A podcaster’s unique method for engaging his fanbase

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The full market capitalization of NFT at present stands at round $3.6 billion, an enormous drop from the heady peaks of 2022.

Speculative NFT markets are useless, however the use circumstances of NFTs usually are not.

Non-fungible tokens as a knowledge format and a singular digital identifier, within the technical sense, are nonetheless utilized in productive, non-speculative ways in which do not essentially translate right into a quantity graph.

Take podcasts, for instance. Pods.media offers podcasters a option to simply faucet into an alternate monetization stream by letting followers create NFTs of their podcast episodes. Customers create their favourite podcast NFTs out of altruism, or just because choosing up a one-time free digital collectible is a no brainer.

Since launching a 12 months in the past, Pods has onboarded greater than 75 podcasts and picked up greater than $1 million in podcast episodes from 120,000 collectors.

One in every of Pods’ largest podcasts on its platform, Mint Podcast, has minted over 250,000 NFTs amongst 69,789 distinctive collectors. Mint Podcast has raised roughly $476,885 in income because it began utilizing Pods in April 2024.

$477,000 is not life-changing cash, but it surely’s a pleasant quantity for a little-known podcast in an business the place the podcast provide is oversaturated.

However the actual use of NFTs goes past a easy income stream.

After pushing his podcast viewers towards a easy NFT coin with Pods, Adam Levy, the face behind Mint Podcast, was capable of assemble a complete social graph of his nameless viewers.

To create an in depth onchain composition, Levy focused his 90,000-strong viewers utilizing Bello. The advertising analytics product Web3, of which he co-founded, emerged from a hackathon at ETH Amsterdam.

“I found that a big share of my onchain viewers have been additionally Zora collectors. With that info, I used to be capable of faucet into the pursuits of my podcast listeners (with Bello) based mostly on the historical past of their pockets onchain,” Levy tells Blockworks.

“I took motion by creating extra Zora-centric podcast episodes, which translated into one other 40-50% enhance in podcast content material downloads.”

Basically, NFTs allowed Levy to fulfill its customers the place they have been after they took step one to create an episode.

Not like sending generic mass emails, Levy’s technique allows tailor-made outreach to podcast audiences who have been lively Lens or Farcaster customers straight of their social media DMs, or Coinbase Pockets customers through the XMTP messaging protocol.

It additionally permits podcasters to handle their podcast content material or sponsorships round standard content material launched in actual time.

Think about you’ve got arduous proof that 80% of your devoted podcast viewers has interacted with a selected DeFi or NFT contract within the final six hours. Then think about releasing a podcast episode or advertising message round that very same matter inside an hour.

It is an abundance of onchain info that would not have been potential for a standard podcaster utilizing Spotify or Apple Music, Levy stated.

“I now not actually care about my attain on Twitter or my viewers on Instagram. I care extra concerning the wallets that acquire my content material as a result of I now have methods to interact them in a permissionless means the place I can by no means be overshadowed. platform.”

Along with podcasting, NFTs are additionally getting used to fight counterfeiting and fraud within the luxurious items sector.

Since 2021, the Geneva-based nonprofit Aura consortium has been providing luxurious manufacturers a means to offer customers with a simple option to observe a product’s lifecycle and authenticate merchandise on-chain with NFTs.

It is a purely non-speculative use case that applies the immutable properties of NFTs to fight tons of of hundreds of thousands of {dollars} in fraud and counterfeiting in a $300 billion greenback business.

Aura has introduced greater than 50 million luxurious items onto the chain, from luxurious watches, baggage, sneakers, vehicles, jewellery and furnishings to greater than 50 luxurious manufacturers from Cartier, Dior, Prada, Mercedes-Benz and extra.

Manufacturers pay Aura licensing charges to make use of a non-public or public blockchain possibility, though 90% select the previous for knowledge safety and privateness causes.

Traceability represents one of many main challenges within the luxurious business, partly as a consequence of legal guidelines such because the EU’s Ecodesign for Sustainable Merchandise Regulation (ESPR) and France’s Anti-Waste for a Round Economic system (AGEC), which place larger scrutiny on the life cycle of a product, Romain Carrere, CEO of Aura Blockchain Consortium, informed Blockworks.

There are numerous different circumstances the place NFTs are getting used for productive functions, comparable to opening up 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 earlier than.

Extra about this in a future 0xResearch problem.