Big Little Things

Silly as a strategy

The demand for fun always exceeds supply. It’s just a fact of nature, and lately there have been some cool projects that use this to their advantage. The formula is pretty simple: use silliness to build attention, use that attention to get more attention until you’ve got a mini-phenomenon, and then let others participate in that phenomenon in exchange for valuable assets.

People have used this for all different kinds of projects both frivolous and not. For example:

This guy traded one red paperclip for a whole house.

You probably remember the Million Dollar Homepage.

A stunningly quick success for a fan: Help Me Get Random With Lady Sovereign.

And then of course there’s Your Name on Toast.

And here’s a brand new one, with rather humble goals: If I Blog It, They Will Come.

Pretty amazing, huh? Know any other projects that use silliness this well?

02/02/07 by Axel Albin

This entry was posted on Friday, February 2nd, 2007 at 12:39 pm and is filed under Thinking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “Silly as a strategy”

  1. tiny gigantic » Blog Archive » Don’t work. Play. Says:
    February 5th, 2007 at 11:21 am

    […] talked about fun as strategy here before. That’s because play is an essential developmental part of the human experience. It makes […]

  2. tiny gigantic » Blog Archive » Don’t work. Play. Says:
    February 5th, 2007 at 11:21 am

    […] talked about fun as strategy here before. That’s because play is an essential developmental part of the human experience. It makes […]

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