SYDNEY: We are all in the wrong business, it seems. An Australian man has just made himself an $85,000 payout selling a site that sends out packets glitter after only a few weeks of operations.
22 year-old Mathew Carpenter has sold off ShipYourEnemiesGlitter.com to an anonymous buyer who won an auction for the domain on Flippa.com.
As its name would suggest, Ship Your Enemies Glitter only does one thing- ship glitter to people as a joking act of revenge. The buyers pay a small fee to have an envelope full of glitter and a note shipped anywhere in the world to create a messy, sparkly problem for the target.
“So pay us money, provide an address anywhere in the world & we’ll send them so much glitter in an envelope that they’ll be finding that shit everywhere for weeks,” the site reads
Originally started as a joke by Carpenter, word of mouth caused the site to go viral and rack up more than $20,000 in sales before the overwhelming demand for glitterbombs caused Carpenter to suspend the service. According to the sale page, the site had more than 2.5 million hits in the span of four days.
“You guys have a sick fascination with shipping people glitter,” he noted
Shortly after, he put the site up for auction where it received 343 bids, including the winning offer of $85K. That’s enough to buy 8,508 envelopes of glitter through the service.
The new owner of ShipYourEnemiesGlitter will, upon relaunching, have to compete with a myriad of copycat glitter-shipping sites that popped up when news of Carprenter’s success began to circulate. Some of the sites have even made reference to the original.
While the sale price is a nice payout for Carpenter, it’s chump change compared to the prices being thrown around for sites on the generic top-level domains. One registrar is charging companies $150,000 a pop to get sites on the .trust domain.
