Gauging cryptocurrency, NFT appetite across OTT, music, social audiences

Introduction

Despite relatively light uptake among the general public — with 19% of U.S. online adults trading cryptocurrency in the last six months and just 7% buying or selling nonfungible tokens — a host of big media firms, tech giants, game publishers and financial service providers are jockeying to stake their claims in the nascent digital asset sector.

* Potential use cases spanning streaming video, e-commerce, music, social media and mobile payments have seen Alphabet, Amazon, Disney, and Meta and others actively exploring cryptos and nonfungible tokens, or NFTs.

* Early adopters in the U.S. for both crypto and NFT trading tend to skew male, young and relatively affluent.

* While Apple has largely adopted a wait-and-see attitude toward crypto and NFTs, its services, including Apple Pay, Apple One, Apple Music and Apple TV+, have high percentages of users that trade digital assets.

Big media firms including Walt Disney Co., Warner Media LLC and Fox Corp. are actively exploring digital assets as a way of monetizing intellectual property, popular franchises and digital content such as sports highlights. Most early use cases have revolved around creating NFTs for digital collectibles linked to popular TV shows and movies, video games and athletes such as Tom Brady and Tony Hawk. While streaming service operators could eventually accept cryptocurrency as subscription payment options, most investment and development efforts have been focused on NFTs.

Results from Kagan's U.S. Consumer Insights survey of 2,519 internet adults conducted in March show that more than half of active NFT traders are also users of Netflix Inc. (56%) and Amazon.com Inc. Prime Video (53%), roughly in line with overall survey respondent usage of those services. Hulu, Disney+, HBO Max and Apple TV+, however, registered much higher usage among NFT traders versus total respondents, suggesting those service users could have outsized appetites for NFT-related features.

Among niche services, ESPN+ and Twitch also saw a big jump among NFT users when compared to other services, sporting high marks for NFT users as a percentage of the service user base at 20% and 19%, respectively.

Big tech firms and retailers including Amazon, Apple Inc. and Walmart Inc. have yet to directly embrace cryptocurrency as a form of payment but respondents who used Amazon Prime, Apple One and Walmart+ were also very likely to be active crypto and NFT traders. Crypto traders made up more than half (52%) of all Apple One users and almost one-quarter (23%) of all Amazon Prime users. Many e-commerce operators and big retailers have taken a cautious stance when it comes to directly accepting crypto payments, although both Amazon and Walmart have been rumored to be exploring the possibility of creating their own cryptocurrencies and NFTs.

Streaming music service providers are also eyeing the NFT space, with the technology potentially supporting collectible albums and songs as well as being a mechanism to support the sale of tickets, backstage passes and other merchandise. Blockchain technology and cryptocurrency could also potentially offer royalty tracking and payment mechanisms that could simplify the process of streaming music services compensating artists and musicians.

Alphabet Inc.'s YouTube Music, Spotify Technology SA's Spotify, Pandora, Amazon Music and Apple Music were popular across both crypto and NFT traders, with Apple Music notably seeing a significant boost in usage among digital asset traders as compared with total respondents. While only 6% of total survey respondents reported using SoundCloud, those that did were avid cryptocurrency adopters, representing 55% of all SoundCloud users in the U.S.

Social media operators such as Meta Platforms Inc., Snap Inc., Twitter Inc. and Beijing Byte Dance Telecommunications Co. Ltd.'s TikTok are potentially natural fits for both cryptocurrency and NFT applications, especially given Meta's metaverse ambitions and massive global audience bases for many services. Meta's efforts to launch its own cryptocurrency fizzled out in 2022 amid intense regulatory scrutiny but enabling payments via established cryptocurrency services could be a more achievable goal across its Facebook, Facebook Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp services.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg also announced in March plans to support NFTs on Instagram, initially enabling users to bring existing NFTs to their Instagram accounts along with future goals of possibly minting new NFTs on the platform itself. Twitter has also experimented with allowing Twitter Blue paid subscribers the ability to display NFTs as their profile pictures as well as enabling tipping with bitcoin as part of its Tips feature to direct payments to content creators and fundraising efforts.

Payment services are perhaps the most obvious fit for cryptocurrency applications and several popular services — including PayPal, Cash App and Venmo — are supporting sending and receiving at least some cryptocurrencies for U.S. users. PayPal easily outpaced other services for both usage among total respondents and usage by crypto traders while Apple Pay, Google Pay and Cash App saw big bumps in usage among crypto users compared to the total survey, as well as a high percentage of each service's user base involved in buying and selling cryptocurrency.

Pulling together top services across sectors that are most often used by crypto and NFT traders produces an interesting list. Some widely used services across all survey respondents unsurprisingly make both lists — Facebook, Netflix, Amazon Prime, Prime Video and PayPal — but others such as Instagram, Walmart+ and several Apple services (Apple Pay, Apple One and Apple Music) are noticeably more popular with digital asset enthusiasts than with the total base.

^{Data presented in this article and the associated Excel banner file was collected from Kagan's U.S. Consumer Insights survey conducted in March 2022. The survey totaled 2,519 internet adults with a margin of error of +/- 1.9 percentage points at the 95% confidence level. Percentages are rounded to the nearest whole number. Survey data should only be used to identify general market characteristics and directional trends.}

^{Consumer Insights is a regular feature from Kagan, a media research group within S&P Global Market Intelligence's TMT offering, providing exclusive research and commentary.}