Whatever Happened to the ‘Charlie Bit My Finger’ Kids? Viral Video Turns 15
What happened to the kids from the viral "Charlie bit my finger" video? They're all grown up!
It's been 15 years since dad Howard Davies-Carr uploaded the viral clip of baby Charlie biting his brother Harry's finger to YouTube on May 22, 2007. Since then, the original video was viewed over 900 million times before being taken down from YouTube.
The family sold the clip as a non-fungible token (NFT), which was sold at auction to an anonymous bidder for $760,999 in 2021. While the video was on YouTube, the video made over $1 million in YouTube royalties and helped the family's channel grow to 1 billion views overall.
Despite the money and notoriety, fame hasn't gone to the family members' heads. Howard still works as an IT consultant and both parents used the money to put their children through private education.
Since the video went viral, the family has welcomed two other boys — Jasper and Rupert. Mother Shelley told The Sun that expanding their family wouldn't have been possible without the YouTube ad money.
Today, Charlie is 15 and Harry is 18. The younger brother appears to be a Twitch gamer/streamer these days.
A few years ago, they celebrated the 10-year anniversary of the viral sensation.
The hilarious clip of Charlie biting his brother's finger was originally intended for just family.
"In 2007, sharing video files — about 50 megabytes — was hard. It was too big for email, so YouTube stood out as a great vehicle to share videos," Howard explained to The Sun. When he went back to delete the video, he saw that it was racking up a lot of views and decided to keep it up.
"After people had seen it, I didn't see any point in it being on there any longer," he added. "But when I went back to delete it, it was then I realized the video had a lot of views ... almost doubling every day, so we decided to embrace it."