Playboy, the global media and lifestyle company, is now one of the hottest properties for NFTs. According to Axios, its shares have jumped more than 150 percent since returning to public markets in February.
After rebranding as a sexual health and lifestyle brand, the PLBY Group is seeing investors trying to cash in on the company’s future on the blockchain. Playboy is working to offer fractional ownership in their original artwork such as iconic magazine covers the company has held for years, by selling their digital rights as NFTs.
The company has divided digital ownership rights of these artworks into fractional shares. Thus, Playboy will retain partial ownership of the physical piece that will continue to pay the company long after the original sale, Axios reported.
Besides new work that is being commissioned, Playboy is believed to have 10 million pieces in their archives in addition to a 5,000-piece art collection.
The company is seeing this as a way to open up new revenue streams.
In the latest episode of ‘Voices of Wall Street’, PLBY Group CEO Ben Kohn said that not only would the company receive 80 percent of the initial NFT sale, but also receive 10 percent of every subsequent sale thereafter.
Read: Art in the time of NFTs
What are NFTs?
NFTs are “non-fungible tokens”. These are digital things that are unique and can’t be replaced with something else. For example, if you trade in bitcoins, you can trade one Bitcoin for another Bitcoin. But this does not apply to NFTs as they are one-of-a-kind. NFTs are mostly supported by the Ethereum blockchain.
These NFTs can be anything digital. This includes digital paintings, drawings, music, etc. In fact, Twitter co-founder and CEO Jack Dorsey recently sold his very first tweet as an NFT for over $2.9 million. However, a lot of NFTs being sold right now are digital art.
Any NFT – a video, picture, artwork, music file, etc. – can be digitally copied and downloaded. So, why would anyone pay for them? Buying an NFT gives you what others don’t have – ownership of the work. It is to be noted that the creator/artist can still retain the copyright and reproduction rights.