How NFT artists can help each other (and themselves) instead of relying on investors
NFT art has been the idealistic safe haven for new and emerging artists over the last few months. Stories continue to pop up about small time artists making thousands, or hundreds of thousands, of dollars on NFT art sales. Unlike the traditional art world that requires acceptance to a gallery (and usually an art degree with contacts), plus the patronage of high rolling investors, the NFT world only requires a few self proclaimed “autists” (#wallstreetbets) or part-time crypto traders to take an interest in your work.
Or, just find a few artist friends to support what you do, right?
It turns out that shallow pockets and an unknown name still mean a life of irrelevance on sites like OpenSea and Nifty Gateway. Why? Well, part of it may be because of algorithms that favor big sales and big quantities, and part of it may be because of market manipulation. But fear not, artists! I’ve created this list of ways you can help each other out.
But first, let’s talk about why this is important
*If you’re an artist and you just want the tips, scroll down.*
There have been increasing rumors coming out about market manipulation in the NFT world. Which makes sense due to relatively small trading volume (compared to something like NASDAQ) and transparent pricing. Basically, it’s easy to intentionally drive up prices and subsequently convince others to pay those prices. How?
Well, first, it’s important to understand how art is found on different networks. Most of the ETH based networks (SuperRare, Rarible, Nifty Gateway, Makersplace) have an activity board. This might include “trending artists” which are any accounts with a lot of likes, bids, and sales, like SuperRare, along with a running activity log.
On sites like Nifty Gateway, stats are shown by secondary market sales, otherwise known as resales of NFTs.
As an investor, this is where I get my information about good investments. The most important indicators for me when buying a NFT as an investment is demand and secondary market sales. First of all, do people actually want this art? Are people interacting with it (liking it, bidding on it, etc. as shown by the activity boards/logs)? Secondly, can you resell it? Secondary market sales are a great indication of this, because they show proof of resales actually happening. This information takes some of the speculation out of a highly speculative, unproven, illiquid investment.
Knowing that, it’s not inconceivable that people with time and resources to spare would go ahead and make it seem like art they own is both desirable and easy to resell.
One way to do so is “wash trading” which is explained by Bloomberg as “when a trader or group of traders buy and sell the same asset to create the illusion of heightened demand.” Eventually, someone outside of the group will see something trading for higher and higher prices and they’ll buy it for the inflated amount. After that, the original group of traders takes their money and starts the process over with another piece.
Additionally, a group of traders could all bid high amounts on a piece of work by an artist they all already own art from. The price of that artist’s entire collection is more likely to go up as artificially increased bid sizes go up for a single piece. That way, if each trader from the group owns other works from the same artist, they may be able to resell those pieces at higher prices during a feeding frenzy for that artist’s work.
It all leads the small artists to the same problem as the traditional world.. how do you break in?
Paid trades
I’ve been seeing more and more artists promoting free trades of NFTs. Here’s how it works: I create a NFT on Rarible, you create a NFT on Rarible. I transfer you mine, you transfer me yours, we just accept the lost gas fees and live happily knowing we have art we love but didn’t need to shell out thousands of dollars for. Maybe the price of said art goes up, maybe we keep it forever since we love each other’s work.
The problem is that this kind of arrangement doesn’t actually log much as far as activity goes, and it doesn’t show validation for your pricing. The transaction simply shows up as “transferred”.
How to get around that and still swap work with artists you love or friends you have?
Paid swaps!
I did this with an amazing woman I found on Twitter. She launched a collection on OpenSea that I wanted to own a piece from. When I mentioned my admiration, she said something complimentary about my work, and I proposed a trade. We both wanted to own each other’s work anyways. We both were open to a trade (and willing to eat the gas), and I would have paid for her work regardless. So why not combine all of those things together?
So we did. I bought her piece, Loud Lust, and she bought my piece, Vivid Imaginations, for a similar price. We both ate the gas, but the pricing evened out so with gas fees, we each got an amazing work of art for around $30. Within a day, I had an offer from someone else who wanted to buy her work for .2 ETH more than what we swapped for.
Overall, it was a successful trade and now we both show sales for our pieces at relevant prices. When someone else looks at our work, they’ll see our price point has been validated by a buyer (therefore, we’re not just crazy artists asking for arbitrary sums of money).
