Farting for Dollars

Stupid sells, even in a downturn. Check out this datapoint:

"iFart is our top application -- it's been pulling in $25,000 a day, for weeks."

That from Brian Barletta, director of marketing at AppVee, which hosts applications and vidoes specifically for the iPhone. He was speaking at a MobileMonday event in Boston about compelling business models. I wrote this down, and told a friend, who asked why I didn't blog about it. My answer was I thought it was stupid. But so were pet rocks.

iFart does what you would guess: it turns your iPhone into an adolescent boy. It's selling like hotcakes despite a one-star review on AppVee that says in part "This app is a complete waste of your time and money." By the way, it only costs 99 cents.

Welcome to the Internet, where you can find all the suckers born every minute. At $25,000 a day, for weeks, there are a lot of stupid ideas that suddenly seem worth trying.

Michael Fitzgerald

Michael Fitzgerald writes about innovation and other big ideas in business for publications like the New York Times, The Economist, Fast Company, Inc. and CIO. He’s worked as a writer or editor at Red Herring, ZDNet, TechTV and Computerworld, and has received numerous awards as a writer and editor. Most recently, his piece on the hacker collective the l0pht won the 2008 award for best trade piece from the American Society of Journalists and Authors. He was also a 2007 Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Fellow in Science and Religion.

More from CBS News