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How much is a brand name worth if it’s well known, but only because of its failures? For the botched music festival Fyre Festival, it’s nearly a quarter of a million dollars. The Fyre Festival brand sold for $245,300 on eBay Tuesday after 42 bidders made 175 bids. The sale includes rights to all trademarks, intellectual property, and social media assets associated with Fyre Fest, according to the listing. Although Fyre Fest founder Billy McFarland didn’t think the sale price was high enough (“This sucks, its so low,” he said on a livestream), it proved that even without actually ever putting on a successful music festival, there was some value in the rights to his trademarks and IP. McFarland congratulated the buyer in a Notes App statement posted to Instagram and said he would “begin the process to finalize the sale.” As splintering media has made attention harder to capture and scrambled traditional publicity and marketing plans, some have turned to purchasing discounted brand names in hopes of buying themselves a shortcut. Fyre Fest might be a punchline, but since people already know what it is, it’s also a starting point that a new owner can use as a launch pad. [Screenshot: eBay] “Someone paid $245k, so that establishes its value,” David Reibstein, a William Stewart Woodside professor of marketing at the University of Pennsylvania, tells Fast Company in an email. One thing Fyre Fest has going for it is “its level of awareness, despite its baggage, and that cannot be overlooked,” he says. Enron, the energy company that went bankrupt in 2001, was bought by the organizers of “Birds Aren’t Real” to sell a parody product, and in March, an AI company bought Napster for $207 million and used the brand to launch a platform with “AI companions.” McFarland didn’t say who the Fyre Fest buyer is, but he did say, “it’s funny.” Whatever the new owner intends to do with it, they’ll get extra attention at least for the name. Since Fyre Fest is more meme than a brand, “its value isnt in social media followers or brand equity,” says Emily Day, a strategist at Mother LA, but cultural shorthand. McFarland said in a letter he put the brand up for sale as part of an attempt to make things right and pay back investors. Rather than go forward with a planned Fyre Festival 2, he said selling the brand for parts was the best way to accomplish that. His brand’s nearly quarter-of-a-million-dollar purchase price, though, isn’t enough to pay off all the $26 million he scammed investors of. Fyre Fest ticket holders also won $7,220 each in a 2021 class-action settlement. “Fyre is one of the most powerful attention engines in the world,” he wrote, citing the documentaries and headlines the festival inspired. Fyre Fest was no good as a festival. As a meme, though, it was great.
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E-Commerce
In 1995, a familiar experience sat at the center of many peoples first experiences with the dial-up internet: the chance to create something for themselves. Along with the access to the World Wide Web, Telnet, and Usenet newsgroups, many users were given a few megabytes on their ISPs FTP server to share whateverrecipes, pictures, creative projects, any weird thing that came to mind. Other people created personal sites using third-party providers such as GeoCities, AngelFire, and Tripod. If you knew a little HTML, you could suddenly express yourself however you wanted. It was the personal home page era of the internet, a slice of life that feels quaint in an era of constant social engagement and monetization. Most of these sites are forgotten to history, too obscure for even the Internet Archive. But a lucky few made it to the present day. Tom Fulp owns one of those pages. You might have heard of it. Today, its called Newgrounds, but it started life as a site called New Ground Remix. When Fulp, a one-time zine-maker who got online in 1995 landed on an ISP called Fastnet, he found its hosted website feature to be the most appealing part. This story is part of 1995 Week, where well revisit some of the most interesting, unexpected, and confounding developments in tech 30 years ago. I thought it was awesome that you could make a page full of stuff and anyone could come see it, he says. It was a little rocky getting goingthis was the era when Netscape and Internet Explorer often rendered pages wildly differently. Nonetheless, he jumped in with both feet. Newgrounds as it appeared in 1996, when it was still known as New Ground Remix. Even knowing how they worked, there would still be unique challenges that kept cropping up while trying to get everything to look how you wanted it, he says. Newgrounds Flash of success At first, it wasnt a particularly serious thing. Fulp went off to college, where he didnt have access to his hosting space and therefore couldnt update it. But when he got back to it, he made the most of his site, which he used to create point-and-click web games using his budding HTML skills. And those games started to gain attention. One of them, Assassin, became a huge hit. Essentially, the idea of the game was that you could let off steam by killing a celebrity you didnt like. All the popular-to-dislike celebrities of the eraBarney, Britney Spears, Jonathan Taylor Thomas, the Backstreet Boysmade appearances. But some of them were completely off the beaten path. Hate Bil Keane, the creator of newspaper comics staple The Family Circus? So did Fulp, apparently. There was no plan to promote it, people somehow found it, he says. One of those people was a producer for the TV show Inside Edition, which was considering doing a story about the Assassin game and reached out to Fulp. What could have been problematicwhile the games many variants are clearly satirical, this was notably during an era of high awareness of school shootingsturned out to be a blessing in disguise. They wanted to feature the site on TV, at which point I knew I had to get a domain name, so people could remember the web address, he says. Newgrounds never ended up being featured