🪙 Social Tokens Fall
In this week's ALTS by Flippa newsletter: Valuing SEO domains, the top newsletter sponsors, the collapse of social tokens, and how little creators get from NFT royalties
Hey there 👋,
In this week’s ALTs by Flippa newsletter, I discuss:
Acquiring the most profitable businesses
Using ChatGPT to improve your site’s SEO
Why domain auctions can go crazy over ugly domains
Flippa Featured Domains
The top newsletter sponsors plus acquisition news
The rise and fall of social tokens
NFT projects continue to mint out plus what creators make from secondary sales
Every heading is a discussion channel in the ALTS by Flippa discord community - come join over 2250 of us.
Cheers!
#acquire
The PrivateEquityGuy on Twitter asked about the best (most profitable) business people had seen, and some of the replies are great:
This 90% profit margin is just beat out by a reply from Blake Hutchison, the CEO of Flippa, to a different thread by Codie Sanchez on passive income, with an asset that sold on the Flippa marketplace last year:
#contentsites
Following on from my last newsletter where I got ChatGPT to write a business listing, Aleyda Solis wrote 20 Ways to Leverage ChatGPT in your SEO Activities, from keyword research, to content optimization to even technical optimization.
My favorite was using the AI to generate FAQs to add to the bottom of your SEOd content.
#domains
Sean Markey from the great domains newsletter Rank Theory, wrote an article for Domain Name Wire on why domain auctions can heat up on unusual-looking domains. The answer is in the value of their link profile.
Flippa Featured Domains
gamesskins.com - $450 asking price (classified listing)
weddingdiets.com - current price $155, $1 reserve, 22 days left at auction
beautifulnaturally.com - $8 current price, 2 bids, reserve not met, 22 days left
stsuretrader.com - $100 reserve, 26 days left
impuestos.ai - $45K asking price (classified)
juego.ai - $60K asking price (classified)
quw.com - $1,500 current price, 2 bids, reserve not met, 23 days left
skiers.com - $180 current price, 3 bids, reserve not met, 23 days left
#newsletters
It was super interesting to see who were the top sponsors of other people’s newsletters in The Top 💯 Newsletter Sponsors of 2022 by Who Sponsors Stuff.
They tracked 250+ newsletters and 4,500+ sponsors; here are the top 10 (with the number of sponsorships in parenthesis):
1440 (1032)
SmartAsset (516)
Adobe (364)
Impact (355)
Startup Jobs (298)
Vanguard Personal Advisor (283)
Security Compass (281)
Personal Capital (268)
The Motley Fool (255)
CompareCards (LendingTree) (241)
In the top spot is 1440, a newsletter itself offering unbiased daily news.
And talking of news, 6AM City, the hyper-local news media company, recently acquired Austonia, an Austin-based local media company which had over 20,000 email subscribers.
#crypto
If you followed my journey back down the crypto rabbit hole in 2021 (after a bear market break) you will know I went heavy into DAOs and social tokens (before arriving at NFTs).
Back then, crypto projects were new and no one knew whether a fungible token/coin (AKA social token) or a non-fungible token (NFT) would be a better way to build communities. I was involved in media DAOs such as Bankless and Forefront, writing content and other duties, and being rewarded in their tokens.
One of the biggest players in this space was Rally, a ‘platform for creators and their communities to build their own independent digital economies.’
The top community on Rally is/was The Tilt by Joe Pulizzi, who used their TILT coin as a rewards system for members (of which I was one):
The TILT coin had over 2000 supporters and was worth over $50 per coin at its peak:
This week, I heard on The Tilt podcast that they are shutting down the coin due to issues with Rally:
Indeed, another creator, Mark Schaefer, who is also shutting down his RISE coin, talked about Rally in his article The rise and fall of my Web3 creator token:
The company dramatically cut staff, stopped launching new creator tokens, curtailed development, and — unbelievably — suspended all communications with their 350 creators.
Rally had been in business for a year and a half. In that time, the value of its $RLY cryptocurrency plummeted from $1.45 to $0.01.
I transferred the TILT coin I had earned back to Joe Pulizzi, to use as a credit against a future Web3 initiative. I firmly believe in wherever he will take it next. His audience and company-building track record, from founding and selling the Content Marketing Institute (mentioned in his great book Content Inc) speaks for itself.
It’s pretty clear to me that this social token experiment has failed. At its peak, the Forefront token was over $7 back in 2021, it’s now $0.14 (98% from top). Likewise, Bankless DAO token reached $0.155 and it’s now $0.008 (95% from top).
But what has proven can work are NFT-based communities, which encompass membership (exclusivity), utility (if well funded) and art.
Indeed, I’ve just seen that Forefront is now minting (selling) its own NFT membership passes.
#nfts
Jack Butcher from Visualize Value sold out over 100ETH of his NFT project Checks within 24 hours, and the number is going up:
Just another 10x in a week I missed out on!
And talking some more on the topic of creators, it’s super interesting to see just how little artists make now that royalty fees can be circumvented on some NFT marketplaces:
That’s less than $2 from 8 secondary sales.
Ok that’s it for this week. If you’re reading this on the web and you’re not yet subscribed you can do so above.
ALTS by Flippa is owned by Flippa. Nothing in this email is financial advice and we are not professional investment advisers. We send weekly updates on what we're doing personally - consider it informational and for entertainment purposes only.