Q: Can NFTs help monetize media brands? | Ask Doctor Bitcoin [Free, #15]

Monetizing media and creator efforts is one of the digital frontier's great unsolved mysteries. Could NFTs provide a pathway to profitability for some media brands?

Jun 23, 2021

Obviously the news dominating the week continues to be China’s crackdown on mining, a topic we’ve covered in past issues. The price action continues to be range-bound generally between $30k and $40k, putting us in “Schrodinger’s market,” decidedly neither bullish or bearish until the market figures out what it wants to do.

Both the news and the market bears further commentary (and we will later on in this issue), but during sideways and south-bound markets, it’s best to pay attention to innovation. It’s in these conditions that the most interesting projects and ideas tend to emerge.

Over the years, I’ve been asked in public speaking engagements and private consulting arrangements to imagine a particular sector, industry, business or business model, but in the context of a blockchain or a cryptocurrency. I’ve got a stack of these things, some far more refined than others.

One of my friends who subscribes suggested they may make great fodder for material, though as fictional but plausible use cases. I’ve got a bunch in the can already, but I figured the best way to kick this off might be with one I’ve already had a nominal bit of success with already: content monetization using NFTs.

This feature will be structured like a mini-white paper. These ideas are free to take! Steal this Blockchain Business Plan!

Read on into the Blockchain Deep Dive for more!

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Blockchain Bulletin

Thailand bans meme coins and NFTs in crypto crackdown. Thailand’s SEC is cracking down on memecoins, tokens, and NFTs that it deems without “clear objective or substance” to protect traders according to a report from Engadget.
World Bank refuses to help El Salvador with Bitcoin project. The World Bank has refused to assist El Salvador with its project to make Bitcoin legal tender in its country through a legislative project, according to a report from Decrypt.
Crypto glitch causes man to become trillionaire overnight, temporarily. A nursing student from Georgia became a temporary trillionaire after he invested $20 in a cryptocurrency and a glitch caused it to go into the triple digits, according to Newsweek.

Blockchain Behind the Scenes

Criminals target Ledger customers with fake devices. Some customers of the hardware wallet company Ledger have reported receiving fake replacement devices from hackers attempting to steal their cryptocurrency.
Kraken could go public in 2022, according to CEO. The CEO of Kraken, Jesse Powell, has suggested that the company may be intending to go for a direct public listening sometime in 2022 following in the footsteps of Coinbase.

Other Blockchain Tidbits from the Group Chat!
We’re still working on a better name for this!

A brief thread by me on the precipitous drop in Chinese mining rates. TL;DR, this is bad for China, good for anyone who isn’t China.
Creator of the S2F Bitcoin economic model says that worst case scenario, Bitcoin will see $135k by December.
Foundry Services VP Kevin Zhang reports on what his peers in the Chinese bitcoin mining sector are saying. Spoilers: They’re a bit morose.

Blockchain Deep Dive: Can NFTs help monetize media brands?
Steal this biz model!

Monetizing media in the modern age is a perennial problem.
Since the dawn of New Media, the watchphrase coined by Jeffrey Zucker has been “trading analogue dollars for digital pennies.”
For most of the history of journalism and media, ad dollars have been enough to sustain media.
Ad dollars as a revenue model are inherently problematic, since as artists Richard Serra and Carlota Fay Schoolman pointed out in 1973, “If you’re not the customer, you’re the product.”

Traditional finance (TradFi) applies additional pressure to alternative monetization models due to its inherent limitations on transaction size.
Permissioned banking with crypto solves the “small transaction size” problem with some lesser used implementations, but introduces new problems around recurring subscriptions.
In a recent conversation with marketing strategist Schlomo Rabinowitz, I was introduced to the idea of using NFTs as subscription tokens.
Using NFT key features of putting “unlockable content” and creator royalties into the NFTs, I dogfooded this idea by releasing a series of Ask Doctor Bitcoin cover art NFTs.
Letting the NFT be redeemable for a subscription gives it some intrinsic value aside from the subjective value assigned by the market on the quality or rarity of the art itself.
The existing dynamics of trading art NFTs give subsequent resales of the token new revenue for those looking to add the token to their collection or benefit from the subscription it’s redeemable for.

This experiment is nascent, but within 48 hours of releasing the first two in the series, I’ve already sold one subscription using this method.