How to earn money curating NFTs

So you’ve finally decided to try out being a curator. While the term is quite broad and encompasses a wide range of activities in the classical art world — you might wonder how to make money being a curator in a decentralised world?

Artist x Curator collabs

This is the most lucrative way. You can offer your technical (creating NFT smart-contract and minting experience) or marketing skills in exchange for a part of artist royalties. It can be something as significant as 30% of all artist royalties. When following this path you’re signing up for a lifetime promotion of this particular collection. It will depend solely on you whether you hit a bank or not.

The great aspect of this is that you can partner with potentially any artist in the classical world and help him bring his mastery into the world of NFTs. He might do physical or digital art — both have potential to have success in the form of NFTs.

Make sure that your NFT includes the IP rights license. We recommend sticking to CC-BY-SA-4.0 which would allow future owner further commercial usage of the artwork (like selling derivative artwork or t-shirts).

In our previous article we’ve already covered a possible service agreement contract one might use for this kind of partnership.

Marketing existing collections

This way doesn’t require entering any contractual agreements with an artist. It’s enough for you to own a few pieces from the collection in your own wallet.

The goal would be to advertise this collection as much as possible and attract the right collectors who would buy out these artworks. The less available supply — the higher the price it potentially commands.

On the other hand building hype and a lot of demand from retail can prop up the prices short term just as much so it’s up to you really.

Owning the NFTs in advance is not always a pre-requisite for this to work. Sometimes there are open auctions that allow the curator of the final sale to be rewarded using a referral link (Manifold’s gallery is a good example).

Selling merch and organising events

Finally there is a direct way to get payed — namely helping existing marketplaces such as SuperRare, Foundation or Formfunction to curate their list of artists accepted onto the platform.

There are also frequently events/exhibitions in the space by both native and established galleries. Both (and especially latter) would require someone to promote and organise the thing. That is a lot of logistics and deserves a separate blog post on its own. Nevertheless these gigs could keep you afloat.

Finally after you own some of the NFTs you might spin up a small online shop via Shopify to sell the prints directly (e.g. silkcreen printing) or clothing with the printed artworks.

In case you know something we didn’t mention here please slam that comment section below with your questions or suggestions!