Cards Against Humanity Made Over $70K Selling Absolutely Nothing On Black Friday

So last year on Black Friday, the fine folks behind Cards Against Humanity offered a “box of sh*t” for $6 to people who were willing. Those same folks were later shocked that they got an actual box of sh*t, leading to many reactions online. So to change things up from their loaded gift the previous year, 2015 became the year Cards Against Humanity sold nothing for Black Friday. And they sold it for $5 dollars a pop:

The funny part is people took part and paid the $5, some multiple times because it seems that Cards would ask for another fiver as soon as you had given them the first one.

And in the end, it worked. Cards Against Humanity walked away with a bundle of cash on Black Friday according to WNCN:

“On Black Friday, everybody is selling something. We’re the only company to offer the superior Black Friday experience of buying nothing,” the company explained on its website.

The trick seemed to work. Just before switching back to its normal site at midnight eastern time, the tally was just over $71,000 in sales from the Black Friday promotion.

But don’t think that was all for the trick. The staff announced that they would put out a statement explaining how the money will be spent and explain they did.

https://twitter.com/MaxTemkin/status/670505342426611712

The statement covered all the bases, but the folks at Cards Against Humanity decided to spend the money on themselves for once:

This year we offered our customers the ultimate Black Friday experience – the ability to buy nothing from us for $5. We took our entire store offline, and put up a simple payment form where people could give us $5.

11,248 people gave us $5, and 1,199 people gave us more than $5 by filling out the form more than once. One enthusiastic fan gave us $100. In the end, we made a windfall profit of $71,145.

Cards Against Humanity is known for our charitable fundraising – since 2012 we’ve raised nearly $4 million for organizations we love like Worldbuilders, the Sunlight Foundation, the EFF, DonorsChoose.org, the Wikimedia Foundation, and the Chicago Design Museum. We even started a $500,000 full-ride scholarship for women getting degrees in science.

There’s been a lot of speculation about how we would spend the money from Black Friday, and we’re happy to announce that this time, we kept it all. Here’s what we bought.

– Max, Ben, Josh, Eli, David, Daniel, and David

You’ll have to check out the list of items over here, but it includes a bottle of Yamasaki 18 year Single Malt Whiskey, a Lord Of The Rings – Legolas Lothlorien long bow, a couple of Wii Us and Playstation 4s, a donation to the American Refugee Committee for Syrian refugee response, and 760 lbs Of cat litter. The entire list is nice, with some variety in the purchases. And it was all for the employees according to creator Max Temkin:

Does it top the sh*t gift from last year? Hard to say. But making $71,000 from selling “nothing” is pretty good. It must be the same feeling the folks who sell star names have at tax time.

(Via Cards Against Humanity / WNCN)