Image hosting sites, stock photo sites, clip art sites, fonts, icons, animated gifs, and any other kind of digital imagery that can be bought and sold online are going to be decimated by NFTs.
Keep reading to find out why, and make sure you 🔨 SMASH the upvote button and FOLLOW me for more stories like this.
In my last post I talked about how Shutterstock seems to be anti-NFT and anti-crypto. And the whole reason I wrote that was because I was doing some research to try to answer this nagging question of mine: What is the value proposition for regular people making NFTs of regular stuff, like stock photos or clip art, as opposed to famous people making NFTs of their valuable works of art?
After some more research today, I think I've finally found the answer. And it was so obvious, I have no idea why I didn't think of it sooner.
Its' not the potential for royalties, although that doesn't hurt. And it's not the verifiable ownership, which is wonderful and also doesn't subtract from the value. No.
It's that...
Image hosting companies will no longer be able to take exorbitant cuts of image sales!
The HUGE potential of stock images and clipart NFTs lies in the fact that image hosting sites take a HUGE percentage of the profit of each image sold. We are talking as much as an 85% cut here, in the case of Shutterstock. That means if you sell an image for $100 on Shutterstock you only get $15 of it! Highway robbery, I tell you!
Compare that with NFTs, where you can create, secure, and distribute your images, for a very low cost and with no meddling middlemen. I think it's pretty obvious what is going to happen. And I think Shutterstock sees the writing on the wall, hence their blog post about NFTs being bad for the environment.
Nice try, Shutterstock! We're onto your devious methods. Better luck next time!