According to Time’s president Keith Grossman, 14 months after launching its initial NFT initiative, the publisher has sold more than 20,000 individual NFTs, netting the publisher a profit of more than $10 million. The NFTs’ resale in the secondary market, with Time earning royalties on each resale, contributes to the profit margin. Sixty percent of Time’s NFT sales occurred in the secondary market, totalling $50 million, and owing to a built-in royalty structure, Time earns a percentage of the sales that occur outside of their ecosystem.
This success comes amid a period of uncertainty in the NFT industry, which was highlighted earlier this month by an NFT of the first-ever tweet falling in value from a $2.9 million sale to a highest price of $277. People have begun to look for additional reasons to invest besides the potential for financial benefit as a result of this.
In the past year, NFTs were not Time’s only source of blockchain-related revenue. Since the option was originally given in April 2021, two advertisers (both bitcoin investment firms) have paid with cryptocurrency: Grayscale in Bitcoin and Galaxy Digital in Ethereum. The total amounted to more than a million dollars. The entire revenue from these partnerships was not disclosed by the corporation.
In just over a year, Time has built a significant blockchain business. Time’s first NFT project, a three-part collection of digitised magazine covers from decades ago, was unveiled in March 2021, and the top-selling one went for the equivalent of $250,000. (135 ETH at the time).
The company also began taking cryptocurrencies as payment for subscriptions and advertising partnerships in April 2021. The newspaper then debuted its TIMEPieces project in September 2021, which brings crypto enthusiasts together in one Discord-based club (now with 40,000 members) and brands all of its NFT drops under the same TIMEPieces title.
TIMEPieces has released four collections on its own, as well as two collaborations with Timbaland and Pablo Stanley, the creator of the Robotos NFT collection. The Beatclub, its sixth collection and first musical NFT partnership with Timbaland, will be released on Thursday. It will have 252 buyable NFTs, and 2,000 people were pre-registered and approved prior to the start to avoid bots and malicious accounts.
The collaborations have been leveraged by Time to reach out to various crypto-native audiences and introduce them to TIMEPieces. Robotos, for example, has a 70,000-strong community and 10,000 NFT holders. Following the NFT partnership, Time Studios was brought on board to create a TV show based on the illustrated IP from the collection. According to the corporation, the Studios division has collaborated with four NFT communities to bring their IP to life on video, including this initiative.
