YouTube is looking into the lucrative world of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) in order to provide more services and benefits to its content creators. In her annual letter to creators, YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki revealed the company’s aspirations for the universe of NFTs.
The letter also discussed the Google-owned company’s future priority areas, such as gaming, retail shopping, music, and Shorts, a short video format comparable to Instagram Reels. According to Wojcicki, since its start in 2020, YouTube Shorts has received over 5 trillion views.
“We’re always focused on expanding the YouTube ecosystem to help creators capitalise on emerging technologies, including things like NFTs while continuing to strengthen and enhance the experiences creators and fans have on YouTube,” she wrote in the letter, per a Bloomberg report. However, she did not provide any details on how YouTube would go about it.
To Wojcicki and her team, everything happening in Web 3.0 has been “a source of inspiration to continue innovating on YouTube”. They are now exploring emerging technologies in the Web 3.0 space for creators.
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NFTs are one-of-a-kind digital assets with a unique digital signature maintained on blockchains. They are available in various formats, including images, video, and audio. According to Chainalysis, a blockchain analytics business, NFTs have grown into a $44.2 billion market in the last two years.
Many social media businesses and merchants are in the process of doing the same or have already integrated NFTs into their business models, so YouTube’s foray into this market will come as no surprise.
Twitter announced the launch of a feature last week that will allow users to display their personal JPEGS as NFTs via a hexagonal profile photo. Users must link their Ethereum wallets to their Twitter accounts to use this service.
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Instagram, a Meta-owned social media company, is working on a feature similar to Twitter’s where users can display non-fungible tokens they have on the platform.
TikTok, a short-form video site, also released an NFT collection produced by its top creators in September.
Several successful YouTube content creators are already producing educational content about cryptocurrencies, blockchain, decentralised finance, and related technology. Some YouTube creators have transformed their viral videos into NFTs and sold them for significant sums of money.
For instance, The ‘Charlie Bit Me’ NFT was sold for $761,000 last year. It was an NFT of a video displaying a newborn biting his brother’s finger.
