‘More dynamic, loyalty driven communities:’ What comes next for publishers on the blockchain

To the naked eye, it looks like media companies’ dalliances with NFTs have come to an end.

In the early summer months of 2021, publishers like Bleacher Report, The New York Times, Time and Quartz, among many others, minted their first-ever non-fungible tokens. What followed was a flurry of a few fanatics who paid anywhere from $1,800 to $650,000 for ownership rights to the media companies’ columns, articles, digital magazine covers and gifs.

Nearly four years after media’s first doomed dalliance with the blockchain, which was supposed to remedy some of ad tech’s transparency problems and fight fraud, the NFT mania was hard to take seriously.

But times are different, proponents say. These recent forays were more rooted in experimentation than creating a regular business line.

“I don’t think that anybody experimented with [NFTs] under the guise that it was a full fledged business model. I think people were just dipping their toes,” said David Cohn, the head of research and development at The Alpha Group, an in-house tech and media incubator for Advance Local. “People are only buying those [NFTs of articles and headlines] out of either vanity or the idea that they’ll flip it for more money later and neither of those are a big audience.”

Behind the scenes, however, media companies are putting more brain power into what NFTs, and more broadly the blockchain, can do.

Time has already integrated cryptocurrencies into its balance sheet, allowing subscribers to pay for content with more than 30 different crypto coins and advertisers to pay for their campaigns with Bitcoin. But beyond that, Time president Keith Grossman has been bullish about turning NFTs into more purposeful digital assets, rather than collectibles that get traded for a bit of profit.

“Today, most people are fixated on ‘collectibles.’ That is only one component of a much larger shift taking place,” Grossman wrote in an email to Digiday. “NFTs, blockchain technology and ultimately the metaverse will enable brands and the media industry to evolve analogue relationships with consumers and subscribers to more dynamic, loyalty driven communities.”

This month, Time launched an NFT collaboration with Cool Cats to create magazine-branded NFTs of digital cat cartoons. Grossman would not disclose the terms of the deal with Cool Cats, but he said the appeal of working with Cool Cats is its IP creation. Beyond the NFT drop model, the legacy publication is also creating an NFT marketplace and using its cover shop as a model for what it will sell there. And down the line, Time will license out the technology it creates for its NFT business to other publishers.

Bleacher Report didn’t stop after its first NFT drop either.

After its top selling NFT earned the company more than $70,000 within one day of being on the auction block, Bleacher Report continued creating NFT drops for sports fans to not …read more

Source:: Digiday