How Social Cues Drive Popularity in NFT Art Markets

How do consumers form preferences when they cannot rely on established quality standards? This question is examined in the context of nonfungible token (NFT) art markets, where buyers lack evaluative anchors such as provenance, conventional aesthetic criteria, or institutional endorsement. This article demonstrates that view counts, a social cue that reflects others’ attention, are one key attribute. Across a 150-day observational dataset (n = 1,459,979), a preregistered 20-wave panel study, and six experiments, the researchers documented that artworks that attract early views accumulate disproportionately greater attention over time, while other artworks fall further behind. This “snowballing” effect is driven by investment motives. When consumers approach markets with the motive to invest rather than collect, they rely on others’ attention as a proxy for market value. Two structural features of the NFT market amplify this reliance: high price volatility and purely digital ownership, both of which heighten the salience of investment outcomes. By attenuating volatility or introducing tangible ownership cues, this study diminished this reliance on social signals. These findings extend theory on social influence and digital consumption, demonstrating that in the absence of objective quality standards, social cues shift from supplementary information to the primary basis for preference formation.