Picture Perfect

Happy holidays🎄Time has flown and it’s already our last issue for the year—we’re taking the rest of the week to work on a project we can’t wait to share with you next month. See you back here on the first Tuesday of January!

-Hannah Doyle

In Today’s Issue 💬

• How a photographer sold out an NFT auction

• A podcast and music comedy duo get into comics

• The latest TikTok creators to sign with Netflix

Freelance Photographer Sells Out Auction on OpenSea

A picture can be worth a thousand words—or in this case, thousands of dollars. Last week freelance photographer Jeremy Cohen sold out his first NFT photo series, ROOFTOPS, for 22.7 ETH, which equates to about $86,000. 

The images went viral on TikTok and Instagram last year (one even became a New York Magazine cover shot), capturing his neighbors at the start of quarantine, repurposing their rooftop into a safe gym, office, or art studio.

Agency Guppy NFT helped Cohen sell ROOFTOPS as a collection of 76 one-of-a-kind images on OpenSea in less than 10 hours. “I had a lot of people guarantee they would buy one before the drop, but when it sold out, I still had to pinch myself,” Cohen said.

Cohen shared more details with us in the exclusive Q&A at the end of this newsletter👇

Our Take

Both online and in real life, utility isn’t always necessary for ownership. The price of classic cars continually rises, not because they get better at being cars, but because they are a rare and exclusive indicator of identity for those who buy them. With NFTs, ownership is often the primary product, and utility is secondary. Creators that understand ownership is a product in and of itself will unlock huge potential in the NFT space.

Tiny Meat Gang Gets Graphic

But not in the way you might think—last week the YouTube and podcast duo, made up of Noel Miller and the newly-engaged Cody Ko, announced a newsletter with original comics set to release every Friday.

Illustrated by their now-full-time artist Jim Fiser, the comics depict popular bits from the podcast. The weekly send will also have exclusive content such as merch drops and recommendations on what to read, listen to, and watch.

Our Take

Creators are continuing to launch newsletters as they build a more direct and deep relationship with their audience, as well as providing opportunities to promote merch, live shows and other offerings—not that we’re biased or anything 🙃

Sponsored by Shopify

How Creators Can Turn Their Influence Into Ownership

“A startup is an organization that scales. A creator is an individual that scales. It’s the same DNA.” —Shopify

Creators have countless tools and platforms to help build and scale their audiences. But for the most part, they don’t own the relationship they’ve built with them.

The future of the creator economy is rooted in ownership. Creators of all sizes are recognizing this and launching their own Shopify stores, allowing them to build deeper connections with their communities in an environment that’s theirs.

Read more about the future of the creator economy in this blog post from Shopify.

Netflix Buys Into the Hype

The house which incubated Addison Rae and Charli D’Amelio is making its way to the world of reality TV on January 7th. Hype House has one of the largest followings on social media, but has lost some of its clout over the past year due to many of its top creators leaving.

Our Take

The Hype House uses a revolving-door model that leverages their franchise to bring in new talent. Creators get value through a built-in platform and audience to launch their own brand, while Hype House gets talent to build their IP. Given its diminishing popularity in recent months, will the show refresh the franchise and help it last like Love Island and Big Brother? We’ll have to tune in to find out.

🔥 In Other News

• VFX artist and TikTok creator Julian Bass lands a Facebook show.

• Liza Koshy will co-host New Year's Rockin’ Eve with Ryan Seacrest.

• YouTube expands its Shorts fund to 70 new countries.

• TikTok is getting into the ghost kitchen game with TikTok Kitchen.

Q&A: Jeremy Cohen

The freelance photographer shares how his NFT project changed his approach to work, and what advice he has for creators looking to get into crypto (The following interview has been condensed and edited for clarity).

Why do you think people purchased the photo NFTs? 

I think collectors in the space buy for a couple different reasons: because they feel connected to the artist’s work and want to own a piece of their art, or because they believe in the artist’s future and think that collecting can be a good investment.

Has using crypto changed how you approach your work? If so, how?

For future projects, I’m going to be more intentional with what I’m creating, knowing the space that it will be living in. Also, I’m generally more okay with saying ‘no’ to gigs creating for brands to make time to create personal bodies of work that might have a place in the NFT space.

What advice would you give to other creators looking to sell their art on crypto?

I truly believe the creator economy is going to be revolutionized by NFTs and creators are going to have way more freedom and control. The best place to start is on Twitter–start following a bunch of people in the NFT space, and hop in Twitter Spaces to hear what people are talking about.

Will you continue to sell more art in the crypto space? 

I plan on it! But quality over quantity. I will definitely need to put some time and energy into whatever I decide to drop next sometime in 2022. In the meantime, I’ve started to collect other photography NFTs with the ETH I’ve made from my drop, and it’s been very fun and rewarding to start my own collection all while being able to support up-and-coming artists.