Say adios to ‘Charlie Bit My Finger’: Viral video to trade YouTube fame for NFT cash

We’re turning a page in Internet history: “Charlie Bit My Finger” is leaving YouTube.

Fourteen years after the now-viral video was uploaded, it’s getting the NFT treatment. Bidding starts on Saturday.

The video, which has racked up over 880 million views to date on YouTube, will be deleted off the video-sharing site and live on as a 1/1 non-fungible token, or NFT, to be sold off, according to the auction site. Only cryptocurrency holders can participate in the auction.

The lucky auction winner also will get the chance to meet Internet royalty — the clip’s stars, Harry and Charles Davies-Carr, now 17 and 15 — and an opportunity to create a parody of the viral video.

Not one of the hundreds of millions of people who’ve seen the video? Well, the official auction description tells you what it’s all about: “Harry, aged three, is relaxing watching television with Charlie, aged one, after a day spent playing in the garden. Inexplicably, Harry decides to put his finger in Charlie’s mouth, and the rest is history.”

More than a clip, it’s “an adorable rollercoaster of joy, pain, love, and laughter, plus all the facial expressions to boot.” Ah. Of course it is!

The NFT craze, an almost inscrutable trend with tons of money at stake, took off this year, with celebrities from Emily Ratajkowski to Linkin Park cashing in on selling unique electronic tokens tied to images, albums, videos and even concert tickets.

“When it was first put up on YouTube, it was 14 years ago, and YouTube was the new thing. But now ... NFT has become the new thing,” Charlie Davies-Carr said in an interview with CNBC. Since the original clip took off, the Davies-Carr YouTube channel has uploaded many more videos of the boys, including a spinoff video game channel.

“YouTube’s market is quite different to us,” their father, Howard, said in the interview. “It’s a one-off. We never sought subscribers.”

Asked how much the bite really hurt, Harry replied, “I don’t really remember.”