Editor’s note: This article was first published in April 2014. It describes the HollyStock platform as it was then, including that week’s biggest risers (Lindsay Lohan, Justin Bieber) and Miley Cyrus’s “market value” of $722,000. The site may no longer exist.
These days you can bet on just about anything, from who will score the first goal in a football match to when someone will die. In fact, you can also bet on many of the things celebrities do or will do, such as when they’ll get married or have a child. But the HollyStock platform goes further. On it, you can buy and sell celebrities as if they were shares on the stock market.
You can invest in a single celebrity or build a portfolio of them, whose value rises and falls depending on how often they are mentioned on celebrity gossip websites. And just as on the stock market, the business works exactly the same way. There are penny-stock celebrities, celebrities on an uptrend, others whose popularity is in decline… The secret is to invest in a “penny stock” person who is about to become a celebrity and get everyone talking.
Among this week’s biggest risers are Lindsay Lohan and Justin Bieber, while the great blue-chip celebrity is Miley Cyrus, with a “market value” of $722,000.
Although I don’t know exactly how the whole celebrity trading platform works, you can see that any user can play with play money, though there’s also the option of playing with real money.
This could be a good business idea to bring to Spain, one of the countries where celebrity gossip leads the TV ratings. If a platform like this existed in Spain, do you know who the country’s most profitable celebrity would be?… 3… 2… 1… Exactly! It would be Belén Esteban (a fixture of Spanish gossip TV): a stock that many gossip analysts believe could be overvalued and may already have formed a double top, while other celebrity-press analysts think it could still break through that resistance and continue its bull run.
Perhaps it would be a good way to introduce gossip lovers to the world of the stock market.
Further reading
Featured image: Dietmar Rabich, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
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