When she’s home, she often walks past the lot where it all started and wonders if locals know that it’s a “meme place,” she said. She said she would donate the fortune she has made from her likeness - which is still in cryptocurrency form - to charities and to pay off her student loans, among other things. Roth plans to take a gap year before pursuing a graduate degree in international relations. Roth pictures of a mural with the meme.Įven so, she said, she hopes to one day do something meaningful enough to shift “Disaster Girl” to the second page of search results for her name.Īfter graduation, Ms. Once, a group from Poland asked permission to use the meme for educational material about a dying Indigenous language. “Disaster Girl” memes have spread far and wide. “It’s the only thing that memes can do to take control,” Ms. Roth consulted “Bad Luck Brian” himself - his real name is Kyle Craven - and Laney Griner, the mother of “Success Kid.” Roth said selling the meme was a way for her to take control over a situation that she has felt powerless over since she was in elementary school.īefore making the decision to sell, Ms. In the meme hall of fame, “Disaster Girl” ranks alongside “ Ermahgerd,” a pigtailed teenage girl posing with “Goosebumps” books “Bad Luck Brian,” immortalized in a grimacing yearbook photo with braces and “ Success Kid,” a toddler on a beach with a clenched fist and an expression of intense determination.
Roth just sold, are stamped with a unique bit of digital code that marks their authenticity, and stored on the blockchain, a distributed ledger system that underlies Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. All NFTs, including the “Disaster Girl” meme Ms. The market for ownership rights to digital art, ephemera and media known as NFTs, is exploding. The Roths retained the copyright and will receive 10 percent of future sales. The meme sold for 180 Ether, a form of cryptocurrency, at a Foundation auction on April 17 to a user identified as As with any currency, the value of Ether fluctuates, but as of Thursday, 180 Ether was valued at more than $495,000.
Roth has sold the original copy of her meme as a nonfungible token, or NFT, for nearly half a million dollars. Now, after more than a decade of having her image endlessly repurposed as a vital part of meme canon, Ms. Roth grinning impishly as a meteor wipes out the dinosaurs or the Titanic sinks in the distance. In the years since Dave Roth, Zoë’s father, entered it in a photo contest in 2007 and won, the image has been edited into various disasters from history, with Ms. Roth flashed a devilish smirk as the fire roared behind her. With her hair askew and a knowing look in her eyes, Ms. Roth remembers watching the flames engulf the house when her father, an amateur photographer, asked her to smile. Firefighters had intentionally set the blaze as a controlled fire, so it was a relaxed affair: Neighbors gathered and firefighters allowed children to take turns holding the hose. Roth was 4 years old, her family went to look at a house on fire in their neighborhood in Mebane, N.C. The name Zoë Roth might not ring any bells.