The 800 Pound Gorilla in the (NFT) Room is a Penguin

Pudgy Penguins are set to overtake the Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) as the top NFT community on ETH by the floor price (FP) metric. Although FP is a silly way to measure the value of a collection, especially collections with low token counts, it is great blockchain the metric most NFT collectors recognize. I'll suspend my disbelief for this article and go with it.
(By the time this article is published, the roles may have switched! BAYC look about belowwwwww 🤣)
FP aside, there is a great deal we can learn about NFT investing from this seismic shift in the zeitgeist. Here is a list of top lessons that web3 should take in to maximize profitable investment in 2024 web3 culture.

🈸 2024 NFT Culture is All About Real World Assets (RWA)

BAYC represented 2021 cryptobro culture to the core. What are cryptobros?
💮 Cryptobros — Guys without the skills to build in web3 who made money in web3
💮 Skills to build in web3 — Coding, community, content (note the C that is not on the list, collecting)
BAYC were just collectors. They didn't have the coding, community or content skills to actually build anything beyond what the first-party, Yuga Labs, built for them. As such, when the celebrity wave washed over, the Club was left with nothing but collectors waiting for someone else to throw them a party.
Sure, some Apes made stuff, but it was stuff that was generally for other Apes. Mutant Ape Yacht Club is UGLY. There's no point in branding those Apes on any product outside of BAYC; it won't sell. The few lucky BAYCs who didn't drink the mutagen and came up with a product with a saleable face suffered from quality issues. Bored and Hungry is just not good food. Nobody wants an Ape rug except Apes. There were card games, barbecue sauces and liquors — all of which failed to make a splash outside of the web3 and NFT communities.
Penguins, on the other hand, started out with cute plush toys that normal people immediately gravitated towards in normal stores. Unlike BAYC, all the Penguins are cute, family-friendly imagery. Any Penguin can be the frontman for a product, not just a lucky few. Lil Pudgys (the equivalent of MAYC to BAYC) can as well.
So on the RWA front, getting the brand out to actual consumers beyond web3 in a meaningful way, Penguins took the BAYC blueprint and ran off with it.

🈸 Web3 IP 

BAYC and the Made By Apes program made a mess of web3 IP. The Yuga Labs IP program was actually on its way to making some real strides in community based IP until the Made By Apes announcement dropped. 
Before Made By Apes, any Ape could put together a business and start selling. Made By Apes placed Yuga Labs as a definitive middleman for the veracity of a product, taking the power away from the community to build and centralizing authenticity to the Yuga Labs brand. If you haven't met the right Apes at the right convention, your Made By Apes application may simply be forgotten. Or if the Apes cabal doesn't like your product, you don't get the stamp of approval.
It remains to be seen if the Penguins corporation will attempt to usurp power like Yuga Labs, but so far, they are proceeding in a way that allows the community to actually grow the Pudgy Penguins brand. If you have a Penguin, you can build, bottom line. You don't need the permission of a chosen few in the community to get the stamp of approval.

🈸 The Community

BAYC cultivated a community of arrogance. Across the globe, most Apes you ran into were a weird amalgamation of rich suburban wannabe street thug. Not Eminem, who actually grew up poor, but all the rich kids who listen to Eminem and use him as an excuse to yell at their parents for making them cut the lawn. Or not taking out a second mortgage to invest in their Made By Apes business. (That's probably why they grabbed Eminem for an underwhelming promo.)
Penguins are far more laid back. Maybe it's because the FP of Penguins took longer to explode up, ensuring that more level-headed people were able to enter at an affordable price rather than just luckytrade accident whale cryptobros. There's an excitement to build in the Penguin community that you never saw in BAYC, even during its heyday. BAYC Discord was a lot of people feeling entitled to S-tier airdrops and trying to shill goofy Ape derivative projects.

🈸 The Games

Dookey Dash was college toilet bowl humor that's only funny to cryptobros and puts a huge barrier up between BAYC and the 95% of the world population with traditional values. Even cryptobros don't put much weight on that kind of humor. Dookey Dash recently announced new features that went over like a fart in a closet. The audience that was so tickled by this concept in the 2021-22 bull market is no longer enthusiastic about it. If Yuga continues to rely on this narrative to push its first-party content forward, it can expect underwhelming results. And since the entire brand is based on toilet humor, it will take another hit if it tries to pivot.
Penguins are immediately integrating their digital personalities with the world of traditional gaming. Teaming up with the United Emirates of Fun ($UEFN) project and Aeon UGC to produce Pudgy Penguins Fortnite maps creates an easy onboard for web2 gamers. No finding keys in animals' butts — just good old fashioned murder that the whole family can enjoy like normal people.
The Fortnite maps have already produced tens of thousands of dollars of revenue for the UEFN project. More importantly, it is already proven to attract an audience of children and families that can easily scale.

🈸 🈸 What's Next

The NFT community has grown up, and the more mature Penguin community has taken the lead. Thank goodness, because this is a community and a brand that can take web3 into its next phase of integrating fully with normal society. I won't say Apes are done, but let's put it this way: Their Super Bowl commercial just flopped. They should have learned from Digidaidaku that Super Bowl ads call tops, and they should have learned from their previous celebrity wave that celebrities that are unconnected to web3 really don't fly with investors any more.
The 800 pound gorilla in the room is a Penguin, and that's a great thing. The Flappening is happening. Get used to the new meta!