Surely you remember that dazzling moment of societal progress when finance and tech colluded to monetize cartoon apes and pixelated faces? Or, what we now simply call, the “NFT?”
It was all part of those early days of the burgeoning crypto craze, when people religiously checked their Ethereum before they’d even had their morning coffee, and when random celebrities got rich off NFTs like Bored Ape Yacht Club. It felt like a shared cultural fever dream, with people buying digital artworks that could easily be screenshotted and turned into memes on that thing we now call X.
The most intriguing part of this whole NFT boom, though, and the thing that still holds enormous relevance today, was how certain NFT artworks could attract a landslide of attention, climb in value, and become actual status symbols that signaled taste, access, and investment savvy. Despite the fact that, at the end of the day, it was still just a cartoon ape. So how in the world did this cartoon primate net a seven-figure price tag?
This is the question at the heart of new research published in the Journal of Marketing by Vanderbilt Business Assistant Professor of Marketing Eric S. Park and his co-author Jaeyeon Chung of Rice University. Park and Chung examine how consumers form preferences in NFT art markets when the usual evaluative anchors are non-existent or lacking stability.
The Setup
In traditional art markets, buyers generally have signals to lean on. There are galleries, critics, provenance, artist reputation, auction houses, and the trusted art world insiders telling us that the Dannon yogurt lid nailed to the wall of the gallery is a metaphor for humanity.
But where does the value of the NFT come from? For Park and Chung, it focuses on one deceptively simple signal: view counts.
Because NFT art markets operate on less-developed criteria, buyers lack clear standards for judging quality. Without an institutional endorsement or conventional aesthetic criteria, and no real way to know whether an artwork is culturally meaningful or holds financial promise, the NFT’s value ultimately comes down to how many eyeballs are on it.
View counts, of course, do not say who bought it, who came to enjoy it, or who even took meaning from it. As the name suggests, it simply says that other people looked at it. And yet, view counts appear to be enough.
The Research
Applying a multimethod research design, Park and Chung found that view counts really can shape consumer attention and preference in NFT art markets. In one 150-day observational dataset from OpenSea, the researchers tracked nearly 10,000 Bored Ape Yacht Club artworks and found that artworks with higher early view counts accumulated favorites more quickly over time. Attention was less a reflection of popularity and more so a catalyst for it.
The popular NFT became more popular because it was…already popular.
The researchers call this a “snowballing” effect. Early attention creates an advantage. That advantage then becomes visible to later consumers. Later consumers interpret that visibility as meaningful. Then they add more attention, which makes the artwork look even more worth noticing, and all of the sudden, the whole thing starts rolling downhill with the same momentum that forces us to like and comment “Congrats” on your friend’s son’s insurance sales internship.
Beyond real-world exploration, Park and Chung also tested the effect through a pre-registered 20-wave panel study and six experiments. Across these studies, participants were more likely to select highly viewed artworks when view count information was available. The effect held across algorithmically generated, traditional, abstract, and modern digital artwork.
The Results
The importance of these findings is less about why some strange corner of the internet develops unhealthy attachments to cartoon apes and more about understanding how people make decisions in uncertain digital markets.
When consumers do not know how to evaluate something, they look for cues. Sometimes those cues are useful. Other times, they are the marketplace equivalent of seeing a long line outside of Chili’s and assuming something exciting must be happening, when really it was just a deal on cheese sticks. (Which, come to think of it, is actually pretty exciting).
The key mechanism in Park and Chung’s research is investment motivation. When consumers approach NFT art as something to invest in rather than something to personally collect, they become more likely to rely on others’ attention as a proxy for value. The mental conclusions we come to are less “I love this” and more “that Kardashian bought it, and she’s on TV.”
Is it sexy? No. Financially understandable? Absolutely.
Two features of NFT markets intensify that mindset: volatility and digital-only ownership. NFT prices can swing dramatically, and many transactions happen through cryptocurrencies whose values are experiencing their own identity crisis. At the same time, NFT ownership is often purely digital. There is no canvas, no sculpture, and no slightly offensive statue to anchor your rug too. Without tangibility, buyers have less personal attachment, so financial pressures become front of mind.
Park and Chung find that when volatility is reduced, or when digital ownership is paired with a physical component, consumers rely less on view counts. When we give people a clearer or more tangible way to evaluate value, the peanut gallery matters a little less.
For marketers and platform designers, this is incredibly important. View counts may seem like numbers to glaze over, but they are the opposite. They determine what consumers notice, what they value, and which artists or assets snowball in visibility.
This relationship between virality and financial profitability is the larger warning inside the NFT craze. Digital marketplaces do not display consumer behavior but organize it to where a number on a screen can become a signal, a signal can become a preference, and a preference can become a market pattern.
So, during the next crypto fad, it may be worth asking whether people are responding to the thing itself, the market around it, or the irresistible suggestion to buy because everyone did.
Popularity is not always the result of value, but sometimes popularity is the thing creating value.