Tag Archives: monetization

Zillow Gone Wild is popular but how can one make money from it?

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Social media users like to see unusual residences on the account Zillow Gone Wild:

Photo by cottonbro studio on Pexels.com

Since he started the account in December 2020, it has exploded into a social media phenomenon, amassing more than 4 million followers across the major social media platforms and spinning off an HGTV show that debuts next month with Mezrahi as executive producer. Throughout it all, Mezrahi’s recipe has remained mostly unchanged: Find the zaniest homes on the market – castle-themed mansions with full drawbridges, for example – then blast them out to the internet with a bit of pithy commentary, and watch the clicks, likes and shares pile up. The simplicity of the premise is part of the brilliance; it’s the result of the decade-plus that Mezrahi spent charting the internet’s fascinations as social media director for BuzzFeed.

Does all this interest in houses translate into money?

None of this, however, was enough to save Mezrahi at BuzzFeed. The now-struggling company laid him off last spring. He had survived previous cuts, “but eventually you don’t last, especially as a strategist kind of person,” Mezrahi says. Already, he’d been mulling the prospect of leaving the full-time gig to focus entirely on his personal projects. BuzzFeed simply made the choice for him…

Still, there is one thing that Mezrahi shares in common with the rest of them: He’s trying to figure out how to make more money off the internet. Aside from the HGTV executive producer credit, most of Zillow Gone Wild’s revenue comes from ads. He did one for “The Bachelor,” posting what looked like a typical listing but for the show’s famed house. PopTarts and Royal Caribbean have also paid him to promote fake listings for a house made of PopTarts, and for the new Icon of the Seas cruise ship.

But the account still brings in “very little” money, he says. He imagines a future where his newsletter has a paid classified section or where he dedicates more time to growing a YouTube audience because that platform can be the most lucrative.

Americans like houses. It helped give rise to suburbia and an decades-long emphasis on homeownership. That they are now popular on social media should not be a surprise.

It will be interesting to see how this goes in the next few years. How big can the social media audience get for this account? Would users be willing to pay for such content or special content? How much content could there be? Will a TV show lead to more opportunities or spin-offs or streaming shows? Can Zillow Gone Wild be its own brand soon with different content and products?

Calculating the costs associated with a murder

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Whenever I see a researcher or lawyer put a dollar figure on a certain act, I’m always curious how they calculate this figure. Here is another example: a sociologist at Iowa State argues the total monetary cost of a single murder is just over $17 million.

Matt DeLisi, an ISU associate professor of sociology and director of the criminal justice program, led a team of five Iowa State graduate students on the study of 654 convicted and incarcerated murderers. Expanding upon earlier monetization estimates, they calculated the costs of five crimes — murder, rape, armed robbery, aggravated assault and burglary — in terms of the victim costs, criminal justice system costs, lost productivity estimates for both the victim and the criminal, and estimates on the public’s resulting willingness to pay to prevent future violence.

The sociologist argues this calculation was undertaken with crime prevention in mind:

“This area of research has really been run with prevention researchers,” he said. “That’s because what they find is that even if a prevention program is very expensive — and most of them are actually shockingly inexpensive — they’re still more cost effective than allowing these careers to unfold.”

Of course, focusing on prevention can be difficult and it may not eliminate all the crimes. But faced with the high costs of dealing with crimes after they are committed, some may take a longer look at preventative measures.