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.
So what does a NFT collab look like? The space already has lots of artists working together, and collaborations also happen between platforms and artists, like Art Blocks, or between NFT projects, like the building we’ve seen happen with Loot, N, or OpenPalette. For Dirt, we wanted a collaboration to take the form of an original piece of art that mingles our two identities: the Dirtyverse meets the London literary scene. That’s how Dirt’s in-house artist Mark Costello conceptualized our new edition: Filthy (Dirt x The Fence).
Filthy is the British cousin to our mascot, Dirty. He’s fit for the Soho cultural scene and comes from art-world characters like Francis Bacon.
It’s an edition of 200 and costs .02 ETH, or around $75. The funding will be split 60% to The Fence, 30% to Dirt, and 10% to the artist. You can buy it in our OpenSea Dirt Collection now.
Why collaborate?
Media companies don’t do enough collaboration and NFTs present a perfect format for a shared project, whether that’s using NFTs to fund a syndicated piece of editorial content or as a form of digital swag to memorialize a joint project. Think about the NFT as a co-branded tote bag that could appreciate in value.
But few media organizations have actually built NFT-native projects (TIME’s work with Cool Cats being the rare exception). It takes a certain amount of expertise to know how to develop NFT art, where to create editions, and how to connect with the right audiences. Beyond launching our own NFTs, Dirt is becoming a hub for connecting the media industry with NFTs in general, bringing new publications and voices into the space. It benefits everyone.
The importance of collections
NFTs need context, especially when they’re connected to media companies or publications. The most important form of context for NFTs right now are collections, which give a name, some brief explanation, and a coherent secondary-market space for NFT projects.
Logistically, Dirt’s OpenSea collection will keep growing into an archive of all of our projects, both in-house and collaborations. As we keep producing NFTs and new editorial, the collection will reflect the different directions we go in and our different partners. Each NFT is a snapshot of a moment in time when our community was engaged with a single editorial theme or goal. Discovering new communities and audiences is at the core of collaboration.
The importance of community
We know who our current community is: our readership, our token holders and our NFT buyers. Not everyone with a Dirt NFT reads the newsletter and not everyone that reads the newsletter is interested in NFTs, but they are all part of the same Dirtyverse. In order for our community to expand we need to reach people we haven’t reached before–in this case, literally, reaching across the pond to a predominantly UK market and readership. Likewise, through this collaboration, the readers of Dirt are being exposed to The Fence. And we hope that in addition to buying your own Filthy NFT you’ll consider becoming a regular print subscriber. Cheers!