on Inside Edition, but once it had a domain name, it started spreading even faster. The final missing piece of the puzzle for Newgrounds to become a cultural phenomenon? Macromedia Flash. When Fulp picked up the animation technology in 1998, I knew I was on to something. By 2000, Fulp had incorporated Newgrounds and hired a friend, Ross Snyder, to build a portal that allowed other people to easily upload Flash animationsan innovative feature at the time, predicting the later success of YouTube. Quickly, Flash animations like 2001s Xiao Xiao No. 3, which featured dozens of stick figures in a seemingly never-ending kung fu battle, came to dominate internet culture. Later animations built by groups of creators extended the concept even further. On Newgrounds, you could find people to collaborate with and create something bigger than you ever possibly could on your own, said Roger Barr, the founder of the humor site I-Mockery and a longtime Newgrounds member. And that was the real draw to me, because I’ve always been a collaborative person. I love working with people. I find it exciting. I find it elevates any project if you have people who are genuinely interested in it. A great example of this is The Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny, the most popular Newgrounds video of all time. The animation had music from Neil Cicierega, who developed the surrealistic Animutation style as a teenager and later became a popular comedy musician. Meanwhile, the animation itself was developed by Shawn Vulliez, who worked on it when he was just 14. But there are many, many animations and Flash games on the Newgrounds site. And while Flash may be long gone, Fulp said the platform put in the work to keep the animations working. When asked about Flashs influence on the platform, Fulp is careful not to lean too hard on where it eventually led. Flash was the tool, but the real point of Newgrounds is that its fun to make and share things on the internet, he says. Weve been working to hold on to that culture and maintain a focus on art made by artists. It was a hub of Flash animation, sure, but it was also a community. And the nice thing about communities is that youre never really alone. Popular, but edgy The early 2000s were a Renaissance period for ground-up content sites like Newgrounds. It was part of a group of humor sites founded in the 90s that had an outsize impact on internet culture. Some of them faded into history, but othersNewgrounds, Fark, Something Awful, and I-Mockeryremain online decades after their key period of relevance. Each started in similar waysas, essentially, larks by their founders that accidentally turned into real businesses. (I-Mockerys Barr, for example, registered his domain after constantly running into storage limits on GeoCities, while Fark, a domain registered because for-letter domains are rare, initially featured a provocative image of a squirrel.) And they all kind of succeeded together. Fark in 2000 A key reason for that is that they cross-promoted one another. It was common to see Fark link to Newgrounds, for example, and Barr was so associated with Newgrounds culture that Newgrounds acquires I-Mockery was an April Fools’ joke one year. Fark founder Drew Curtis said it became something of a symbiotic strategy, and even led to unusual situations where his site gained a large Swedish audience because he frequently linked to a Swedish site. Anytime we did that, we actually ended up growing each others audience, Curtis says. And these site owners knew one another personally. When I talked to him for this piece, Curtis regaled me with stories of his long-ago interactions with Richard Lowtax Kyanka, Something Awfuls late founder, for example. Barr and Fulp, meanwhile, went to the same school at different times, reconnecting later in life thanks to their respective online presences. I-Mockery in 2000 These sites werent corporate, which kind of cut both ways. Newgrounds most popular Flash videos were often cartoonishly violent, which did not make it easy to win over advertisersor keep them. Ill always remember this one day [when] I got notified we were being dropped by our ad company, right before I left for class, Fulp recalls. I had to sit in a lecture hall for an hour thinking about how I was going to pay the next $1,000 bill. (Fulp ultimately teamed with an ad network run by the independent film studio Troma Entertainment, though the ad network concept didnt last forever.) It wasnt a unique problemboth Curtis and Barr expressed similar challenges related to advertising and their content. Curtis noted Fark was on difficult-to-shake advertising block lists, but the situation improved over time. Oddly, what was edgy in 2005 doesnt feel so off-kilter in 2025. Whats funny now is like, we really havent changed, but everybody else here has, he says. I mean, they went flying right past us. The roots of community While lots of people found Newgrounds thanks to popular Flash animations like Salad Fingers or the Animator vs. Animation series, what kept them thereand at many similar siteswas the power of community. If you put the effort into the community, there was a real chance it could give back in a big way. There has always been a strong emphasis on collaboration, which has brought a lot of people together over the years and strengthened the bonds of the community, Fulp says. Those connections proved essential to both Fulp and Barr, both of whom now work professionally in the video game industry. Fulp, who started his platform by creating a series of point-and-click games using just HTML, accidentally created a farm system for a generation of indie game developers. We’re really for the fun of it, but Tom started like sponsoring people, Barr recalls. And he would put up money for monthly contests, where you would win money and just getting any kind of payment for something that you created. I think that kind of put the little a little seed in people’s minds that, Hey, maybe I could actually do this for a living later on. Newgrounds users later developed hit games such as Super Meat Boy