#226: The First Mint's Media Pass: Season 1
PLUS: 🎥 Pudgy Penguins YouTube Channel
If you’ve been around the NFT and web3 space in early 2021, there was one product that newbies couldn’t stop talking about: NBA Top Shot. Top Shot helped me understand the potential of this space as a consumer, and even though I’ve had a fallout with the product, I won’t forget its impact on the space.
While I was early in my web3 journey, there was one prominent media brand that covered the world of Top Shot and eventually the larger ecosystem of web3 sports: The First Mint.
LG and the team consistently created content helping fans stay up to date and still do to this day. The First Mint ecosystem has:
Over the past few months, I’ve had the pleasure of getting to know LG better through a small group of content creators that meet bi-weekly. On yesterday’s call, I had to ask him: What the hell is this Media Pass thing?
The First Mint DAY ONE
In order to understand the Media Pass, we need to understand the community The First Mint created.
As The First Mint brand and community grew alongside the industry, LG released the DAY ONE collection, 550 membership NFTs that provided access to The First Mint’s Discord server. The focus was quality > quantity: Online relationships turned into IRL friendships, one-off alpha turned into deep analysis and hot takes, and LG prioritized an engaged DAY ONE community.
As a result, the DAY ONE collection has maintained a floor price of ~0.1 ETH (~$175) since its launch over 2 years ago.
Media Pass, Season 1
A couple months ago, TFM announced a claim for DAY ONE holders. Holders had to fill out a brief form and were eligible to receive something for each DAY ONE pass they held. 210 passes were minted in total.
Earlier this month details of the Media Pass were shared and earlier this week the passes were revealed. TLDR (full details here):
The passes are separated into 3 categories and have varying supply (rarity)
Contender: Experiences related to the YouTube live stream experiences
Hypeman: Ad space within TFM’s media ecosystem
Rewards: TFM Merch or experiences with the TFM team
Why Season 1? Regardless of the category, the pass needs to be redeemed by November 29th, which is when the 15-week live stream schedule will conclude.
In order to redeem a pass, holders have to fill out a form with details and send the pass to a redemption wallet.
Simple and straightforward: A fun interactive experience for the TFM community! This is where things get interesting…
Creating a marketplace for Media Pass
In a traditional NFT collection, the incentive alignment between the community and the creators is more clear:
Ok, a little aggressive and I’m omitting a lot of nuance lol. But in general, the higher the floor price, the better community morale is, there are more secondary royalties (this system is largely broken now, but that’s for another day), and stronger momentum for the project/company/brand.
In the case of TFM’s Media Pass, this doesn’t apply as well:
Note: There are plenty of exceptions to the ‘Traditional NFT’ column, but the large majority fall into those definitions.
So what has TFM done in spite of these differences?
Created a public channel in Discord
To facilitate more discussion and help community members get the Passes they want, TFM created its first public Discord channel: Negotation Table.
Holders and non-holders could negotiate purchases, sales, and trades of their media passes.
These passes aren’t as liquid as a NFT collection with thousands of holders on Opensea or Blur, but there is something about trading in a chat that is fun, nostalgic, and interactive. The goal here is less about maximizing financial value, but encouraging the community to work together and find win-wins.
On the note of win-wins, one of the experiences is particularly interesting: The Takeover:
There are 10 Takeover passes
All 10 need to be redeemed together
If accomplished, a live show episode will be canceled and the group can make the episode whatever they want it to be
This experience is collaborative, creative, and takes the concept of co-creation a step further. The new term of co-creation is traditionally regarded as a brand creating with the community.
In this case, we see community co-creation. If successful, the community would cooperate together to gather all 10 Takeover passes and co-create an episode of the live show together. TFM only sets the guidelines and provides the platform, that’s it.
If we break down the Pass experiences in a different way, along the axis of Co-Creation, we see multiple levels of interactivity.
Other Thoughts on Media Pass, Season 1
Conducting Media Buys
When LG explained TFM Media Pass to me yesterday, one anecdote stuck out to me: The sale of a Newsletter ad for $145 a couple days ago.
In the world of media buying, this is silly: the process is manual, not scalable, and indirect. And I agree.
However, this shows a tiny glimpse of what the future of media buying could look like if it were tokenized. And in the case of TFM, there are some interesting things that could happen if an advertiser stumbled upon the Media Pass.
LG typically charges significantly more for an ad spot on his newsletter than $145. In this case, an advertiser can come in and do two things:
Conduct an ‘ad takeover’ by making a trait offer for all Media Passes for a specific ad. It’s similar to setting a CPM or CPA cap in your paid ad campaigns.
Make an announcement in the negotiations Discord channel of the media buy
Brand Risk
What if a community member hosts a Spaces and says inappropriate things? What if an outsider buys a Pass joins the Trivia, and exhibits inappropriate behavior?
The chances of this are low, but shouldn’t be ignored. Fortunately, most of the media experiences are vetted (ads still need to be created and written by LG, podcast episodes are pre-recorded).
On the other hand, the community is over 2 years old and has likely established a culture of what is acceptable and unacceptable behavior.
And at the end of the day, this is an experiment that can be iterated on for Season 2 and beyond.
Co-Determination
The Media Pass is another example of a concept I introduced a few months ago: Co-Determination. The max supply of Passes that could be minted was 550, 1 for each DAY ONE NFT. However, not everyone participated.
Only 210 out of a possible 550 (38%) Passes were minted. We’ll see how many will be redeemed.
In the coming months and years, we will continue to see engagement models go deeper and reward the most engaged holders and community members. This will cross over into the physical space as well. An easy example of where this is applicable is with live sporting events.
I’m not sure if this happens globally, but in the US when you attend a live sporting event there are often giveaways. The team mascot might run out and throw t-shirts into the crowd or there would be a sponsored seat upgrade provided to a lucky winner.
But what if there were a better way to reward loyal fans? What if you could tie verified activity to rewards digitally and physically? 😉 To be clear, there’s nothing lost. The same amount of merch or value is given away. It’s just done in a more strategic manner.
Some food for thought.
Although I’m not a member of The First Mint DAY ONE community, it’s easy to cheer on LG and the community’s Media Pass efforts. Community building has evolved from a simple forum to an experience that is interactive, creative, and experimental.
For TFM, the goal of this was never to pump the floor price and maximize profits, but rather foster a strong community and add an ingredient that this space needs more of: fun.
Pudgy Penguin’s Building in Public YouTube channel
I’ve been meaning to share this for a while, but kept forgetting! The Pudgy Penguins team created a YouTube channel: Building in Public. The channel started this year and has provided a behind-the-scenes look at how the team operates, executes, and even fails.
The YouTube channel is another piece of the puzzle for the PP strategy. The content is meant for the core community and a B2B audience (partners, investors, web3 builders, etc.)
If you’re a VC that invested in Pudgy Penguins and want an update from Luca and co., just go to the YouTube channel! Jk, I’m sure you’ll get an update, but the YT channel really provides a deeper look into the realities of building in the space. At the end of the day it’s a startup, and startup life is crazy, regardless of which iteration of the web you’re in.
See you next week!
❤️❤️❤️