[Feature] Mirror Genesis NFT Minting Will End Tonight

Compiled By: Coinlive
Author: Blockbeats

After months of hiatus, Mirror has once again launched a new feature. On March 9th, Mirror announced on social media that the new feature, Subscribe to Mint, is a new way for creators to turn their subscribers into owners, creating an actively engaged Web3 community.

"Monetization challenges": Mirror's winding exploration path
As the most well-known decentralized writing tool in the Web3 space, Mirror has had a very winding path in exploring the economics of creators. From Editions, the $WRITE competition, crowdfunding, writing NFTs, and more, Mirror has launched seven product features targeting creators, swinging back and forth between 2C and 2B audiences. Despite the team's attempts in many different directions, the results so far have been unsatisfactory. Before we look at the new Subscribe to Mint feature, let's take a look at what Mirror has tried in content creation in the past.

Evolution History of Mirror Creator Tools
In June 2021, Mirror announced the introduction of the Editions feature. Editions is an improvement on NFT auctions that allows multiple users to own a single edition. Early versions are more valuable, incentivizing user participation. It also provides different pricing tiers for NFTs and more cost-effective minting to reward early super fans. It can be applied to crowdfunding projects, replacing physical gifts to reward super fans.

In September 2021, to achieve Sybil-resistant and fair distribution of NFTs to anyone who wants to participate, preventing a single address from minting most of the NFTs, Mirror announced the introduction of a new feature called Heroes. This allowed participants in the $WRITE contest to create an identity, as their pen name or character, and each account could only have one NFT. Free minting and trading were also possible, with a market provided for names that looked rare. However, due to poor performance, this feature was discontinued shortly after.

In September 2021, Mirror opened its crowdfunding feature. The crowdfunding feature includes token representation of members participating in a project, NFT tiers for digital collectibles, a sponsorship platform to reward the top three sponsors, and a crowdfunding editor to simplify crowdfunding creation. Mirror also announced a teaser that it was preparing to open all remaining creation components to the public.

In October 2021, Mirror officially opened all of its new features, including NFT version releases, crowdfunding, NFT editing, revenue sharing and voting, Token Race, auctions, etc. The goal was to support the entire lifecycle of all creators, communities, and DAOs, providing all tools to anyone.

In February 2022, to allow creators to quickly release their own ERC20 tokens on Mirror with enhanced security and efficiency, Mirror released a new feature: the ERC20 Factory contract. This feature allows creators to set token owner and total supply, and also lets users set the contract burn setting, which decides whether the token can be burned, affecting the token's circulating supply and economics.

In May 2022, to allow people to collect important works as digital collectibles, with customizable supply and pricing to promote the development of all great ideas, Mirror released two new features: a leaderboard and collector's personal page, to facilitate the discovery and exploration of writing NFTs released on Mirror.

In July 2022, to allow readers to subscribe to any Mirror publication through their wallets and receive email notifications when new content is published, enabling creators to build a wallet-based Web3 community.

Forced revenue performance
So, did these feature updates bring ideal revenue changes for Mirror creators? According to previous reports, the Editions and writing NFT features that Mirror values most did not bring significant economic value to creators.

As of the end of 2022, the two modules with the highest revenue share for Mirror were crowdfunding and auction functions, with 6,464.26 ETH and 2,787.04 ETH respectively, accounting for 90% of revenue, while writing NFTs only accounted for 210.43 ETH, or 2%.

Mirror user activity is mainly focused on article publishing, particularly from the beginning to the middle of 2022, especially in May when the writing NFT function was officially launched and monthly article releases surpassed 6,000. However, when comparing the revenue data from May, we found that writing NFTs did not bring considerable profits to creators, and crowdfunding events remained the main source of revenue. In other words, monetizing through Mirror is still a "game for whales."

