Suppose there’s a person-maybe an accountant, or a waitress, or a machinist-and through some happenstance they become universally known and liked. Maybe they ask a particularly insightful question of a candidate, or are filmed rescuing a cat from a tree and it goes viral, or the evening news shows them escaping a burning building with a baby.
This person is ordinary, no skeletons in the closet, no interesting talents or hobbies, no wealth to draw on, no important background or charisma, but suddenly they are known and liked by the entire population of their country.
How can this be monetized, and how much is it worth? Now, some would say it’s foolish to try, and the best thing is to be humble and act like nothing happened, but that seems unlikely. When good fortune falls into a person’s lap, most want to take advantage of it.
There is a standard accounting set up for goodwill and a way to monetized it, though it doesn’t apply in the example you’ve given.
When two companies merge, the numbers on their balance sheets may not match up. Accountants used “goodwill” as a fudge factor to match up assets and liabilities.
Two ideas for monetization:
- Set up a GoFundMe and milk the goodwill until it’s dry
- If they have an existing business, use their publicity to drive new customers to it, like how in Better Call Saul the main character stages a fake rescue of a worker dangling from a billboard that advertises himself, in order to attract new clients to his law practice
What immediately springs to mind is Antoine Dodson, who was made internet famous by the Autotune the News guys. He tried his damndest to capitalize on it - more music, merch, conventions, talk shows - but never managed to make anything stick. As best I can tell, the only thing he ever made real money on was from sales of the original song, which he didn’t create in the first place.
So based on this one data point, brief fame ain’t worth much unless you have more to offer. And since your hypothetical person has no talents or charisma, I’m afraid their window of opportunity is going to slam shut very quickly.
That’s got to be one of the most poorly written definition of the measure of accounting goodwill I’ve seen.
But, as I don’t want to hijack the original intent of the thread, I’ll let it slide.
I believe that OP is talking about monetizing the “Good Samaritan”. Antoine Dodson was just interviewed on a local TV station, not really a good samaritan.
I know that good Samaritan stories have been used to increase donations to charitable causes, this is probably the best example of monetizing their stories in a positive way.
If one were to attempt to generate monetary gain for themselves as a good samaritan, it’d probably be called out pretty quickly.