Suvarna Garge (Editor)

BuyMyFace

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Type of site
  
Fundraising website

Revenue
  
£3.5 thousand+

Commercial
  
Yes

Available in
  
English

Website
  
www.buymyface.com

Created by
  
Ross Harper Edward Moyse

BuyMyFace is a website created by Cambridge University graduates, Ross Harper and Edward Moyse, as a way of paying off their combined student debt of £50,000. The website contains an online calendar where each day of the year can be purchased for the purposes of advertising. On each purchased day, Harper and Moyse paint a logo (or alternative image) onto their faces and upload portrait pictures to the homepage of BuyMyFace.com, adding a link to the advertiser's website and including a short piece of text about them.

BuyMyFace is an example of viral online marketing. The 366-day project began on 1 October 2011 (the summer after Harper and Moyse graduated), with the first day of advertising costing just £1. As their story became more well-known, and the number of unique daily website hits rose to typical levels of 7,000, a place on the boy's website became worth hundreds of pounds, and their faces began to attract big names such as Paddy Power, Ernst & Young, Russell Howard’s Good News, and Pipers Crisps. In its first ten days, the website had turned over £3,500 in revenue.

In the 8 months since its creation, BuyMyFace has featured in over 400 news articles worldwide, and earned a spot on the front page of the Sunday Times newspaper. Harper and Moyse have since been invited to speak at technology conferences, including The Startup Career Launchpad in association with Google. The pair are now working on their next entrepreneurial project - developing an application for smart phones due for release in September 2012.

References

BuyMyFace Wikipedia