NFT marketplaces are removing artist royalties from Secondary sales. This is not something we should support or encourage by using these market places with Zero royalties applied.

On Oct, 27 LooksRare the second largest NFT marketplace announced that it would no longer collect and distribute artist royalties. It's going to give the artist a 0.5% cut of sales which is much lower than the 5 to 8% that most artist set on their NFTs.

another NFT marketplace X2Y2 tweeted on August 25th that it would let the buyer choose what percentage of the sale would be paid back to the artist.

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https://preview.redd.it/6veoem6xmtw91.png?398&format=png&auto=webp&s=a4afb1fbb1aacdfe83efb8545e8e3d2fc2c7b3da

How much is this going to hurt artist income on NFTs?

we can use Reddit Avatars as an example to see what are the amounts artist receive for the initial sales and what they get in royalties from secondary sales. We can look at the two collections with the highest sales from Gen 2 (Spooky Season: Poieeeyee & Spooky Season: Rojom)

From the information Reddit has released the artist receive all of the initial sales amount minus minting, transfer and any type of processing fees. Apple takes 30% off of any app sales so if we figure that 70% of all sales went to the artist it should be close enough to the actual percentage which is probably a bit higher after factoring in Android app sales and direct credit card sales.

These numbers are not exact since I don't have all the information they are an approximation used to show how important royalties are to the artist creating these NFTs. Used the current price of Ethereum for the 2.5% royalty totals.

Popieeeyee

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Rojom

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So even though the artist do make a decent amount of money up front we can see the majority of their income for a project such as Reddit avatars will be coming from royalties.

These two artist will earn more from their royalties than the initial sale which is a one time thing, the royalties will continue to provide income to them for years unless more of these NFT market places continue removing the royalty from artist.

There doesn't seem to be a way right now to make sure the NFTs these artist make continue paying out the royalty that they are expecting when they first created the project, it's been on the market places to honor this but as new marketplaces are starting they are using the zero or chose your own royalty model to attract new users to their platforms. It seems that it is falling on the the users themselves to decide with their wallets if they would like to continue supporting artist or NFT projects by using a market place that honors the royalty fee.