Digital Real Estate Is a Hot New Thing—How You Can Invest in It

When it comes to investing, there are numerous ways to make money online, whether it's through trading, ads, a YouTube channel, or a website. Digital real estate is the latest thing in the investment world.

Companies and individual investors alike are making their way into virtual real estate. Here's a guide to what digital real estate is, why you would want to invest in it, and how you can do so.

Digital real estate refers to digital assets or virtual property. Examples of that can be a website, blog, or even a domain name. Domains can be viewed as a home just as a piece of property in the real world can be used to "house" a business or a family. While domains can house a website, they can also represent a brand. Consider company’s like Meta (previously called Facebook), Twitter, and Instagram. Within each app is a type of digital real estate.

On Instagram when a person wants to promote a picture or ad, the post is elevated and marketed to a larger audience. The person or company seeking to promote their post pays for the promotional marketing and Instagram makes money from that, just as a landlord would collect rent or a bank collecting a mortgage. Other sites like Shopify work in a similar way—functioning as a digital commercial space. People are allowed to house their products on a Shopify website and pay a percentage of their revenue to Shopify for their services.

With more monetizing features becoming available on social media, digital real estate is reaching new heights for income opportunities. Twitter users can monetize videos and tweets. Twitter created a Tip Jar that allows followers to tip their favorite accounts. If you have an account with over 10,000 followers and you produce a minimum of 25 tweets every month, you qualify for Super Follows. This feature allows the account to create a subscription service. Subscribers or "super followers" get access to special tweets and replies.

Creators take between 80 percent and 97 percent of the revenue. By participating in a feature such as this, you turn your social media account into a type of digital real estate. There are various ways to get into digital real estate like buying or building a website. When creating a website, the user can implement things such as affiliate marketing, selling ad space, or doing sponsored content.

Another popular way to get into digital real estate is through Metaverse and Decentraland. In the Sandbox metaverse, users can buy pieces of land using SAND cryptocurrency. Each unit of land in the metaverse functions as its own unique NFT. On the “LAND” the developer can create various features which they can charge for. Similar to Sandbox, Decentraland is another digital universe where people can obtain virtual real estate.

For Decentraland, the crypto used to buy parcels of LAND is MANA. When a person buys a piece of LAND, they can create their own virtual worlds and even merge LANDS with other landowners in the metaverse. The opportunities to acquire digital real estate are plentiful and available to any investor who is interested.