April, the EMOT named "Disaster Girl" was auctioned for 180 ETH at a price of more than $495,000.
For crypto art collectors, live memes are a unique collection category, behind which there is a support for the influencer effect, although its value is controversial, but the emergence of NFTs does provide another more direct way to confirm and monetize Internet celebrities and their works.
<h1 toutiao-origin="h2" > "Glimpsed Chloe" emojis sold at 20 ETH</h1>
A popular meme in 2013 sold for 20 ETH in the form of an NFT for $58,000.
Eight years ago, 2-year-old Chloe Clem and her sister Lily were sitting in her mother's car, and when her mother told her children not to go to school today but to go to Disneyland, Lily cried out in excitement, and Chloe,who was sitting next to her, had a look of indifference on her face. The mother filmed the sisters' reactions, and in the video, Chloe calmly looks at her sister who is out of control and squints at the camera.
In 2013, the "Glance at Chloe" expression became popular
This glance later became a household name expression "Chloe of The Glimpse", which was widely disseminated online through the Youtube video website, and has been viewed more than 20 million times so far, and Chloe's squinting glance has attracted netizens to imitate, and this expression has also appeared on T-shirts and bumper stickers.
Today, clem's family has reaped financial rewards from their little daughter's memes. On September 25, the official tweet of NFT creative economy platform Foundation showed that the NFT emoji of "Glimpse of Chloe" sold for 20 ETH at an auction price of $59,000, which was acquired by 3F Music, a music production company in Dubai.
Chloe's mother, Katie Clem, did not expect that a video of her daughter would bring an unexpected fortune. Today, Chloe is 10 years old, Katie uses the NFT casting tool provided by the platform to record her young daughter's expression on the Ethereum blockchain, and the family sold the emoji on the 16th birthday of her sister Lily, "This is a very interesting thing that our family did." In an interview with The Washington Post, Katie said the money would serve as a college fund for her two daughters.
<h1 toutiao-origin="h2" > multiple live memes are monetized by NFT</h1>
"Glancing Chloe" is not the highest-priced live-action emoji NFT.
On April 4 and 17 this year, also on the Foundation platform, the two pictorial emoticons of "Disaster Girl" and "Overly Attached Girlfriend" were auctioned for 200 ETH and 180 ETH respectively, and according to the different exchange rates of ETH, the two emoticons were worth $411,000 and $500,000 respectively.
Both of these expressions have also been acquired by 3F Music, and it is worth noting that the company has acquired many types of NFTs, including encrypted artwork, NFT columns of the New York Times, etc., but the company has not made a public statement on the purpose of acquiring NFTs, and the crypto circle defines them as the collector role of NFTs.
In front of the fire camera, the evil charm smiles and makes the "Disaster Girl" emoji
Like "Glancing Chloe", "Disaster Girl" and "Overly Attached Girlfriend" are all emoji pictures widely circulated on the Internet, the former became popular in 2005, a blurred background for the fire scene in the picture, the little girl Zoë Roth smiled evilly at the camera, this expression was interpreted by netizens as fear, and the smile of the little girl was often PS into the disaster scene. In fact, it was just an unintentional capture of the photographer's father watching his daughter watch a controlled fire.
The protagonist of "Over-attached Girlfriend" is Lena Morris, a fan of singer Justin Bieber, who in 2012 imitated and made a video of her idol's latest single at the time, "Boyfriend", and the smile with wide eyes and staring at the camera was intercepted by netizens, portraying an aggressive and sticky girlfriend image. Nine years later, Lena minted her emoticon, which had been popular on the web for years, into NFT tokens and put it up for auction on the Foundation platform, which brought her a financial return of $500,000.
Imitating the idol's expression to become popular for 9 years, he turned into an NFT selling high price
One can probably come up with a rule – not all emojis will become valuable NFTs, and only those real emoticons that have been virally spread on the Internet have the potential for value.
You may not understand its value, but bringing in the influencer economy may be able to get the economic model into it. Emoticons are like the works of Internet celebrities, it relies on the acceptance of fans or audiences to condense value, and the dissemination of memes is like the praise of Internet celebrity videos, and there is a possibility of monetization when accumulated to a certain extent.
Of course, compared with photographic pictures, paintings or video works that embody the creative process, the hard cost of emoticon output is really not high, which is also the controversial point where emoji NFTs are auctioned at a high price.
But there are also NFT enthusiasts to the Hive Finance said that the popularity of an expression represents the empathy of the audience, empathy will produce dissemination, and the expression that can make everyone empathize and spread widely often occurs in a real moment, and the capture is often unintentional, and the public resonance brought by this unintentional retention is the preciousness of the meme NFT, "And for the maker of the expression, this is also a kind of creation, but also the original, viral replication and dissemination has brought network effects, Some people even get commercial value from their expressions, but the people who create them don't get anything out of it."
Fashion model Ellie SenHaver, creator of the horror emoji "Creepy Chan," became popular for her frequent makeup as creepy horror girls and filming them, which she also made into the NFT series, "Horror emojis aside money, minting Creepy Chan NFTs allows me to identify and assert my image." They've been circulating on the internet for years, and I've never been told how they're being used. I feel like I'm going to take back my power today... That means a lot to me."
For creators, NFTs provide a way to confirm the rights of works, and some NFT auction platforms charge a certain fee and share the proceeds of subsequent transactions of the works to the authors. The business model of the traditional Internet celebrity economy is still the advertising realization brought by traffic, NFT points directly to the original work itself, under the current market frenzy, there is no shortage of buyers for works with traffic advantages, which is the current market dividend, and it is also the performance of the market that is still immature.