Paris Hilton will sell NFTs and hold virtual parties in The Sandbox

Paris Hilton announced this week that her company, 11:11 Media, will bring her world to the immersive virtual gaming world of The Sandbox.

There she will launch a “land” where she will interact with fans and sell digital goods. The platform said Hilton “plans social and community events such as rooftop parties and glamorous social experiences in her virtual Malibu mansion” – featuring 11 versions of Hilton-inspired avatars.

The Sandbox, which describes itself as a leading “decentralized virtual world” that is “part virtual estate, part theme park”, has 300 existing partnerships, with the likes of Warner Music Group and video game maker Ubisoft, along with other celebrities such as such as Snoop Dogg and Steve Aoki, along with brands such as The Smurfs and Adidas.

In an exclusive interview with CNBC, Hilton said she wanted to bring her own metaverse from Roblox onto other platforms.

“Snoop Dogg released his world in there, which is incredible, and I was so excited when I saw that,” she said. “I’m really excited to bring the world of Paris all over the world – we’ll be working on a couple of other platforms.”

In The Sandbox, she’ll be selling Paris-inspired NFTs and hosting virtual parties — but she says this is just the beginning of what she hopes to build.

“Right now we’re focusing mostly on the experiences and not the monetization, because that’s just not the focus right now,” Hilton said. “But we’re going to be doing digital wearables and working with different brands, and there are a lot of exciting projects that I can’t announce yet.”

Hilton’s first move into the metaverse was when she built “Paris Hilton World” inside Roblox late last year. She launched the space with a virtual New Year’s party where her avatar DJed. She then DJ’d what she called a “Neon Carnival” festival timed to Coachella. Roblox said Hilton’s virtual world has been visited by nearly 544,000 fans — but that won’t say how much revenue it has generated.

For Hilton, the virtual presence is an opportunity to reach more people – without the 250-days-a-year trips she made before the pandemic.

“On New Year’s Eve I was DJing in the Maldives. It was my honeymoon and I was playing and there were more people in Paris World than there was a New York Times Square,” Hilton said. “At Neon Carnival we had almost half a million people there and in the real party it was 5,000. That’s the power of the metaverse where you can get people from all over the world to enjoy and experience things that are usually, you know, exclusive events .”

Hilton started investing in crypto in 2016 – before crypto’s meteoric rise and fall – and she has been selling NFTs since last April. Before that market dropped more recently, she sold one for over $1 million last year. She has also invested in a number of startups in the space, including Genies, which makes custom avatars and has drawn investments from former Disney CEO Bob Iger, entertainer and model Priyanka Chopra and other luminaries.

Now Hilton is looking at how she can bridge her real-life businesses — such as a tracksuit line — with her digital ones.

“We want to be able to do that [something] where people could buy the tracksuit and then also get a digital version for their avatar to wear,” Hilton said. “That’s what we’re going to be doing a lot of — things that happen in real life, I’m going to let them also happen in the metaverse at the same time.”

And she’s talking to other metaverse platforms to expand her presence. She didn’t say which ones, but said she likes what Facebook parent Meta is doing.

Hilton’s 11:11 Media is private and does not disclose financials, but said the company’s business doubled from last year to this year and that it expects to generate tens of millions of dollars in profit this year.

There’s also no word on what kind of profits — or losses — she’s seen from her crypto investments over the years, but her company said she’s generated $3.5 million in revenue from NFTs this year.

What happens to the metaverse, and the NFTs that she has promoted over the years, it is too early to say.