In Brief: Repurposing NFTs; Tuning Out the News

As NFT Fever Cools, Brands Offer Perks Through the Tokens

As the cryptocurrency market has fallen and interest in non-fungible tokens bought with those currencies has waned, brands are trying to create NFTs that offer practical benefits to consumers, The Wall Street Journal reports. 

Non-fungible tokens prove ownership on the blockchain of unique or limited-edition digital images. For brands, NFTs that give consumers a sense of community and access to physical experiences or rewards are most promising now, industry executives say.

At this year’s Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival in April, organizers sold three sets of non-fungible tokens that celebrated the festival’s return after a two-year hiatus during the pandemic. Sold at auction, one set of NFTs comprised 10 tokens that each serve as a lifetime pass for the annual event. Some NFTs gave festivalgoers perks or weekend passes for next year’s event.

Chad Dominic Sahilan, who attended Coachella, said the NFT that accompanied his ticket gave him a free Ferris wheel ride and meant more to him than digital collectibles would. 

Exhausted by Bad News, Americans Tuning It Out 

Americans have grown weary of bad news from the media, Axios reports. Survey data show engagement with news reporting plunged during the first half of this year compared to the same period in 2021, when news engagement was already falling. Constant negative headlines haven’t drawn audiences to match 2020’s record media attention during the pandemic and the election. 

Among the major cable-news networks, CNN and MSNBC lost 47 percent and 33 percent of their prime-time viewership, respectively, during the first half of 2022. By comparison, Fox News’ ratings rose by 12 percent during the same six-month period.

Also, during the first half of this year, news-app sessions for the top-12 most-trafficked publishers dropped by 16 percent, according to Apptopia, a data-intelligence company. Visits to the top-5 U.S. news websites fell by 18 percent, as tracked by data-analytics firm Similarweb. According to NewsWhip, a media-monitoring platform, engagement with news articles on social media plummeted by half, despite more articles being published. 

Companies with Female CEOs, Board Chairs Hire More Women Executives

Companies with female CEOs or board chairs hire more women for leadership roles overall, a new study finds. 

As CNBC reports, data intelligence-firm Altrata’s latest “Global Gender Diversity” report examined the leadership teams of 1,677 publicly traded companies in 20 countries. About 28.2 percent of their board members are female, the report finds.

On the boards studied, 9 percent of directors are women, as are approximately 10 percent of executive directors. Women hold about a third of the companies’ nonexecutive board posts, the report finds.

When taking the 20 countries studied in aggregate, women constitute just 5 percent of those companies’ CEO positions and 19.2 percent of leadership-team memberships. In the United States, female CEOs run 6.8 percent of companies in the Standard & Poor’s 500 index, the report says. 

Organon, a U.S pharmaceutical company that focuses on women’s health, has the highest proportion of female board members studied. Chair Carrie Cox oversees a board of eight other women and four men.

Video-based Social Media Sites Challenge Google Search, Maps

TikTok already threatens Google’s YouTube for market share. And now, TikTok, along with Instagram, is also taking young users from Google’s search and maps services, TechCrunch reports. 

“We keep learning, over and over again, that new internet users don’t have the expectations and the mindset that we have become accustomed to,” said Prabhakar Raghavan, a Google senior vice president. “In our studies, something like 40 percent of young people, when they’re looking for a place for lunch, they don’t go to Google maps or search.” 

Instead, young internet users increasingly search for restaurants and other businesses on TikTok or Instagram. At the same time, 55 percent of product searches now begin on Amazon instead of Google, Raghavan said.

Google’s years of work to organize, curate and recommend businesses and create discovery tools could be lost on young internet users. Raghavan said younger people prefer more “visually rich forms” of search and discovery.