THE New York Times entered the NFT game, selling the chance to own “the first article in almost 170 years of The times to be distributed as an NFT ”- and it sells for about $ 560,000. Although Paper of Record is not the first brand (or even the first news organization) to sell one of the digital tokens, it was certainly one of the most successful.
The NFT auction was announced in a column by Kevin Roose, who acts both as an explainer of the NFT and as a pitch for someone to buy the item. The author can also talk about the process of coining an NFT and putting it up for auction.
The NYT did an NFT!
My new column is about NFTs, and I also turned the column into an NFT and put it up for auction at @withFND, with the proceeds going to charity.
Place a bid and you could own the first NFT in the newspaper’s 170-year history. https://t.co/9ItGZvID8B
– Kevin Roose (@kevinroose) March 24, 2021
Like other branded NFTs, the NYT added a few extras to sweeten the deal. Of course, there is a PNG of the article that the NFT points to, but the buyer will also receive a congratulatory voice memo from the The diary podcast and be featured in a follow-up article on the sale of the NFT.
As with many branded NFTs, the proceeds from the sale will go to charity (specifically the NYTFund for the Most Needy Cases). Which is great, because it’s a mind-boggling amount of money: enough to buy two millennia of NYT digital signatures. The newspaper has yet to say whether or how it plans to offset the carbon emissions from the sale.
When asked about the sale, Roose simply replied “wow”.