As of the end of 2022, only 8% of the total creators on Mirror, or 7,395 creators, had issued writing NFTs. These creators released a total of 13,000 writing NFT series, comprising 760,000 NFTs, with a total revenue of 149.1 ETH, equivalent to approximately $228,000 USD. The average mint price of a single writing NFT series was $3.06 USD.

As for collectors, as of 2022, a total of 78,000 users have collected writing NFTs on Mirror. Among them, 58.3% have only collected one writing NFT, while nearly 82% have collected no more than three. Most readers have only dabbled in buying NFTs of articles, which reflects the scarcity of high-quality content on the Mirror platform. There are not many articles with collectible value, and in the top ten collectors, the total spending starts to decline rapidly from the second-ranked collector.

Looking at the collection data, the minting and collection of writing NFTs peaked in May, followed by a significant drop in the growth of collections.

While the average collection price briefly increased after the launch of the writing NFT feature, it quickly declined due to the rapid decrease in minting revenue.

On the one hand, there is a lack of good content, and on the other hand, article NFTs do not offer the same privileges as NFT Pass, such as subscribing to read paid content or participating in future content creation.

As a result, readers soon gave article NFTs their own psychological price.

As of the time of writing, the top ten most collected articles on Mirror were almost all project announcements, and all had zero collection costs.

Minting a writing NFT does not necessarily mean that the reader owns the content of the article.

Furthermore, not every Mirror author is a figure of influence like Vitalik, and most articles are unlikely to have traditional collectible value.

Therefore, when a reader collects an article, the value of the article NFT to them lies in displaying their identity as a true fan of the creator and obtaining a qualification certificate for deep interaction with the creator.

Currently, in the eyes of most people, Mirror is still a decentralized content publishing standard.

However, we believe that the market positioning that is more suitable for Mirror is a "chain-based writing community."

In the Web3.0 world that emphasizes community and composability, the primary task of content applications should be to help form and cultivate their own communities. However, whether it is writing NFTs or the later wallet subscription function, Mirror seems to lack the momentum to do so.

Without the ability to develop an audience through Mirror, authors lack the motivation to produce original content, which further leads to a lack of high-quality content on the platform. This is also a problem that many Web3.0 content platforms may face.

Now, after a long hiatus, Mirror has launched a new creator tool, Subscribe To Mint, in an attempt to challenge the "monetization challenge" facing creators.

Will Subscribe To Mint live up to expectations and help Mirror break through its difficulties?

What innovations does Subscribe To Mint bring?
In order to help creators convert their subscribers into holders and create an actively engaged Web3 community, Mirror has launched a new feature called Subscribe to Mint. The operation of Subscribe to Mint is similar to the open edition drop model, but with Mirror-native style elements, including web3 subscriptions and writing NFTs.

With the Subscribe to Mint feature, collectors need to subscribe to the creator's Mirror publication using their email address, to guide a communication channel between the creator and the collector for regular interaction.

This helps to make creators stronger and create deeper connections between creators and the community.

In addition to web3 subscriptions, Subscribe to Mint also includes Writing NFTs, which guide audiences collected on Mirror through Genesis NFT activities.

For example, UFO attracted nearly 8,000 subscribers through the Genesis Pass, and each of their posts has sold out, raising an average of 0.5 ETH.

Mirror officials have claimed that the success of Subscribe to Mint has been demonstrated through new feature tests on various projects on Web3, such as Optimism, which collected 334,000 subscribers and created collectibles to celebrate their achievements last year, and Base, which has already gathered 222,000 subscribers to commemorate the historic collaboration between Base and Optimism.

The famous web3 podcast UFO has also collected 8,000 subscribers as listeners for their podcast.

To celebrate the launch of the new Subscribe to Mint feature, Mirror has also opened its own Genesis NFT free mint. Subscribe to Mint is now in community testing phase and can only be accessed by Mirror Genesis NFT holders to unlock early access to the tool, future product updates, and beta features. The Mirror Genesis NFT minting will end tonight.