Group buying
Many moons ago, I had a friend who got swept up in a pyramid scheme selling candles, or lotions, or snake oil, or something similar. She explained to me the concept of a buying circle where all 10 of the people in her tier would commit $100 dollars. Each month they would use that $100 to buy $10 worth of goods from one of the other sellers. That way they all had a month where the good fortune came back to them. The whole thing seemed like just a smaller pyramid of a larger scheme and I didn’t understand where anything beneficial came from it (the math seemed to work out to $0 gain/loss), but as long as she was happy, we were all happy.
However, I realized that this could be changed slightly and used by artists as a way to benefit one another and build amazing communities. After testing it out, I think you all can replicate it, especially on non-ETH networks with no gas and low fees like SIGN Art or NFT Showroom.
First, find a group of about 5 artists. You have to all respect each other and actually want to own each other’s work (otherwise, you’re really just artificially inflating prices like the same traders mentioned in the beginning). The best scenario is one in which each artist would be happy to pay full price for each other creator’s pieces anyways, but instead, you make purchases in a concentrated way to increase buying power.
Each artist commits to sell a certain piece on a certain day for a designated sum. We did this on NFT Showroom so we agreed to sell a piece for 30 hive (which was about $10 at the time, now it’s more). When the day of that artist popped up, we all bought the designated work and shared it on our social media. That way, we had a NFT we wanted, but we were also able to amplify the artist’s voice by sharing it, all at once, through social media. Additionally, the activity feed on NFT Showroom repeatedly showed purchases of that artist, making it more likely a different investor would see the work and be compelled to buy it.
Did this work? I’d say yes and it was my favorite experience out of all those I tried out. A few of us made 1–5 additional sales on the day of and the few days after our designated day, which is significant considering the relatively low number of users on the platform. Most of us got more followers, likes, and retweets on social. All of us formed a tight community and learned about each other in ways we wouldn’t have otherwise. I even did an interview on each artist through PeakD, which is part of the Hive ecosystem. It was an incredibly enriching, supportive experience.
In the end, I only made a few extra sales because of the circle. But, I did build an amazing collection that I’m very proud of including works from: Glogurl, TonalSpace, inhaledelium, Bryan Imhoff, and Juan Miguel Salas.
Cheap NFTs
Lastly, I want to talk about the cheap NFT. I wrote a whole article on PeakD (the blog I discovered during my buying circle) about the benefit of cheap NFTs. Here’s an excerpt so I can avoid re-writing:
I recently came across some super cheap NFTs by @richardfyates and absolutely fell in love with the concept of creating starter NFTs for people who are just building their collections or testing the NFT waters.
After attempting to credit him with my appreciation, he let me know that he got the idea from other artists before him including Eric Rhodes (secondrealm), and then Eric insisted on crediting the “trash art” crew, which then led me to the idea that we need a whole art history course just for early NFT creations, which I definitely don’t have time to delve into right now.
I also did a poll on Twitter and although I had a pitiful response of only a couple votes, everyone loved the concept.
This model hinges on the no-fee/low-fee model. If you’re currently creating on an ETH platform, check out this list of alternative NFT marketplaces we wrote up last week.
This sounds like a stupid idea — price things so low people can’t resist buying them. But I actually love the intent behind it. Buying art is expensive and people who are new to collecting want a way to test the waters without risking large sums of money. Also, artists want to support other artists but don’t always have the means to do so. Creating cheap NFTs benefits those people who can’t afford an expensive collection, while also boosting your own sales. I’ve been using this model on SIGN-Art app and have sold out four runs of 10 editions within 12–72 hours depending on the piece. Prices ranged from about $1-$5 but were below anything else on the market at the time. To be clear — this isn’t my best work. It’s mostly stuff I created in high school or sketches I threw into a digital collage. But it let’s me make use of art I have sitting around and allows other people to start building their collection. Hopefully, I’ll also attract buyers who may want to purchase more expensive work.
So there you have it — three ways for artists to support other artists in the world of NFTs. If you’ve come up with another idea, I’d love to try it! Let me know and I’ll test it out for you and write it up here.
