Although you may be right, OpenSea (the NFT Marketplace used in the article) does lazy minting. Of course, one can still not make any money if no one buys the NFT.

The author writes about it here:

> There's a bit of nuance to how OpenSea does things. They do so-called lazy minting. While you may need to pay an initial gas fee to list a new collection, each NFT listing does not require any fees. This works because the NFT is not actually minted yet. It gets officially minted once the buyer pays the gas fees to mint the artwork on the blockchain.

Why is it called "gas" fees?

> Gas is essential to the Ethereum network. It is the fuel that allows it to operate, in the same way that a car needs gasoline to run.

https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/gas/

Smart contracts get compiled into byte code that get run on the blockchain. Each instruction costs a certain amount of money. This fee is called a “gas” fee, because you need to put in enough money to execute your entire contract, which varies by how complex it is, similar to how you need enough gas in your car to drive a certain distance.

The sibling comments appear to be accurate, but I think it’s more helpful to think of gas in this context as the fuel that powers gaslights.

The deceptive kind, follow?