Information
Weird Revenue tracks internet projects that make money in strange ways and answers one question: did it make money, and how?
What is on the board
Real websites or accounts that take real money in an unusual way: a laptop lid sold as sticker space, a public list where the price is the rank, a toilet with sponsor tiers, a person paid to stay silent for a month. The way it makes money has to be the story. Failed and dead projects are listed exactly like the winners.
How projects are sorted
Every project gets one category. The category says what the buyer gets.
| Category | What the buyer gets | Examples |
|---|---|---|
| A rank on a list | A public list where your position is what you paid. Whoever pays more pushes you down. | outbid.lol and its clones, pixel walls where price decides the row |
| Space on a thing | A real object or a person carries your logo: a laptop lid, a car, a toilet, a forehead, a shirt. | The Million Dollar Toilet, Brand My Mac, forehead ads, I Wear Your Shirt |
| Space on a page | Space on a website or a screen, sold by pixel, slot or hour. | The Million Dollar Homepage and its pixel clones, one-pixel ads, screensaver ads |
| Exclusive rights | A right that only one buyer can hold at a time: a person’s name, the naming of something for a day, a whole life on eBay. | a legal name change, naming a potato for a day, Ian Usher’s life on eBay |
| An act by a person | People pay a person to do something, or to stop doing it. The money buys the act. | the potato salad Kickstarter, fund my silence, 100 days of X |
| A product per piece | A thing or a service delivered per purchase, bought for the story: toast with your logo, glitter in the mail. | logo burned into toast, Ship Your Enemies Glitter, Potato Parcel |
| Nothing, just support | Money for nothing: a donation, a tip, five dollars for literally nothing. | Save Karyn, Cards Against Humanity selling nothing for five dollars |
Four more details are recorded for each project, shown on its page under "The facts":
- How the price forms: Fixed price · Tiers or rising price · Pay what you want · Auction, one winner · Pay-to-rank, no end · Goal, all or nothing
- Where it lives: Own website · Physical object · A person’s body or life · Live stream or event · Marketplace or platform
- How often it can be sold: One-off · Repeats · Never ends
- What brings the next buyer: Buyers post about it · The outbid post about it · The creator’s own audience · Press and absurdity · A platform’s feed · The stream is the ad
Twenty years of well-known cases sorted this way are on the History page.
How revenue figures are checked
Every revenue number carries a proof level, shown next to it everywhere.
| Level | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Verified | We checked the number ourselves against payment data or a trusted third party. |
| Public counter | The project shows this number on its own website. We record it, we do not audit it. |
| Claimed | The creator states this number in public. We have not checked it. |
| Estimate | We calculated it from what is visible, for example prices times units sold. |
Each project page lists the evidence behind its figure: source, date, value and link. Changes over 24 hours and 7 days come from daily snapshots; they are greyed out on the board when the figure is only claimed or estimated. "Post views" are the public view counts of the posts we track, so they are a floor, not a total. Website visits are only known if the creator shares them and are labelled as such.
What the statuses mean
| Status | Rule |
|---|---|
| New | Launched less than 7 days ago, or we have fewer than 3 daily snapshots. |
| Growing | Revenue went up at least 5 percent in the last 7 days and the site is online. |
| Viral | Attention in the last 14 days was at least 10 times its normal level, and revenue kept rising. |
| Stalled | Revenue moved less than 2 percent over the last 14 days, or not at all in 60 days. The site is still online. |
| Landed | It ended the way it was meant to: sold out, or the run reached its end. A landed project is a success, not a failure, and it never appears under Cancelled. |
| Dead | The site has been offline for 14 days, or the creator announced the end without selling out. Quiet alone is never enough. |
How each mechanism is explained
Every project page answers the same seven questions, so any two projects can be compared: what is exchanged, how the price forms, supply and scarcity, growth loop, defensibility, what can kill it, why it works here. Next to them, a funnel shows post views, website visits and revenue for the last 30 days.
Why dead projects stay
9 of 70 tracked projects are dead (13 percent), median lifetime 6 days. That is the base rate you bet against when you copy one of these. Causes we record: Never found buyers, Interest faded, Sold out, Ran its course, Copied to death, Creator quit, Shut down by others, Unknown. See the Cancelled board.
Privacy and opt-out
About projects and creators we store public information only: the project website, the creator's public handle and follower count, public posts with figures about the project, and what the project website shows. Submissions are stored with the text you enter, for review. Creators who want a correction, their name removed or their projects unlisted: email hello@weirdrevenue.com. We answer within a week. Legal basis is legitimate interest (Art. 6 (1) f GDPR); you can object at any time.
Technical data: the web server writes access logs with your IP address to the system log, kept for a limited time and used only for security and error analysis. The submit form counts requests per IP address in memory for one hour, to limit spam. Visits are counted with Umami, a page view tool that runs on our own server: it records the page, the referrer, the browser and device type and the country and city derived from the IP address, and then discards the IP address. It sets no cookies and cannot recognise you across sites. If your browser sends the Do Not Track signal, nothing is counted. The visitor counter in the footer (online now, visitors today, visitors since launch) works without Umami: it hashes your IP address with a salt that changes every day, keeps that hash in memory for five minutes, and stores only daily totals; no address, page or device is written down. There are no third-party requests; fonts, scripts and the counter are served from this site. If you book a sponsor slot, we store what you type into the booking form before you pay: the company name, the line of text, the link, the colour, the logo file if you add one (kept only as the small image we make from it; without one we fetch your site's icon once at booking and keep it the same way) and your email address. Name, line, logo, link and colour are published in your slot for the duration of the run; the email address is never shown and is used to send you the start and end date and to reach you about the booking. The payment itself runs through Dodo Payments as merchant of record under its own privacy policy: card and billing details go to Dodo, not to us, and we receive a payment identifier, the amount and whether the payment succeeded, failed or was refunded. Legal basis is the contract with you (Art. 6 (1) b GDPR); for the checks that keep the board clean it is our legitimate interest (Art. 6 (1) f GDPR). An unpaid booking is marked as failed after a day and kept only as a short record; a paid booking is kept as long as tax and accounting law requires, in Germany up to ten years. Responsible for this site is the operator named in the Imprint. You have the right to access, correct and delete your data and to complain to a data protection authority, in Germany for example the authority of your federal state.
Contact
hello@weirdrevenue.com. Sponsorship: sponsor a slot.