10 Lessons for Crypto Media: Dirt’s Year in Review

10. Mainstream NFTs need a cheaper blockchain.

9. The new big brands are open-source NFT projects are similarly dictated as much by their holders as their creators, if not more. Because of their prominence, CryptoPunks and Bored Ape Yacht Club are decentralized lifestyle brands, like Supreme, Louis Vuitton, or Rolex. Bored Ape holders can use their ape as a free-floating symbol, even as a way t... See more

8. Intellectual property will become less defensible in the short term but it is still cultural gold. From “my kid could do that” to “right click and save,” new media from the early 20th century onward has been poorly received. As W. David Marx writes of NFTs in Dirt, “whether or not this particular NFT bubble bursts, we should take them seriously ... See more

7. The metaverse is driving aesthetics for a new era.

6. Individual creators are sharing less and partnering more.

5. Algorithmic feeds are failing: StumbleUpon helped me start to understand, almost at a humanistic level, how vast the internet could be. TikTok often yields a similar result, though with a key difference. On TikTok, almost all videos trend toward a kind of visual consistency and repeatability. Silly voices or bits of speech become ‘sounds’, to be... See more

4. Communication is key: It’s really hard to reach NFT buyers. Almost laughably hard: Someone can spend hundreds or thousands of dollars in ETH to get a collectible from your brand, and you can have no way of communicating with them save airdropping to their wallet address. In part this is by design, the verifiable anonymity that blockchain technol... See more

3. Media needs subscriber governance: Subscriptions are mostly pitched as giving access to content. You pay so you can get around the annoying paywall. But the increased familiarity of paying for content will also lead to the desire to give more feedback on it. Substacks have comment sections and Discords where a sole proprietor has to answer to fa... See more

As with the hand-wringing over millennial cord-cutting, the limitations of supporting 10+ independent creators at $10 a month is similar to the impracticality of a Hulu, HBO, Criterion, Topic, Netflix and Amazon Prime subscription (phew). The pendulum has swung back to bundling–whether in a form like Every, or some sweet Atlantic media money.