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Advertising Your NFTs – Why it’s a Bad Idea

Ryan Cowdrey
3 min read
Advertising Your NFTs – Why it’s a Bad Idea

If you cannot generate organic interest in your NFTs, then please don’t think that buying Ads for your NFT will help. Furthermore, if you see an ad for an NFT, please think twice before investing in that project.

(TL;DR: Ads don’t sell NFTs, people do. In fact, ads will probably hurt your chances at sales.)

Advertising NFTs

Marketers ruin everything. That’s just the sad truth. And while we’ve talked about how marketers will eventually use NFTs to promote products and generate more attention, I want to address the use of advertisements to promote NFTs.

It didn’t take long for people to start buying YouTube Ads, LinkedIn ads, and even Times Square billboards to advertise their NFTs. After all, paid ads is the laziest form of marketing:

Heck, I even just received a massive NFT ad placement on my Brave Browser homepage, promoting the upcoming NFTs from Doja Cat:

You can see the link to her NFT with OneOf in the bottom right corner.

Why NFT Ads Are A Bad Idea

There are a few reasons why ads for NFTs don’t work:

  1. No clear way to target people who have NFT wallets and are set up to purchase an NFT.
  2. There’s already so much unsolicited “shilling” (hawking, promoting, etc.) going on for NFTs on social media.
  3. Promising NFT projects are indicated by the size and quality of the community of people they gather. Not how many people see it.
  4. We already have ad exhaustion, why should an NFT ad be any different?

The simple fact is that we’re way too early for NFT ads to be effective.

Most people don’t have NFT wallets. They don’t know how to purchase an NFT. They don’t know why they should purchase an NFT. And not to mention, most people don’t even know what an NFT is.

OpenSea, the largest NFT marketplace only has a couple hundred thousand users. How in the world are you supposed to target a couple of hundred-thousand people on a platform like YouTube which has over 2 billion users?

You can’t. Well, you can place ads on videos about NFTs. But, I think I speak for most NFT collectors when I say that I would avoid all NFTs that I came across via an ad.

I have more than enough NFT projects I want to get into. Every day, without fail, I come across another dozen. Most are crap. Some that are interesting. I don’t need an ad to make me aware of more projects.

Furthermore, the indicators of a quality NFT project are when trustworthy NFT creators / collectors are talking about it.

NFTs are investments, after all.

And with all investments, people do their due diligence before investing. So yes, an NFT ad may help you bring awareness to the project, but if you’re not following that up with a lot of value and a strong community, then that due diligence is going to come back as a “not buy”.

I’ve seen many people sell space on their virtual plots of land in Decentraland. Cool in theory, but there aren’t that many eyeballs in there.

The Decentraboard is a cool concept. Essentially they’ve sold a few hundred advertisement slots on their “decentralized billboard”, which they’re going to display somewhere in Times Square and eventually in various virtual worlds.

Overall, the best way to promote your NFT project is still word-of-mouth. Clubhouse, Twitter, and Discord are where you create interest for NFTs.

Please be wary of an advertisement you come across for NFTs. Do your due diligence on it after you see the ad. And I’ll be they’re not following that hype

Bulletin

Ryan Cowdrey