NBA Top Shots allows basketball fans to collect the on-court video highlights (“moments”) of their favorite professional basketball players. Basketball is a passion for millions of people, and NFTs give fans a deeper connection to the action. I’m personally most excited about authentic NFTs created directly by creators (like the ones mentioned above)) but Top Shots has proven there’s a market for IP-based NFTs too. The belief in these stories appears to be growing as well.

Cryptopunks is known as the OG NFT project. Matt Hall and John Watkinson launched it based on 8-bit vintage design back in June 2017 well before NFTs were cool. They minted 10,000 punks with various traits and gave them away for free. Cryptopunk 7804 recently sold for 4200 ETH and the cheapest you can buy a punk for today is ~21 ETH (~$38K). More people are believing the Cryptopunks story over time.

Robbie Barrat is an early pioneer in utilizing Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) to create digital artworks. His open-source code was famously copied and used by a group who sold it at a traditional art auction for $432K. But the authentic implementation of his code is AI Generated Nude Portrait #1 on SuperRare. Robbie is a true artist who has largely stayed away from the recent NFT hype, but has a compelling story to those deeply interested in art.

Beeple has been grinding for 13+ years creating digital art that people love. Last year he started tokenizing his culturally aware artwork on Ethereum and that artwork is now worth over $100M. His EVERYDAYS: THE FIRST 5000 DAYS piece recently sold for $69M at a Christie’s auction. More people are believing Beeple’s story.

3LAU is an independent electronic music artist who has built a 10 year+ career in music doing shows and putting out music on the internet. Here’s an interview we did in October 2020. Since then, he dropped an NFT-based album that sold for over $11M. His authentic approach to connecting with fans combined with his great music is making more and more people believe his story.

NFTs appeal to people interested in art, music, sports and culture

People own bitcoin because of the story (digital gold that anyone can use and no one controls) and the scarcity (21M will be created by 2140 and the protocol verifies and enforces that scarcity).A story and scarcity has created a cryptocurrency that today has a market cap of $1.1T, which is greater than the currency of all but 13 countries in the worldTens of millions of people globally now own bitcoin and believe it has massive value despite countless claims that it’s worthless from conventional wisdom in the media and on Wall Street. The success of bitcoin is a testament to the authenticity of the creation (it was the first protocol to achieve trust-minimized digital scarcity) and the conviction of the community. The community did not care what the institutional narrative was, it just believed the story. More and more people have come to believe the story over time, which validates the belief of the early supporters and increases the value.

We’re now seeing new stories attract new people to the cryptocurrency space who don’t care much about money and finance. It turns out there are more people in the world who primarily care about art, music, sports and culture. And stories about art, music, sports and culture tend to be more fun and relatable

Mimetic desire gets more intense the more connected we are.

An NFT is a concrete product (a digital good), not a promise about the future. This fact alone makes the NFT boom more sustainable than the ICO boom.

Google trends data shows interest in NFTs recently surpassed interest in cryptocurrency.

Web3 promises rewards — maybe even a kind of justice — for “users”, but Ethereum doesn’t know anything about users, only wallets. One user can control many wallets; one bot can con­trol many wallets; Ethereum can’t tell the difference, doesn’t par­tic­u­larly care. Therefore, Web3’s gov­er­nance tools are appro­pri­ate for decision-making processes that approx­i­mate those of an LLC, but not for anything truly democratic, which is to say, any­thing that respects the uniform, unearned — unearned!—value of per­son­hood.

Web3 is best under­stood as a game, or a game of games. I don’t intend that as a dig: it’s a really good game! Vast and open-ended, deeply social, with lots of scores to tally … AND you can win real money?? I mean, that’s terrific.

This message was emailed to the Media Lab committee. The assumed audience is subscribers who know roughly what Web3 is supposed to be, but aren’t sure what to think about it. (Here’s more about assumed audiences.)

Does a “Web3” that depends on Twitter for its mar­ket­ing and coor­di­na­tion chan­nel really deserve the name?

Ethereum is the locus of most of this work — hey, who named that client library web3.js, anyway?—so it’s not unrea­son­able to read “Web3” as “Ethereum-powered inter­net”.

Hypebeast Ltd.

The highest revenue NFT project to date, NBA Top Shot, has generated $200M in gross sales in just the past month while spending very little on marketing. It’s been able to grow so efficiently because users feel like owners — they have skin in the game. It’s true peer-to-peer marketing, fueled by community, excitement, and ownership. 

Modern video games like Fortnite contain sophisticated economies that mix fungible tokens like V-Bucks with NFTs/virtual goods like skins. Someday every internet community might have its own micro-economy, including NFTs and fungible tokens that users can use, own, and collect.

Social platforms will continue to be useful for building audiences

Centralized social platforms became the dominant way for creators and fans to connect. The platforms used this power to become the new intermediaries — inserting ads and algorithmic recommendations between creators and users while keeping most of the revenue for themselves.

