It’s my birthday
I’m not much of a birthday guy. Growing up, it was always lumped together with Christmas or faded into the background with exams and finals.
However, I’d like to take advantage of this day by asking you to share my Substack with someone that’d enjoy my content. Thanks in advance! 🙂
The Evolution of Opensea
Over the past couple of weeks, Opensea has made some announcements around their category and tagging architecture.
TLDR:
Creators can set the categories and tags for their collections
New categories: Gaming, Membership, PFPs, Sports
Deprecated categories that were too broad: Collectibles, Utility
Added tags within categories, eg for Gaming: Card, Strategy, Turn by Turn
Categories and tags won’t have an impact today, but will be “used in the next few months when we launch a completely new way to navigate OpenSea!”
Opensea shared another update today regarding categories and tags:
7000 collections in a week?! Impressive.
TLDR: Categories and tags will be reflected on Opensea UI starting Monday.
A few months ago I broke down Opensea’s announcements and extrapolated them into a broader strategy they were taking.
I even gave them some hypothetical OKRs lol
Why categories and tags?
Categories
Opensea’s homepage changes a few months ago highlighted their emphasis on discoverability.
So why categories and tags?
I believe the first shift was for internal discoverability, while this new move is for internal and external discoverability.
My hypothesis is Opensea has taken internal and external (Google probably) datapoints to inform the category decisions.
Let’s take 2 new category terms, “Sports NFT” and “Gaming NFT” and compare that against “Collectible NFT” on Google search trends.
Though overall search interest for NFTs have cooled down considerably since the frenzy of earlier this year, we can see that search interest for sports and gaming nfts are generally higher than collectible NFTs. Plus, ‘collectible NFT’ is too broad of a term.
I imagine Opensea’s internal datapoints confirm what the public data is suggesting.
Let’s check out the new Sports category:
Cool, there’s tabs set up for different NFT categories.
If I were coming from Google, searching for ‘sports NFTs’ what do I get?
Top search result for a higher volume search term, nice! What happens if I click on the link from Google?
Similar with some subtle differences:
Banner that compliments the category
Copy focused on Sports NFTs
Category bar removed
The user is specifically searching for Sports NFTs, so Opensea is doubling down on that and removing distractions.
Tags
Let’s look at tags. In the example from Opensea’s tweet, one tag under Gaming is ‘Strateg'y’. I don’t see anything for that on Google…yet.
Tags may become a form of sub-categories that are also indexable for search optimization purposes.
Opensea provided a sneak peek of what the revamped homepage would look like with category tabs:
The goal of these category tabs is to make it easier for users to reach their desired destination. There are multiple paths to the end goal of reaching a collection (and ideally purchasing a NFT), and Opensea is making it easier to do so.
[Exists] Google ➡️ Collection
[Exists] Creator ➡️ Collection
[Exists] Opensea ➡️ Collection
[Improving] Google ➡️ Category ➡️ Collection
[Improving] Opensea ➡️ Category ➡️ Collection
[Creating?] Opensea ➡️ Category ➡️ Subcategory (Tag) ➡️ Collection
This reminds me of:
App Stores
I’m highlighting Apple mainly because I’m an Apple user, but all App Stores (and marketplaces for that matter) operate similarly. Category architecture is important — Less steps to reach goal = Higher chance of purchase/checkout.
Of course, they aren’t the same and I’m comparing Opensea on desktop vs. the App Store on mobile. There are still many parallels though.
Opensea’s homepage when there is a Drop:
Apple’s home tab with the App of the Day which has now evolved into a “Today” newsfeed with a featured app at the top:
An Opensea category page:
On Apple, categories used to be more prominent. They’re now grouped into thematic sections and are buried deep within the Apps tab:
Makes you wonder…
Have you downloaded an app before? If so, share or subscribe!
What might be next for Opensea?
These predictions are specific to the consumer-facing marketplace, not their manyyy other efforts related to developer relations, creator partnerships, and other initiatives. Looking at how Apple’s App Store has evolved over the years, here are some potential themes over the medium to longterm (months to years).
Personalization
As with any web3 product, users have to connect their wallet. And what does a site like Opensea get when you do that? Repeat after me:
Let’s go back to Apple for a second. What do they know?
Apps you’ve downloaded
Apps you’ve deleted
App usage
With Opensea you get something similar:
Tokens you have in your wallet
Contracts you’ve interacted with
How you’ve interacted with the tokens and contracts
As of now, Opensea’s home and category pages are the same for all users. The App Store was the same in early days, while also focusing on ‘top’ apps determined by download volume. This is analogous to Opensea’s trending/top sections.
Where’s the App Store at now? Apps are grouped into themes and the Today tab is somewhat personalized.
I believe Opensea will move in a similar direction for wallet-level personalization. Users will shift from self-led discovery to curation-led discovery.
Ads
You heard it here first. Over the past several years, Apple has introduced ads into the App Store. Starting from SERP (search engine results page) and more recently with the announcement of ads in “You Might Also Like” and the Today tab.
PS: Do you see those keywords underneath “game”? That may be one of the applications for the new tags that Opensea will implement.
Comparing this with Opensea, it feels like ads are only a matter of time:
The Battle of Brands vs. Creators
There has been a lot of conversation about creator royalties and marketplace’s roles in helping creators receive them. However, I think another issue will be looming in the coming months: Brands taking over curation and discovery.
Some mobile native apps have ‘made it’ and become brands of their own. A few examples include Angry Birds and social platforms we know and love today like Snap and Tiktok. However, other non-mobile native brands have taken over most of the curated real estate in the App Store.
As an example, I see Pokemon apps featured 2 times on the Today tab, and 8 more times on the Games tab.
Why? Brands = more downloads. More downloads = more purchases. More purchases = more $ for Apple.
Even in the screenshot alone, we see some other notable brands highlighted by Apple:
Marvel (comic books ➡️ movies/toys ➡️ game)
Dragon Ball (manga ➡️ anime ➡️ game)
Call of Duty (console/desktop video game ➡️ mobile game)
There’s a good chance that all these brands will eventually shift into the NFT space, and Opensea would want to be the marketplace of choice for them.
And what’s the current version of this we see? Bored Ape Yacht Club. Looking at the categories, I see the BAYC in Trending, Top, Art, Collectibles, and Virtual Worlds (Otherside).
This isn’t good or bad. This is just where curation may be headed based on other marketplace observations. However, web3 is a still predominantly a space for smaller or web3 native creators and they aren’t afraid to be vocal.
Opensea has continued to exhibit their lead in the NFT marketplace race. I’m curious to see how they maintain and innovate from their position while carefully balancing the multi-sided marketplace they’ve built.
And of course, I want to know if my predictions will be correct in time 😉
See you next week!