and Among Us. Reflecting this, Fulp won a Pioneer Award at the Game Developers Choice Awards in 2021. Newgrounds success inspired real-life friendships and interactions that go deeper than your average social network. Fulp says Newgrounds fans became a major fixture at San Diego Comic-Con. This inspired an annual party at the NG office, with hundreds of artists making the trip each year, Fulp says. I stopped doing the parties, because they were gonna get out of control if they kept growing. But they have always stood out as special moments, where Id step back and realize how many amazing people were touched by the site. From a social media perspective, it was almost as if sites like Newgrounds and its friendly competitors had cracked the code for how to build online communities. The business model for Something Awfuls forums, for example, which required banned users to pay money to rejoin, still stands out as one of the more intriguing online-community business models. (Imagine having to do that on X!) In Farks case, Curtis says, his knowledge of how to build a long-running community has led to friendships with leaders at modern community platforms like Reddit. One of the massive mistakes we made early on was so you create the site, you create the community, and they’re like, We got some bad actors, didnt expect this to happen, Curtis says. So you kind of built it as an afterthought. But the real problem here, and we all screwed this up. This moderation is actually the product. And I didnt even realize that until 15 years down the road. (Side note: Curtis ran an ISP during the late 90s. Fark turned out to be his soft landing after the dial-up internet business fell apart.) Part of what might have made these communities stickier might have had something to do with the fact that nobody was making money, except maybe, after vast amounts of work, the people who owned the sites. In 2025, theres a genuine expectation that when you build something, its likely to come with a business model. That leads to things like peacocking on social media on the hunt for additional followers or traffic. That wasnt true with these earlier online communities. Curtis says the lack of internet points really stands out to people who use Fark, to the point where Gen-Z users read it as an alternative to social media. And, according to Barr, all the great creations on I-Mockery and Newgrounds came from people who had no real expectation of even getting paid. There wasnt influencer culture or anything, where studios are sending all kinds f freebies, in hopes that theyll promote it, or paying them ungodly amounts of money and stuff, Barr says. Disrupted, but still hanging on This is likely the least controversial take in tech history, but things change, and the disruption can leave even online stalwarts at a loss. Newgrounds is no exceptionand it got disrupted in multiple directions. It was weakened not only by the decline of Flash, which made it difficult for the site to find footing in the mobile world, but by the rise of YouTube as a sustainable lifestyle. Creators started to care more about making money from their work. Worse, an open-source tool Newgrounds had created made it easier for those users to leave. By the time things began to get messy, Newgrounds had started to support its creators financially. It added support for Flash-based ads in 2008, and even a revenue-sharing program. But the combination of disruptions, mixed with a cratering ad market, ultimately left the platform struggling to stay afloat. When asked if he ever felt any motivation to take a break, Fulp noted that when he felt that tug to stopsay, a big life change, like having a kidhe always felt the desire to keep the site he built online. He knew he would miss it if it wasnt there. I kept going, but it often felt like the world didnt care, he says. Over time, it started to feel like people cared again. Maybe not the world, but enough to keep going! Likewise, Roger Barr has kept I-Mockery online, but a personal loss ended up sidelining him, something he has been transparent about on his website. But he noted that one thing that differentiates sites like Newgrounds and I-Mockery from most of their contemporaries is that they never sold out. Sure, the acquisition offers were always there. Newgrounds was prominent enough at its peak that it could have sold for millions of dollars. But many sites that werent, says Barr, likely sold for tens of thousands of dollars. Yeah. Those sites are gone, all those articles, everything, The only thing we have to look up now is the Internet Archive. You can look back on those things. The sites themselves are gone, and that’s a sad thing that people would sell out for that. In other words, the reason we can celebrate the 30th anniversary of Newgrounds is because Cracked or College Humor never owned it. Instead, the guy who founded it on some random server space in 1995 does. But Fulp feels that pressure. He says he still receives periodic offers for the site, which hes been running at a loss, but funding through sales of his various games, such as the forthcoming Nightmare Cops. He admits that, while hes avoided the temptation so far, staying independent isnt easy at this juncture. Depending on how things go on my end, there might come a day where I need to either close it or sell it out of personal desperation, he says. Im trying to avoid that outcome, though. Fark, which long ago diversified its revenue streams, has held on better than most other legacy platforms of its nature. (Helping things: the site is famously based in Kentucky, where Curtis once ran for governor, and benefits from a lower cost of living.) But Curtis understands the pressure. He has some simple advice that applies to Newgrounds, but also to every other site you might love. Everybody needs to subscribe to them immediately, he says. Newgrounds will live another 50 years if literally a thousand people go and subscribe right now. Its not easy to keep a thing alive forever, even one as fundamental to the rise of the internet as Newgrounds. But godspeed for trying.
