[pkdpic]

Yeah, I mean personally the only artists I know who have experimented with NFTs seem to have continued operating at a loss with no concrete hope of making back the money they've spent on minting fees etc.

I don't want this to be the narrative but I've been consistently reminded of the small number of people I've known / worked with in the past with who get into buying lottery tickets and / or scratchers. It's never people who are in a position to burn money and it seems like it turns into a long-term commitment / compulsion that is really hard to understand but also not something that seems like it should be judged too harshly either.

[shimmeringleaf]

Yeah, this is the sadder "it isn't a silver bullet" part, I've found it's a lot more productive to have the same mental expectations as selling a physical print: you need to have a community of people who like, want to support and/or collect your work. This has always been the case, even before NFTs, if you don't work on your visibility, community and reach, the chances of people randomly stumbling over your work and collecting it are ... slim. This is why I never recommend anyone to go all-in on NFTs, but rather choose a platform ala hicetnunc (or its now many variants and mirrors) with very low minting fees and double down on building community rather than burning a lot of money on sales.

What has made NFTs interesting to me, who as a digital artist has to "give away" their work daily just to stay visible in social media, is that it allows for also the non-physical manifestation of the work to have "value". That is to say I don't have to go through all the complexity and expense of producing a physical print in order for the jpeg to be considered "worth collecting".

But yeah, it's not a get-rich-quick deal, it's still just as tricky as the old-school art market..