As of Dec. 23, the total number of NFTs sold, year-to-date, reached nearly 14.5 million, and a total of about $13.8 billion was spent to buy them, according to NonFungible.com, a database of blockchain gaming and crypto collectible markets. Considering how much was spent, it’s important to note that the number of unique wallets (digital stores for cryptocurrencies and NFTs) that bought and sold NFTs also increased substantially in 2021, reaching nearly 1.4 million as of late December, up from about 87,000 on Jan. 1.

Naturally, where money flows, digital media follows. Several publishers Digiday reported on this year contributed in some way to the NFT market in 2021. Below are some highlights of the more innovative NFT projects that took place last year from said media companies:

Squeezing new revenue from old IP

Time was one of the first publishers to dive head-first into blockchain experimentation, launching a collection of digital magazine covers in the form of NFTs in late March called “Time Is_Dead.” The collection consisted of three covers with black backgrounds and bold red text asking “Is God Dead?”, “Is Truth Dead?” and “Is Fiat Dead?”, the first two being published as print covers in 1966 and in 2017, respectively, while the third was made exclusively in this style for the NFT collection.

All three NFT covers and a three-pack set of the covers sold as a separate NFT were sold for prices ranging from $55,000 to $138,000.

According to SuperRare, an NFT marketplace where Time posted its digital covers for sale, the most expensive NFT sold by Time was a digital cover of an issue originally printed almost a century ago titled, “TIME ‘The Man of the Year’ – January 2nd, 1928,” the magazine’s first of the franchise. The NFT cover, which featured Charles Lindbergh, who was the first person to fly from New York City to Paris, sold a month ago for $463,000 and was accompanied by a physical copy of the magazine.

Time demonstrated fervent interest and trust in decentralized finance and cryptocurrency throughout last year, particularly when it announced it would accept crypto as payment from both advertisers and subscribers.

Rewarding engagement

One of the earlier stories around tokens and NFTs this year was from Decrypt, a crypto publisher, which created its own set of reward tokens that were distributed when audiences downloaded and engaged with content in its app. …read more

Source:: Digiday

Author: Aaron