Category:
E-Commerce
Bill Gates recently sounded the alarm: with massive cuts to foreign aid, global child mortality is set to risefor the first time in decades. Since the Trump era, more than 80% of USAID contracts have been slashed, and the shortfall is being felt across the worlds most vulnerable communities. As a result, there is an urgent need to address how global issues are tackled, making the private philanthropic sector more important than ever. Its tempting to assume that philanthropy should simply step in and focus on filling the gap. But that in my view would be a mistake, and a missed opportunity. Philanthropy, at its best, isnt built to replace government-scale aid. Its real potential lies in its agency to take a longer term view and absorb risk needed to tackle the seemingly intractable issues we face. And in this moment of global disruption, thats needed more than ever. There is a real danger that the primary focus of philanthropic funding pivots towards being a backstop for foreign aid. My fear is that this new role detracts from the real power of philanthropy, which lies in its ability to tackle systemic issues by funding the radical innovation needed to deliver more equitable futures. A moment for philanthropy to embrace breakthroughs Philanthropy is at a crossroads. Traditional models of giving are no longer sufficient to address the complex global challenges we face and the uncertain times we live in. At the same time, too few philanthropists understand their potential in helping tackle them. Let me be clear: I am not criticizing philanthropys storied history. Philanthropists should be proud to be part of a tradition that has had many successes since the Industrial Revolution. Private donors have helped to fund important social advancesfrom the near-eradication of polio to womens liberation and equal marriage. Now, as we face rising uncertainty, is the moment for philanthropy to step up and embrace its true superpower: the ability to embrace risk to make breakthroughs. The ability to commit beyond just signing checks. A commitment that also requires time, perseverance, and expertise. A time for a new mindset In 1962, President John F. Kennedy called upon his fellow countrymen to put a man on the moon by the end of that decade. As I look at the challenges we face globally, the solutions look just as far away from our reach as the moon did to Kennedy. Today, I do not believe that voters and taxpayers would be as accepting of such a bold and audacious goal. At the same time many global corporations, some with more capital than nation states, recognize their potential to contribute to tackling the worlds greatest challenges. They are stepping up, making huge risky investments in potentially profitable, transformative ideas. But their obligation to deliver shareholder returns leaves little room to deliver the high-risk, transformative work where its desperately needed. We need to change our thinking about who delivers that change and how its done. Systems change philanthropy can play that role, but only if philanthropists with the passion, resilience, and risk appetite are encouraged to use their capital for transformative impact. It is this superpower that will enable philanthropy to privatize and absorb the cost of failures, but also socialize its success for the good of all. A partnership, not a substitution Philanthropy has the power to change the tide and create the conditions for larger institutions to act. They dont replace those institutions; they inspire, enable, and de-risk their intervention; it is philanthropists strategic collaboration with partners, experts, and convening institutions that can ensure targeted and effective action. My work has focused on tackling the issue of uncorrected poor vision, which affects 2.2 billion people globallya mission that has been at the heart of my philanthropy for the last two decades. For the first decade, my focus was on delivering universal vision correction to the nation of Rwanda. While we achieved our goal, after a long-term effort by a team that included a funder, many partners, and all kinds of experts, correcting poor vision remained a low-priority health issue on the global agenda. This resulted in transforming one countrys healthcare system. But change cant happen one country at a time. Without institutional support, I quickly realized that philanthropy would not make enough of a dent in solving the global poor vision challenge. It misses the point of what each does best. Its about the legitimacy, scale, and convening power that governments possess. When a government or international organization commits to a cause, it signals to the world that this issue matters at the highest levels of policy and diplomacy. Our global vision campaign, Clearly, was born out of this realization. And it was the inflection point achieved by lobbying the UN to shift its thinking, from vision correction being a low priority health silo issue to being recognized as a high-priority development issue, that led to a resolution committing every country to “eyecare for all” by 2030. By taking the risk to reframe vision correction, it created the evidence base and political momentum that governments needed to act. This is the model for philanthropys future: creating breakthroughs that make government intervention more effective. Philanthropy cannot be a stopgapbut it can kick-start a revolution to address the worlds biggest challenges.
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E-Commerce
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