NFTS IN INDUSTRIES: NEWSPAPERS

CURRENT STATE OF THE NEWSPAPER INDUSTRY

Traditional press and newspapers have lost their hegemony over the past decades.

Twitter and the likes obviously won the battle of attention.

I mean, it seemed like a battle lost in advance.

They are a quicker and easier source of information.

And. It’s. free.

French thread highlighting the drop in newspaper sales

Right now, we don’t even read traditional press to be informed, but more as a ritual.

The same way the 8 o’clock news or the TV weather forecast don’t keep us updated, far from it.

They are social items that we enjoy experiencing because they are full of reminiscence from a bygone era - the pre-internet age.

It’s our modern Proust madeleine.

To moderate these comments, one could also says that we read news we already heard about on twitter because the seen-on-the-news effect still has impact so newspapers play the role of a powerful legit check.

But our generation being increasingly more aware about centralization of power and media control, I think this argument won’t be relevant anymore in a few years.

So, the nostalgic bias and the newspaper-as-a-trustworthy-entity argument being inefficient in a near future with Generation Z, what’s the future of traditional newspapers?

How could they reinvent themselves?

WEB1 & WEB2 ATTEMPTS

Of course, they tried with internet.

In fact, most of their revenue come now from monetizing their content on the web (sponsoring and ads) and it has allowed them to remain solvant during the last decade.

But internet, as of now, is full of frictions - new account creation on each website, mail verifications, credit card payments etc..

And in the contactless era, newspapers must find a way to match new generation way of thinking

If they want to survive, they will have to adapt themselves to WEB3 at some point.

And we’ll said , “in retrospect, it was inevitable”

HOW WEB3 COULD HAVE AN IMPACT IN THE NEWSPAPER INDUSTRY?

Let’s imagine how newspapers could use NFTs to still be relevant in the future.

We can divide media in two categories: the exclusive one that charge you a fee to get the whole content and the inclusive one that are completely free - revenue fully come from ads and sponsoring.

For the exclusive newspaper, we could think to a NFT-as-a-subscription system.

Instead of having to pay a 1$ to finish the article, you would have to sign-in with your Ethereum account and prove that you own the NFT in question.

Thus, you would get the full article.

One interesting thing would be to offer users standardized-lifespan NFT on the primary market - a week, a month and a year of article access - and allowing them to resell customized-lifespan NFT - even a second - on the secondary market.

Let’s say you buy the one-month NFT.

After a week, you’re not interested anymore with this newspaper so you sell the three remaining weeks on a marketplace to another guy to let him enjoy the experience.

So, it would make liquid the most illiquid asset ever created - the subscription.

No more hesitation before spending - or not - money on internet: you would be able to resell it anyway.

Readers are even incentivized to buy longer subscription in order to supply the secondary market with customized-lifespan NFT - which profit to the newspaper thanks to the royalties it would earn from the secondary market.

A beautiful flywheel.

Furthermore, this system would offer a way better User eXperience (UX). Indeed, the crypto-friendly community would need no more than a set-up wallet to get access to every newspapers that offer this service.

To sum up: A new industry (web3), a new target (crypto-native), a new revenue (royalties) for the newspaper and less-friction (NFT technology) and new asset (liquid subscription) for the readers.

It looks like a genuine win-win.

To introduce itself to this industry, a company could even not release its own NFT but allow owners from a collection to access their content for free.

It would cost them no money, and create some free viral engagement in the crypto-community.

Imagine The Economist making its content free for Bored Ape holders..

An unprecedented and broadcasted kind of Airdrop..

For inclusive and free media, WEB3 could help them to be even more inclusive and community driven.

They could release a NFT collection and each owner becomes a contributor of the newspaper.

This is what is trying to achieve the french daily newspaper "20 minutes".

They’ve just released 999 NFTs to initiate their free and community-owned magazine called "20 mint".

Pretty simple: each owner can vote in the private discord for specific subjects to be covered.

So, more than being a consumer, the NFT enables you to interact with the project in a permission-less way.

NEW PARADIGM

WEB3 is meant to align interests between different party of an industry.

We are looking forward to see which newspaper will fully embrace this technology: it could be the next media revolution.

We saw that Brut - a french media - has recently hired a Metaverse specialist...

Stealth mode activated for others newspapers?