Incumbent social media platforms sidetracked this vision by locking creators into a bundle of distribution and monetization.

In ad-based models, revenue is generated more or less uniformly regardless of the fan’s enthusiasm level. As with Substack, NFTs allow the creator to “cream skim” the most passionate users by offering them special items which cost more. But NFTs go farther than non-crypto products in that they are easily sliced and diced into a descending series of pricing tiers. NBA Top Shot cards range from over $100K to a few dollars. Fan of Bitcoin? You can buy as much or little as you want, down to 8 decimal points, depending on your level of enthusiasm. Crypto’s fine-grained granularity lets creators capture a much larger area under the demand curve.

(Note that lowering the intermediary fees can have a multiplier effect on creator disposable income. For example, if you make $100K in revenue and have $80K in costs, cutting out a 50% take rate increases your revenue to $200K, multiplying your disposable income 6x, from $20K to $120K.)

removing rent-seeking intermediaries

NFTs have received a lot of attention lately because of high sales volumes. In the past 30 days there has been over $300M in NFT sales:

A true fan is defined as a fan that will buy anything you produce.

Virtually every object suggests a time and place. The Monobloc is one of the few objects I can think of that is free of any specific context. Seeing a white plastic chair in a photograph offers you no clues about where or when you are. I have a hard time thinking of other objects that are equally independent of context.

Assumed Audience: Theologically-orthodox Christians, or folks interested in things that theologically-orthodox Christians think.

Assumed Audience: Software developers working with Ember Octane.

lit­tle plac­ards up top mak­ing it clear they are aimed at dif­fer­ent groups of read­ers. Those groups might overlap! They might also: not.

the way they push back against the “context collapse” of the internet, in which every pub­lic post is, by default, addressed to everyone.

Apple is not alone: from the White House to Wall Street, journalists protest that they are getting less meaningful access to those in power than ever.

Few have succeeded in making the news as well as Apple. This month, as it unveiled the iPhone 6 and the Apple Watch in Cupertino, California, thousands of journalists live-blogged every detail of the carefully scripted event.

The pressures on news outlets to become multimedia, interactive, 24-hour engagement machines mean editors have become increasingly receptive to what PRs are pitching. A hungry media swallows it up. And with institutions more wary than ever of unpredictable journalists, executives are now more inclined to share their thoughts in smoothly styled social media postings than by inviting in a reporter.

“The magic lies in their ability to take word-of-mouth marketing and turn the launches of their products into sort of micro-experiential events,”

“I would call it a brand that’s heavily integrated with art and culture that tends to drive demand through consumer desire and consumer passion as opposed to explicit marketing.”

brand’s products are “emblematic of rebellious youth culture,”

in-the-know

marketing-shy skateboard shop with a cult following fits

symbolize the ultimate in underground cool.

throngs of fans and “hypebeasts” (the term for the streetwear-obsessed)

streetwear aficionados

has been bolstered by high-profile collaborations with the likes of luxury fashion house

Over the years, they’ve worked with all kinds of different artists, all kinds of different brands, and it’s part of what makes the brand so cool

He’s also enamored with the wide variety of pop culture references touted in many Supreme products, which recently featured shirts paying homage to iconic art-house rockers The Velvet Underground, while past product lines included references to cultural icons ranging from Miles Davis to The Muppets to the artist Jean-Michel Basquiat.

You know, they have a younger audience base and they’re educating people on art, on music and on fashion,

Supreme also generates buzz with a never-ending lineup of branded curiosities — items no one would normally expect to see sold by a skateboard or streetwear brand, but when slapped with Supreme’s unmistakable red and white logo, they instantly become must-have products for the most ardent Supreme fans. The company has sold everything from Supreme-branded hammers, nunchucks, and kayaks to a Supreme brick (literally a red clay brick stamped with the Supreme logo).

Supreme’s extremely active resale market heats up, with sites like StockX and other resellers listing sold-out items for resale at astronomical markups, like a t-shirt featuring Supreme’s simple red box logo that sells for an average price of more than $900 over the past year on StockX. The shirt previously retailed for just over $30 through Supreme.

(1) the scarcity of its products, (2) the credibility of brands collaborations, (3) the growth of the resale market and the power of social media and (4) ever evolving fashion tastes. 

How to stop wasting time

The Wall Street Journal’s newsroom is not involved in sponsored content but its commercial team tells advertisers it can “deploy sophisticated storytelling techniques in order to help brands create content-driven connections with audiences”. For some reporters and editors, this is tantamount to media being complicit in its own displacement.

native advertising has won over some of the most established brands in news, with The New York Times and Time among those embracing the trend.

“native advertising” has become a favourite buzzword. There is little consensus about the definition but it typically means paid ads that look much like the articles and videos they sit alongside.

Coke’s digital-era take on “brand journalism” or “content marketing” got more than 13 million visitors last year.

Philanthropy