I made over $300 this week selling my tweets as art on the new platform Valuables. I love anything new and weird in art and tech because new trends are always set at the fringes in my experience. I also know that earning income as an artist or a writer can be difficult, so I figured I would share my experience selling my tweets as art.
It started when I noticed several creatives in my Twitter feed were talking about selling their tweets over the weekend. I initially thought it was a joke. But it also intuitively made a lot of sense to me. Many important historic communications have occurred on Twitter since 2006. If you believe in digital property (I do), why wouldn’t somebody want to own the first tweet ever, or the first tweet from space? In fact, I believe ownership of culturally relevant digital communications is actually pretty important.
When society decides something is collectible or that it has value, we typically ascribe to it a significance or importance that leads to better preservation. Too often, digital culture is poorly preserved precisely because it lacks a collector or steward to take ownership and make sure it survives the never-ending changes in technological standards. For example, Flash defined a decade of our online culture from ads and animations to games and art and, Adobe recently announced it will not be supported after 2020.
With this mindset, I decided that buying and selling tweets was both ridiculous and smart, and I dove in and bid on some historically significant CryptoArt tweets. After using Twitter’s advanced search tool, I located the tweets I wanted and simply cut and past their URLs into a field on the Valuables website.
I then had the option to click a button letting the owners of the tweets know that I had made them an offer. Knowing I really wanted these two tweets, I offered $100 each assuming that that would be more than any other sane person would spend on a tweet. I was wrong.
Within minutes, other collectors saw the tweets I carefully dug up (Valuables highlights them on their leaderboard) and a bidding war ensued. I am perhaps more bullish on digital property than most folks, so I bid as high as $419. The bidding soon passed $500 and I jumped out of the race. As of this writing it is at $955.
To recap, a platform that only became active last Friday already has active bidding wars to buy tweets that are now going into the thousands of dollars. According to Valuables’ cofounder Matthew, they have:
$70K in bids made
$20K in tweets sold
500 active users
…all in just the first few days of activity.
Just when I thought it couldn’t get more bizarre, people started bidding on old tweets of mine.
I wrote some of the early blog posts about the blockchain art market and specifically about CryptoArt, and a few folks decided they were worth collecting.
Then for fun, some of us started buying random tweets from each other just to be silly. I even took a poll which surprisingly showed that 20% of my followers would not only buy tweets, but they would buy the tweet containing the poll (I know, super meta right?).
Several of the tweets I was bidding on contained images and videos. That’s when I realized Twitter + Valuables may be the ideal format for artists looking to sell digital art on the blockchain.
There are a dozen or so platforms that let artists sign up and mint/tokenize their digital artwork and then show it off in a digital marketplace to attract collectors. But Valuables has several features that I think make it a really nice alternative/addition to existing options.
Many digital artists already have a following on Twitter
Unlike other platforms, the costs of minting/tokenizing work on Valuables are paid by the collector, not by the artist/tweeter
Only work that people want to own gets minted/tokenized
Unlike other platforms that verify creators’ identity manually, only the owner of the Twitter account can accept an offer for a tweet, so identification/validation is baked in
The way most CryptoArt marketplaces work today, artists tokenize their work first, then collectors see it in the marketplace and decide if they want to buy it. This leads to a lot of unsold work that costs the artists money to mint/tokenize (not to mention the power consumption is horrible for the environment).
In contrast, tweets are only minted on Valuables when a collector asks to buy the tweet and the owner of the tweet accepts. Using Valuables as a platform for selling digital art would, in theory, cut down dramatically on the number of works that need to be tokenized and would save artists a bundle.
Twitter also has an enormous community of digital artists and collectors that far outnumbers any other fledgling CryptoArt platform. So instead of bringing the audience to the tokenizing/minting platform, they turn it on its head and bring the minting platform to the audience.
Lastly, several CryptoArt platforms have gone out of business in the last few years making it near-impossible for collectors to find the work they bought. Having the work on Twitter (which I theorize will be around for a while) gives some additional convenience and reassurance that you can easily find the tweet/image should anything happen to Valuables.
I like the bleeding edge and I had been working on an art project called Infinite Abundance over the last few months that I was not sure how I wanted to deploy. Basically, I wrote code to produce a never-ending stream of mandala-inspired imagery using images from the public domain.
My goal was to make enough digital artworks to be able to sell them to anyone who wanted one at whatever price they could afford. However, minting on the blockchain is traditionally not a great system for producing an infinite number of works as there is a cost associated with each work. I believe that how much money you have is not a reflection of your desire to collect art, so I wanted to literally make enough for everyone, regardless of how much they had to spend.
Valuables was the perfect platform for my project. So I made a second Twitter account, ArtnomeNFTs, and announced that anyone could offer whatever they wanted and could own their unique mandala tweet from the Infinite Abundance series.
I sold 23 mandalas in the first day for a total of ~$250, or an average of $11 each. The price paid per mandala ranged from $1 to $52. To keep the abundance going, I made $200 in loans through Kiva, a service that makes loans to women, low-income entrepreneurs, students, and refugees around the world.
The mandalas continue to sell. If you are interested in testing out Valuables and buying a tweet, feel free to offer as little (or as much) as you like for a generative mandala and I will make sure there is enough supply from my end to go around.
In closing, I think my experiment of using a new platform designed for selling tweets to sell digital art was a success. I’m excited to see how other folks use the platform, as I think combining the social accountability of Twitter with the decentralization of the blockchain could actually yield many different “off-label” use cases. I had a call with Valuables co-founder Matthew and he tended to agree. I also asked him how the project came about and he shared that:
With the end of the year racing towards us, we had to keep it simple. [My co-founder] Cam came up with the idea to mint NFT tweets. I made sure it'd appeal to folks in cryptoart. The team loved it and went into grind mode going from idea to live product in a month.
If you like living on the fringe/bleeding edge of art and tech (like I do) with all the good things (and the bad things) that it can bring, give Valuables a shot. If you come up with some cool use cases, let me know. Maybe I will add them to this article. As always, thanks for reading!