In 2008 the internet reached 1 billion users. What if we could get each person online to donate 1 dollar to a single person? That was the main idea behind bumllionaire.com. | |||||||
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The Bumllionaire
 | Meet Guy Ladd Ritchie, a 46 years old homeless from Texas living in NYC, who had the chance to be the first billionaire homeless and make it to the very exclusive Forbes richests' people list.
Several videos were produced every month. Among the videos there were songs, Mr. Ritchie's personal ideas and propositions, talks about timely subjects, like the US presidential elections, the Iraq war, religion, messages to the blogger community and personalized responses from Guy Ritchie himself to supporters. Bumllionaire took advantage of some of the main web 2.0 platforms at the time. It had an online store for merchandise, a Youtube channel, and even a Group, in a relatively unknown social media site at the time called Facebook. The project happened before the internet was familiar with the term crowdsourcing, although the phenomenon was already happening by the time. The project lasted from January 1st of 2008 'till December 31st 2008, when it finally shut down, giving Mr. Ritchie his earned money. |
Results
The project received many donations from complete strangers who were willing to join a cause, there were even a couple of 100$ donations. Also several news and blogs publications were interested in the story, but one of the biggest challenges was to keep track of Mr. Ritchie at all times. Unfortunately we couldn't keep the project running longer and that was the initial agreement. Among many conclusions we could see how people, like in life, are often more inclined to ignore when money is involved. Even being a completely reasonable amount.
We are incredibly thankful for all those who helped in any way making this social experiment possible.
| $ 896,15 | 232 | $ 3,74 | |||||||
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| 415.342 | 26.452 | 67 | |||||||
External Links
J-Walk Blog, USA - January 29 2008
Gazeta do Paraná, Brazil - January 2008
Adverblog, Italy - March 3 2008
Digital Watch, Australia - March 7 2008
29man.net, Japan - March 28 2008
El País.com, Spain - April 17 2008
MDZ, Argentina - April 19 2008
Rubbish Corp, England - April 21 2008
