Brainrot Memes Are Making Real Money
Tung Tung Sahur is an AI-generated wooden plank with a baseball bat. An Indonesian TikTok user named Noxa created
Tung Tung Sahur is an AI-generated wooden plank with a baseball bat. An Indonesian TikTok user named Noxa created him in February 2025. Within months, videos featuring Tung Tung and other brainrot memes characters like Ballerina Cappuccina, Tralalero Tralala, and Bombardiro Crocodilo generated billions of views across TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram. A single AI Brainrot generator helped spawn over 10 million creator accounts producing content that collectively accumulated billions of views.
Creators posting brainrot memes were earning six figures from YouTube ad revenue alone. A single tutorial video titled “Learn to Draw 5 Brainrot Animals” generated 320 million views, potentially earning between $640,000 and $8 million depending on monetization rates. Italian newsstands were selling Tung Tung trading cards manufactured by Panini. Roblox games featured him as a $500 million in-game character that players could convert to real money through the platform’s Robux currency system. Meme coins bearing his likeness hit $636,000 in market cap. An Indonesian film production company wants to make a movie about him. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán posted a TikTok video with a 3D Tung Tung dancing in a government meeting.
Nobody planned this. There was no business strategy, no market research, no investor pitch decks. A community of mostly Generation Alpha users, kids born between 2010 and 2025, created an economy from AI-generated nonsense. Now adults are rushing to commercialise it.
Panini Enters the Chat
In 2025, Panini released the Skifidol Italian Brainrot sticker album and trading card collection featuring Tung Tung, Ballerina Cappuccina, Tralalero Tralala, and dozens of other AI-generated characters. Physical products appeared in Italian newsstands within months. L’Espresso compared the surge in Generation Alpha consumers buying these cards to Garbage Pail Kids during their Italian debut in the 1980s.
GameStop now sells the packs in the United States. Beckett added them to its non-sports card pricing database. The collection features 150 cards total with special holographic cards in every pack.
Panini’s marketing team explained to Pixartprinting: “The answer lies in the phenomenon’s incredible virality. We watched the speed with which these characters had become part of fans’ everyday lives, so we swiftly adapted them all for our most popular and accessible offering: a sticker album.”
Traditional licensing deals involve months of negotiations and gradual rollouts. Panini saw the virality, moved immediately, and shipped physical products within six months. The timeline from meme to merchandise compressed dramatically.
The Roblox Economy
Steal a Brainrot became the platform where brainrot memes generated actual revenue. According to Forbes, the game drew nearly 24 million players in a single day. Tung Tung Sahur appeared alongside characters like Gangster Footera and Los Tungtungtungcitos (described as Tung Tung’s children) as collectible units with different valuations. Tung Tung himself cost $500 million in-game currency and generated $1.5 million per second.
The game reportedly generates millions in revenue, according to Momentum Lab, the agency representing Noxa. Roblox games of this scale typically earn six to seven figures monthly through game passes, in-game purchases, and Robux transactions. Players can convert Robux back to real currency, making the in-game economy directly tied to actual money.
When Tung Tung was removed in September 2025 due to copyright disputes, TikTok videos showed young players genuinely upset. A YouTuber with 14 million subscribers held a live “funeral” that drew hundreds of viewers. One content creator noted: “My cousin who’s in middle school said there were kids crying about this.”
These children formed actual emotional attachments to an AI-generated wooden plank because that character represented status and value within their digital economy.
The Generation Alpha Economy
What makes this phenomenon particularly significant is who’s driving it. Generation Alpha, roughly defined as anyone born between 2010 and 2025, has grown up immersed in digital platforms, AI tools, and meme culture from birth. Polish radio channel Polskie Radio noted the meme is popular among this generation “because it’s stupid, funny, and veeeery addictive.”
For Generation Alpha, there’s no distinction between digital and physical value. A $500 million Roblox version of Tung Tung and a €2 trading card of Ballerina Cappuccina from a newsstand hold equivalent weight as status symbols. Parents report their children playing brainrot-inspired games in real life, designating acorns and leaves as “brainrots” to steal from each other at parks. Birthday parties now feature brainrot themes with kids requesting Cappuccino Assassino decorations and Tralalero Tralala cakes, edging out Pokémon and princesses.
The trend has transcended the internet entirely. Italian brainrot characters appeared in a Latin American musical production that toured to Broadway in August 2025. Theatres packed with children accompanied by parents screaming for cosplays of Ballerina Cappuccina, Tung Tung Sahur, and Cappuccino Assassino. Merchandise featuring the entire cast of characters proliferated across Etsy, with sellers creating plush toys, stickers, and apparel for dozens of different brainrot memes.
Dr. Michael Glazier, chief medical officer for Bluebird Kids Health, told Parents magazine: “Parents sometimes worry when they see their kids acting out online games, but in most cases, it’s just today’s version of make-believe.”
But this isn’t just make-believe. Real money is changing hands. And Generation Alpha is building the infrastructure that determines where that money flows.
The Copyright Fight
In September 2025, Tung Tung Sahur disappeared from Steal a Brainrot during a copyright dispute between Noxa and the game’s developer SpyderSammy.
