Time’s Keith Grossman and the Lure of Web3 Media

It’s no secret that Web3’s relationship with the mainstream media has been contentious at times. But one of the media’s most respected heritage organizations, Time magazine, has been at the forefront of Web3 integration for two years. After officially launching The Genesis Collection for TIMEPieces, the publication’s Web3 community initiative, last September, the media’s NFT effort generated $10 million in NFT sales by 2021 and has collaborated with hundreds of artists to date.

Time President Keith Grossman spoke today on a panel during nft now and Mana Commons The Gateway: A Web3 Metropolis. The media veteran, who recently announced he would be leaving the organization after accepting the role of President of Enterprise at MoonPay, touched on Time’s role as a leader in the media landscape regarding Web3, the future of journalism, the origin story and success of TIMEPieces, and more.

“It’s easy today to be up here and talk about the success that TIME has had for the past two years in Web3,” Grossman said of the publication’s impact on the space. “It’s very important to remember that in March 2021 when we said we were going to go into Web3 properly, we were ridiculed. But what’s really important is what’s driving this. Not the market, right? What is it really who runs Web3? What I saw were people’s digital identities. [Before] 2020, when we were all isolated, our digital personas were nice additions to our physical bodies. In 2020, we realized that our digital personas are equal to our physical lives.”

Grossman told the audience the story of his first Web3 explorations at the Clubhouse in April 2020. The fact that Chris Torres, the creator of the Nyan Cat meme, had sold his creation on the blockchain for 300 ETH (almost $600,000) just a couple of months earlier was at Grossman when he began formulating his thoughts on the potential of blockchain-based technology. “[I told people,] Do you understand why a cat with a body made of poop that farts a rainbow only went for $500,000?” Grossman recalled. “Everyone just looked at me like I was crazy.”

Spending more time at the Clubhouse, Grossman slowly began to piece together the basics of NFTs, including how Web3 communities worked and how token-gated access worked.

Time Magazine’s First Blockchain Experiment

Grossman also told the story of how he somehow stumbled upon the discovery of the power of Web3. After being put in touch with Guy Oseary, the boss of the Bored Ape Yacht Club and Madonna, among many others, Oseary arranged a sort of Web3 speed dating on behalf of Time to find out who might be interested in collaborating with the publication. Grossman eventually met with “the only two people who would ultimately take my call” regarding what Time aimed to do.

“No one would answer my phone,” Grossman explained. “I called everyone. Every platform. No one would take seriously what Time did to get into Web3.” One of the people who took Grossman seriously was John Crain at SuperRare, who offered the publication the opportunity to make a mark on their platform. Crain then loaned Grossman some ETH and walked him through how to make something SuperRare .Grossman’s knowledge that the blockchain was still in its infancy at the time meant that minting something meant it was private at his own expense and could not be seen by anyone else.

With this in mind, Grossman then minted three iconic ones Time magazine cover: “Is God Dead?” from April 1966, “Is Truth Dead?” from April 2017, and “Is Fiat Dead?” from March 2021. Shortly after, he received a bid for “Is God Dead” for $15,000. Crain advised Grossman to cancel the bid as he believed the cover was worth much more. Grossman did, and after enduring a few days without a cover bid (followed by ridicule from Web3 spectators and skeptics who watched the magazine’s experiment play out in real time), he received a cover bid of $440,000.

“I started to understand more how the one-of-one market worked,” Grossman said. “[I saw that] it’s a lot like episodic advertising in the media.” A few months later, Grossman saw that SuperRare had launched a DAO, issuing RARE, the DAO’s original token, in the process. After combing through his inbox, Grossman found an email from SuperRare asking him to claim his tokens.

“I claimed [them], and my jaw hit the ground,” Grossman recalled. “We had done so much business [on the platform] that Time had earned $1.4 million with RARE tokens. I converted it to Ethereum immediately. […] I converted it to cash. I sent another million dollars in cash Time, and I kept $400,000. And that actually paid for the launch of TIMEPieces. So I never had a conversation with a business partner or a single meeting with anyone. I funded literally all TIMEPieces from this DAO convergence.”

The future of Web3 and media

Grossman also commented on the current state of Web3 – specifically which communities are thriving and which are not.

“You can either be a greed-based community, or you can be a value-based community,” Grossman emphasized. “In bull markets, greed-based societies arise; in bear markets, value-based tend to be the ones that survive.” The exciting Time The president’s thoughts on the future of journalism similarly drew on a divide between good and bad actors in the space. In an apparent post-truth environment, both citizen journalism and mob journalism have seen a sharp rise, Grossman explained.

“Citizen journalism is individuals who use Etherscan and present an objective perspective on what happened. You can see it, Grossman said. “One of the most beautiful aspects is its openness. Mob journalism is, ‘How many people can I get in a room and how sensational can I make this?'” It can be funny, it can be entertaining – that’s not journalism. Citizen journalism is incredibly powerful You see it in Iran. […] I just worry about the frustration that is taking place between disjointed coverage in mainstream journalism and citizen journalism that has elevated mob journalism.”

Grossman drew an analogy between the development of the media and the use of horses in transport over the past hundred years in the United States. During the early days of expansionism on the continent, horses were mass transportation, Grossman elaborated. With the arrival of the train, they were located transport. But when cars came, the horses didn’t disappear, they were simply relegated to a few special sectors of society – one of which was only available to the wealthy. With so many publications now requiring paywalls for readers to access their content, Grossman noted that exceptionally good media is now similarly becoming available only to the wealthy.

“Over the coming years, depending on legislation, it will be very interesting to see where the media goes,” Grossman noted.

Grossman admitted that he was confused as to why many legacy media outlets have been relatively cautious about Sam Bankman-Fried and the recent and spectacular fall of crypto exchange FTX. However, conspiracy theories about SBF’s relationship with either journalists or politicians hold little water in his view.

“There’s no scenario where journalists all talk in a room and decide something,” Grossman explained, citing his many years in the media landscape. “There is no scenario where just because he was a big donor to politicians means that politicians will go easy on him because he will have nothing to give them [in the future]. I think [the media] don’t understand the place well enough to understand what really happened. The effective altruism approach he took is so welcome and heartwarming that it’s hard to believe that someone who used money for so much good could also do something so bad. […] It’s not a crypto problem – it’s a bad actor problem.”

Grossman’s transition to MoonPay will be fascinating. The exciting Time President certainly has the enthusiasm and experience to help the web exchange become a major onboarding force in Web3.