A 22-year-old Australian entrepreneur has sold a prank website for $85,000 after its viral success dealt him more than he could handle.
ShipYourEnemiesGlitter.com, where users pay about $7.99 to send an envelope filled with glitter to an "enemy," sold for the tidy sum on Wednesday, according to website marketplace Flippa. Founder Matthew Carpenter launched the site on Jan. 12, and it has since received more than 2.5 million visitors and 400,000 mentions on Facebook and Twitter, he wrote on Flippa.
The site got more than 2,000 orders amounting to about $16,000. Carpenter estimates each order would yield profit between $4.80 and $6.50.
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He decided to sell the site because he never intended for it to gain traction; it started as a joke.
"For the past few days it has been stressful dealing with all of the media attention and even more so because this was only intended to be a small side project," he wrote.
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A CNBC message to the email linked to the site did not receive a response from Carpenter or the new owner.