Meta’s new plan to allow Instagram users all over the world to sell their NFTs on Instagram hopes to change the way we interact with the world.
“We’ve already seen social media change the way we interact with news and online content – in a relatively short period of time, we’ve shifted from a broadcast model to a conversational one,” says Osaka Lab’s Sam Gormley.
According to Gormley, Instagram’s announcement heralds the beginning of a brand-new way of digesting online content, one that will revolutionize the space and help clarify the grey area pertaining to online content ownership.
Tokens that are non-transferable
Mark Zuckerberg announced last week that Meta was expanding their testing for the sale of NFTs on Instagram to an additional 100 countries, as well as launching new integrations with Coinbase and Dapper.
Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are one-of-a-kind items that the creator owns digitally until they are sold to a buyer. There are no copies for sale, only a single, unique, ‘non-fungible’ piece.
Ownership
Recently, we saw the news that Spain’s equality ministry and the Institute of Women released a campaign aimed at encouraging women worried about their appearance to go to the beach. In this ad, the ministry used images they sourced from Instagram, without gaining permission from the account holders.
The artist responsible for the images, ArteMapache, eventually apologised, whilst one of the models whose images were used by ArteMapache expressed the sentiment, “People would never take an image without permission from a photographer because they know they have to pay, but [this has] a bit of a loophole.”
Gormley believes the introduction of the NFT model will help combat situations like this.
He explains, “I think the growth of the NFT format on platforms like Instagram will be a further evolution of the conversational digestion of content, one which will enable clearer ownership.”
He believes that rather than focusing on their ad sales going forward, Instagram will begin to shift to a commission focus.
“The Instagram model will move from selling ads to make money and diversify by taking commission on NFT sales similar to how Twitch, Youtube, Patreon and Onlyfans operate,” he concludes.
