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Publishers’ forays into the world of cryptomedia may have peaked in March, but recent activity shows that the trend is far from dormant.
On Wednesday, Playboy unveiled its latest round of non-fungible tokens, a drop of 11,953 3D rabbit characters known as Rabbitars. On Thursday, The Economist followed suit, announcing that it had minted its first non-fungible token, the cover of its Sep 21 issue exploring the world of decentralized finance. The publisher will auction off the cover on Monday and donate the proceeds to The Economist Educational Foundation, an independent charity.
“By creating this NFT, The Economist is engaging with one of the earliest ways developers have created for the distribution of content on a decentralized web,” Alice Fulwood, Wall Street correspondent for The Economist, told Adweek via email. “The Economist currently has no plans to create any more NFTs in the future. However, [we are] open to potentially exploring NFT tech further if the sale is successful.”
A week prior, the NFT-funded media startup Dirt announced that it had minted its latest collaborative token, an animated design named Filthy, in partnership with British publisher The Fence. Rather than subscriptions, Dirt has financed its editorial efforts by selling NFTs to readers; in its first “season,” the publisher netted $30,000 from the effort.
The latest flurry of NFT experimentation comes months after the technology first entered mainstream conversations, in March, when a handful of pioneering publishers embraced the trend. The New York Times and Quartz each minted and sold an article as an NFT, Time sold a series of covers, and Bleacher Report and the AP sold a variety of digital artworks.
These experiments with the blockchain-based technology coincided with a spiking interest in the technology, spurred in part by economic and social conditions caused by the pandemic. Since then, general interest in the world of cryptomedia has cooled, tempered by price fluctuations, scams and the looming specter of regulation.
However, the recent drops from Playboy, The Economist and Dirt, in tandem with a funding announcement from Mirror, the first blockchain-based web publisher, are evidence that NFTs might have found staying power in the publishing world.
“We were drawn to the technology initially because it seemed like an interesting way to reimagine our 68 years of IP and to leverage our immense archive,” said Jamal Dauda, the vp of blockchain innovation at Playboy. “It started as a new way to tell stories, but the more we built on it, the more it seemed to fit a lot of our larger business objectives.”
In an industry determined to diversify its revenue stream, NFTs offer publishers a way to monetize their digital content in a novel fashion. Whether articles, covers, collaborations or as a form of membership, the tokens allow media companies to translate reader affinity into revenue in a new manner.
In some cases, publishers have diverged in what they do with the revenue they generate from these sales. The Economist, for instance, joins The Times in donating the proceeds from its NFT sales to charity. And in the case of Dirt and Mirror, the sales more closely resemble shares in the company, similar to stocks, rather than standalone purchases.
Despite their varied applications, publishers have settled upon the tokens as a viable tool for generating returns. So long as the demand for NFTs persists, publishers will likely continue to explore how they might translate that interest into revenue.
