Have 99 cents you're looking to throw into the figurative garbage? Well then, have I got a website for you!
On WhoPaid99Cents.com you can pay 99 cents to see who else has paid 99 cents. That's it. That's literally the point of the site. If you're confused, consider yourself in good company, for I too am very confused by this website's existence.
But, in the name of good, sound, investigative journalism, we paid the 99 cents to see what would happen, and as promised we were shown who also paid 99 cents: 19 people at the time of writing.
Most of the names included in the website's tally of people who have paid 99 cents—which will be shown to you once you pay your 99 cent fee—are probably (definitely) fake, unless "Simba The Lion" and "Bung o" are far more common names than I realized.
People also shared links to their blogs and SoundCloud accounts—though, upon a quick search the user was revealed to not exist—in lieu of a name. Gotta respect the hustle, I guess?
After you've paid your 99 cents you're also given the option to "do it again," meaning you can pay 99 cents again to see who else has paid 99 cents again. I highly recommend you not do this because it is a gross misuse of your capital.
So, what's the draw of paying 99 cents? Curiosity? Boredom? An attempt at self promotion? I can't definitively tell you, but I can see the appeal of creating such a website.
Should this website ever go viral, it could prove to be quite profitable for its creator. If 100 people pay 99 cents, that's $99, if 1,000 people pay 99 cents that's $999. Seems like a worthwhile enough money-making venture to me. If people are willing to spend money on literally nothing, why not reap the rewards?
The website, while an amusing gag, also feels like a symptom of a late capitalist society gone awry and a critique of America's excess. We're literally spending money just for the sake of spending money now. Did Thinko, LLC, the computer entertainment company that created the website take this into consideration when creating WhoPaid99Cents.com? Or, was it just a goof?
According to Thinko, it was very much just a goof. A project born out of a love for "dumb slices of internet."
"We've built a buncha (sic) serious products with heavy duty tech in the past, but the thing that tickles us most is using computers to do funny things," Pasquale D'Silva, a Thinko employee wrote via email. "I think a lot of people would agree that most of the internet sucks right now… or it's too serious. We're firm believers that the antidote is making better, funny internet. We pretty much build anything that makes us laugh."
D'Silva also said that Thinko has plans to "build more" silly bits of internet.
Regardless, please don't throw your money away on this site. If you've got some extra cash handy why not give it to charities that could really benefit from it? Like, RAICES, All Hands and Hearts, Charity:Water, or the Southern Environmental Law Center, just to name a few.
[h/t: Taylor Lorenz]
