By Kyle Chayka and Daisy Alioto.

Our digital culture newsletter Dirt has produced a bunch of its own NFTs to fund our content over the past months. But we also want to help other publications move into the NFT space and find collectors the same way we have. That’s why we launched into our first collaboration with another publication, making a new NFT edition with the great London magazine The Fence. 

Over the past six months, Dirt has been pioneering how to run a newsletter media company based on NFTs alone. We raised $30,000 / 10 ETH for Season 1 with an initial crowdfund of Dirty S1 Pea Green, Pearl Pink, and Rainbow Wave NFT editions. Then we raised $9,000 / 3 ETH with our upgrade drop, the Dirty S1 Holo, and energized the secondary market. We also sent a free NFT to our writers.

A few months ago, we sold NFT editions to raise around $30,000 to fund the newsletter Dirt, the first newsletter run on NFTs. We then used that money for a successful two-month-long season of content, paying writers and editors a great rate for great newsletters. During that time, the subscribers grew almost 50% and Dirt was shared by influential media figures and publications. Plus, we have over 100 holders for our 131 original NFTs.

Part of a series on using NFTs to fund publishing, using the daily newsletter Dirt as an experiment.

On May 27th, I launched a campaign to fund the daily entertainment newsletter Dirt using NFTs. In short, all the NFTs and editions have sold out, raising 12.23 ETH, or a bit over $30,000. (131 NFTs in total.)

With this crowdfund, we’re pioneering a way to fund media through NFTs, with a newsletter built on social tokens and NFT sales. It follows the guidelines I described in my previous sketch on Mirror. The plan is to turn Dirt, a daily newsletter on streaming and entertainment that I've been developing, into a major voice on digital culture.

The publication is voice-driven digital content that inspires loyalty in readers: arriving every day, reaching them where they are, communicating about things they need to know about or identify with closely. The publication serves a self-selecting demographic of cultural consumers who are obsessive, and either need or want to know about the content.

My previous post was about how cryptocurrencies function like content and how investing in tokens is in some ways like being a reader of a magazine. Both of these relationships are mediations between creators (a terrible word) and consumers or fans. Many digital platforms have lately been trying to form new relationships between creators and consumers, where it's donations on Patreon, subscriptions on Substack, or buying NFTs on SuperRare. The consumer provides some form of support (usually monetary) in exchange for various forms of access to the creator.