A podcaster’s unique method for engaging his fanbase
It is a phase from the 0xResearch e-newsletter. To learn full editions, subscribe.
The full NFT market cap in the present day is about $3.6 billion, down massively from its heady 2022 peaks.
Speculative NFT markets are useless, however the use circumstances of NFTs should not.
Non-fungible tokens as an information format and a singular digital identifier, within the technical sense, proceed for use in productive, non-speculative methods that don’t essentially translate to a number-go-up chart.
Take podcasts as an example. Pods.media supplies podcasters a method to simply faucet into another monetization stream by letting followers mint NFTs of their podcast episodes. Customers mint their favourite podcast NFTs for causes of altruism, or simply as a result of it’s no large deal to choose up a one-time free digital collectible.
Since launching a yr in the past, Pods has onboarded 75+ podcasts and racked up greater than $1 million in podcast episode mints throughout 120,000 collectors.
One in all Pods’ largest podcasts on its platform, Mint Podcast, has seen 250k+ NFTs minted throughout 69,789 distinctive collectors. Mint Podcast has raised about $476,885 in gross sales because it began utilizing Pods in April 2024.
$477k isn’t life-changing cash, however it’s a tidy sum for a little-known podcast in an business the place there’s an oversaturated podcasting provide aspect.
However the actual use case of NFTs there goes past a easy income stream.
Having pushed his podcast viewers in direction of a easy NFT mint with Pods, Adam Levy, the face behind Mint Podcast, was in a position to assemble a complete social graph of his nameless viewers.
To create a granular onchain composition, Levy focused his 90k-strong viewers with the usage of Bello. The Web3 advertising analytics product, which he co-founded, spawned out of a hackathon at ETH Amsterdam.
“I realized {that a} excessive proportion of my onchain viewers have been additionally Zora collectors. With that info, I used to be in a position to faucet the pursuits of my podcast listeners (with Bello) primarily based on their pockets onchain’s historical past,” Levy tells Blockworks.
“I took motion by doing extra Zora-centric podcast episodes, which translated to a different 40-50% extra downloads on podcast content material.”
In impact, NFTs enabled Levy to satisfy his customers the place they have been as soon as they took step one of minting an episode.
Versus sending generic mass emails, Levy’s technique permits the tailor-made outreach to podcast audiences who have been energetic Lens or Farcaster customers, immediately of their social media DMs, or Coinbase Pockets customers via the XMTP messaging protocol.
It additionally permits podcasters to curate their podcast content material or sponsorships round trending content material being minted in actual time.
Image having the laborious proof that 80% of your devoted podcast viewers interacted with a sure DeFi or NFT contract within the final six hours. Then think about pushing out a podcast episode or advertising message crafted round that very matter within the very subsequent hour.
It’s a plethora of onchain info that may not have been doable for any conventional podcaster utilizing Spotify or Apple Music, Levy mentioned.
“I don’t actually care about my attain on Twitter or my viewers on Instagram any longer — I care extra in regards to the wallets that gather my content material as a result of now I’ve methods to interact them in a permissionless method the place I can by no means be shadowbanned throughout any platform.”
Apart from podcasting, NFTs have additionally been used to battle counterfeit and fraud within the luxurious items sector.
Since 2021, the Geneva-based non-profit Aura consortium provides luxurious manufacturers a method to supply shoppers a simple method to hint a product’s lifecycle and authenticate merchandise onchain with NFTs.
It’s a purely non-speculative use case making use of the immutable properties of NFTs to fight tons of of thousands and thousands of {dollars} price of fraud and counterfeit in a $300 billion greenback business.
Aura has introduced onchain greater than 50 million luxurious items from luxurious watches, suitcases, footwear, vehicles, jewellery and furnishings for over 50 luxurious manufacturers from the likes of Cartier, Dior, Prada, Mercedes-Benz and extra.
Manufacturers pay Aura licensing charges to make use of both a personal or public blockchain choice, although 90% go for the previous for knowledge safety and privateness causes.
Traceability represents one of many large challenges within the luxurious business, partly on account of legal guidelines just like the EU’s Ecodesign for Sustainable Merchandise Regulation (ESPR) and France’s Anti-Waste for a Round Financial system (AGEC) that put extra scrutiny on a product’s lifecycle, Romain Carrere, CEO of Aura Blockchain Consortium informed Blockworks.
There are numerous different circumstances of NFTs getting used for productive functions, like unlocking new income streams for grownup creators by MintStars, or elevating funds and codifying mental property for area of interest science tasks by Bio, as I’ve written beforehand.
Extra on this in a future 0xResearch version.
