How NFTs could Change the Future of Photojournalism

Key Insights

• NFT marketplaces take between 2–15% of each transaction on their platforms while stock media sites take up to 85% of each sale.
• It is common for creators to make pennies for selling media content on stock platforms; however, publishers like CNN and NBC are willing to pay individuals as much as $35,000 for video clips of a single event.
• The infrastructure for connecting media content creators directly to media publishers does not exist but could benefit from being built on an NFT marketplace.

The main focus around NFTs to date has been limited to JPEG trading, tied to a loose concept of community. However, digital non-fungibility offers enterprises the potential to build products that could change the dynamics of their respective industries. With the combination of digital rights and market speculation, NFTs could serve creators like photojournalists particularly well. Building an NFT marketplace category for photojournalism would allow existing exchanges to target the same market that Getty, a stock media platform, alone earns over $300 million from annually.

The Editorial Stock Issue

A stock platform, or website, is a database that holds various types of contributor-generated multimedia content, from cartoon illustrations to videos of war. Stock site clients can buy licensing rights to utilize the multimedia content for different use cases. Publications use stock sites to obtain content in areas where they lack coverage. When content is bought on a stock site, the majority of the sale flows to the stock distributor, rewarding them up to 85% of the transaction and leaving an average of $0.42 for the creator. (The average was calculated based on 2021 figures from Shutterstock’s investor report.)