Market Mix - 📰 Digital Media Mogul

Hey there 👋,

In this week’s newsletter, I discuss:

Cheers!

Richard Patey - @richardpatey

DIGITAL MEDIA

The term digital real estate has been around in our space for a good five years, but its usage has changed.

Looking at when pages first indexed in google, we can see that in 2017 the term was used for marketing actual homes.

Then in 2018, searches started appearing relating to domain names such as Know Your Value: Domain Names as Digital Real Estate by Sam Romain.

2019 was the first year where website flipping appeared under this search term, with Art of Website Flipping: How to Make Money With Digital Real Estate.

In 2020, we started using it in the website investing space, with Juliet covering it in my previous Substack and Flippa publishing an article about it.

Then in 2022, the term was coopted for plots of virtual land in the metaverse, as can be seen on fool.com.

This meta has fallen away with the fall of NFTs such as The Sandbox which peaked at over 4ETH back in Jan 2022 and is now under 0.3ETH (similar situation with BAYC Otherside):

And now in 2023, it was great to see Jason Levin reclaim the term with a post he published this weekend on how to become a digital real estate mogul:

Jason sets out a two step path:

In the post is advice from Greg Isenberg (who runs an 8 figure holdco of community-based businesses) for finding people to help:

Whenever I’ve needed help with my online assets, I’ve always ended up hiring my subscribers, from writing, editing, deal analysis and podcast hosting/editing.

And dealflow of these digital media assets is starting to increase again.

FE International just released their mid year report into the Digital Media Acquisition landscape and deal volume was up 10% in the first quarter of 2023 vs Q4 of 2022, and M&A multiples have now stabilized.

As you know, I view media properties as far more sustainable businesses than websites or FBA. I think it’s only a matter of time before investors and aggregators in these asset classes understand the value in owned media and multiples start to increase.

In coming up for a title for today’s issue, I googled what a medial mogul is, and this definition from Oxford Reference is a great place to finish:

DOMAINS

Escrow recently released their Domain Investment Index for Q2 2023 (download on Domain Name Wire) and the most interesting stat for me was one I previously covered back in June 2020 on my website investing Substack about domain names “with content”.

Back then the value of domains with content, let’s call them websites for short, had been trending down over time, but that trend has now reversed:

And we can see this happening with the aged domain marketplace Odys recently adding a new websites category, and displaying the number of indexed pages (this one comes with 500K words):

I cover these web assets every Monday in the Acquire The Web newsletter, here’s this week’s:

CRYPTO

There’s not much excitement in NFT land right now so this has become a crypto section so that I can cover our fungible token friends.

And the news earlier this week was how 4 wallets managed to acquire 50% of a meme token that launched on the new Coinbase L2 network (built with Optimism) and turned $1K into $1M:

Not bad for a day’s work.

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Disclaimer: Nothing in this email is financial advice and I am not a professional investment adviser. I send weekly updates on digital asset news and what I'm doing personally - consider it informational and for entertainment purposes only.