Momentum Lab, representing Noxa, posted to TikTok stating Steal a Brainrot was “making millions in revenue using Noxa’s work, in which we invest time and resources.” They clarified they never asked for removal but were “open for discussion” about licensing. The agency mentioned “partners (small and big studios) who have acquired our license in all fairness,” revealing multiple entities have secured licensing deals.
Indonesian production house Dee Company publicly expressed interest in making a film in May 2025, demonstrating the commercialisation scope.
The dispute exposes fundamental questions about AI-generated content and intellectual property. In the United States, copyright protection typically requires significant human authorship. Recent court cases have rejected attempts to copyright purely AI-generated works.
If Noxa used AI image generation tools to create Tung Tung, does significant enough human authorship exist to claim copyright? The question lacks clear answers, but money continues changing hands regardless.
Meme Coins and Merchandise
Italianrot launched in March 2025 on Solana blockchain. By November 2025, the coin maintained a market cap around $636,000. ROT, another brainrot meme coin, launched with similar premises.
What’s notable is speed. Previous meme cycles took weeks or months before cryptocurrency speculators showed up. Italian brainrot had meme coins within weeks. The infrastructure for launching these coins has become so frictionless that anyone can create one in minutes.
Beyond Panini’s official products, entrepreneurs filled every merchandise category. Independent trading card manufacturers produced unofficial collections. Italian Brainrot Card, a company separate from Panini, sells its own trading card game with bundles including exclusive cards.
One mobile game, Merge Fellas, drove 2.1 million downloads in just three months (March to June 2025) after adding brainrot-themed updates that replaced fruit with meme creatures. The United States alone contributed 2.57 million downloads. By May 2025, the game cracked the Top 10 Casual Games in the US App Store.
The Broader Scale
A YouTube tutorial titled “Learn to Draw 5 Brainrot Animals” was watched 320 million times. “Brainrot Rap” accumulated 116 million YouTube views. The word “brain rot” was Oxford’s Word of the Year for 2024, months before this monetisation wave began.
Tralalero Tralala, widely considered the first Italian brainrot character, is a three-legged shark wearing Nike sneakers. TikTok user eZburger401 reportedly posted it in January 2025. One version gained 7 million views. Ballerina Cappuccina, created by Romanian Susanu Sava-Tudor, amassed 45 million views and 3.8 million likes. These characters generate revenue through licensing, merchandise, and game integrations.
Brands jumped in. Ryanair posted Italian brainrot content that hit 150,000 views. Samsung Belgium’s remix trended in early April. According to Francesco De Nittis, Manager at Human Centric Group, brands leverage this “meme-based chaos” to inject themselves into the “fast-moving, low-effort humor loops Gen Z thrives on.”
Research by GWI shows 76% of Generation Z uses TikTok to watch funny videos, and 57% prefer short videos for product research. Italian brainrot fits perfectly: fast, memeable, demanding zero cognitive load.
What Changed
The commercialisation of Italian brainrot reveals several shifts. The timeline from meme to merchandise compressed to under six months. AI tools accelerated both content creation and product development.
The monetisation became decentralised and simultaneous rather than controlled and sequential. Multiple independent sources generated revenue in parallel: Panini cards, Roblox games, independent merchandise sellers, cryptocurrency speculators, and licensing deals.
The community building this economy consists largely of children who don’t distinguish between digital and physical value. The virtual and physical economies blend seamlessly for Generation Alpha in ways earlier generations find disorienting.
Legal frameworks haven’t caught up to AI-generated content creation. Courts haven’t established clear precedents. Meanwhile, commercial activity proceeds. Companies license characters of unclear legal status. Developers integrate them into games generating millions.
The quality barrier for monetisation collapsed entirely. Tung Tung Sahur is intentionally low quality. The aesthetic is deliberately crude. None of that prevented commercialisation. The low quality became part of the appeal.
The Infrastructure That Persists
Italian brainrot won’t last forever. Meme cycles die faster each year. The trading cards in Italian newsstands might become worthless nostalgia within months.
But the infrastructure persists. Panini demonstrated they can ship physical products in under six months. Roblox developers proved they can build economies around meme characters that generate real revenue through convertible currency. Momentum Lab showed creators of AI-generated content can establish agencies and negotiate licensing deals. The meme coin infrastructure enables instant speculation.
Each element creates templates for the next cycle. When the next phenomenon emerges, the monetisation playbook exists. Launch meme coins immediately. Approach trading card manufacturers. Build Roblox games. Claim copyright and establish an agency.
The uncomfortable reality is that children build these economies largely without adult oversight. Generation Alpha users create the memes, play the games, buy the cards, and form the communities. Adults monetise what children create and consume.
The legal ambiguity around AI-generated content will eventually resolve through court cases establishing precedents. Until then, commercial activity continues in a grey area where multiple parties claim rights to the same characters and revenue flows to whoever moves fastest.
Tung Tung Sahur is a wooden plank with a face holding a baseball bat. He’s also a $500 million Roblox character whose value converts to real money, a Panini trading card sold at newsstands, an Indonesian cultural reference to Ramadan traditions, and intellectual property currently disputed in licensing negotiations.
He doesn’t exist. But the money does. And Generation Alpha built the economy that turned him from an AI-generated joke into a multi-million dollar phenomenon in less than a year.
