Advertising NFTs – The New Crowdfunding for Media

Earlier this week we were introduced to a new way to think about NFTs for the media sector. We’ve seen publishers sell their prominent magazine covers and articles via NFTs. We’ve seen production companies fund their movies and cartoons through NFTs. But this marks the first time that an NFT correlated to an ad slot, redeemable or tradable at any future time.

Investing in Advertising Slots

The Hustle is a well-known newsletter and conference company covering the tech space with a bit of humor. Over the last 7 years, they’ve grown their audience into the millions and were even acquired by Hubspot because of their influence.

One of the media spin offs from The Hustle is the My First Million podcast – hosted by the founder of The Hustle and an executive at Twitch (Sam Parr and Shaan Puri, respectively).

Just a few days ago, Shaan created an NFT called “5 Minutes of Fame”, details here:

• Token gives the holder the right to 5 minutes of airtime on the My First Million Podcast.
• This enables anyone to become a guest on their podcast for 5 minutes and talk about any topic.
• Podcast has ~1M monthly downloads.
• To use this guest spot, the NFT must be "burned" (sent to the MFM wallet).
• They no longer take new sponsors or advertisers, so this is currently the only way to buy your way onto the show.

As of publishing, the current bid on the NFT is 5 ETH with 6 days left in the auction… It’s likely going to sell for a lot more.

There’s two great elements at play here.

One, they’ve created a new model for selling sponsorships in the auction style. By selling air time as an NFT, you effectively ensure that no money is left on the table for the time slot by underpricing. And on the flip side, the buyers will always feel they got a fair price as it’s on them to decide what they’re willing to spend. Genius.

Two, it actually incentivizes advertisers to think long-term (kind of the antithesis of advertising). You can hold this NFT as long as you’d like, potentially getting more value should the show continue to grow. And furthermore if this model catches on with other podcasts or media companies, then it incentivizes advertisers to invest in people early – thus turning ad slots into a speculative asset. Fascinating new way to think about advertising.

Media & NFTs

Media companies have always needed to be agile with the changing Internet. And NFTs present a lot of new opportunities.

On this week’s episode of the NFT QT Show, we sat down with one of the founders of Dirt – the world’s first newsletter to be funded entirely by NFTs.

We talked about topics including:

• The strategy behind an NFT-funded newsletter
• How Dirt envisions the future of their newsletter through the Dirtyverse
• Ways that independent journalists should use NFTs to run their own media company
• And SO much more (seriously, this is one of the best episodes yet)

You can listen to the thought-provoking conversation below:

While Dirt isn’t making headlines for multi-million-dollar sales, we felt that they’ve brought such a unique use case to NFTs and they’re making it happen! With their second season of NFTs coming up, it’s a project we feel deserves more attention.

Anyways, we hope you’ll tune in and learn more about them – as well as hear our thoughts where we think Media and NFTs will converge in the next couple years.