Should digital estates be a "thing" ?

A digital estate is the collection of all the digital assets, accounts and online data a person owns or controls. It’s essentially the online equivalent of your physical estate (like property, money and belongings), but in digital form. For many years, estate planning has only been about tangible wealth. Examples of these includes: property, financial accounts, businesses, physical gold and physical possessions. However, the nature of personal and commercial wealth has changed dramatically in the past two decades. Recently, a large part of what people create, own and monetize is online.

For example, there have been YouTube channels sold for hundreds, thousands, and even millions of dollars. In some cases, this occurs because the channel is closely associated with a recognizable “face” or personal brand that attracts loyal audiences. In other cases, the value lies in the quality and relevance of the information the channel provides. However, it is not only personality-driven channels that attract buyers. Many faceless YouTube channels , especially those built around educational content, explainers or niche topics have also been sold for substantial sums. These channels demonstrate that the real value often lies in the audience, the content library and the revenue streams rather than the identity of the creator.

Beyond YouTube, entire digital businesses now operate with minimal physical infrastructure while generating significant and consistent revenue. Despite the economic value of these online ventures, estate planning has not kept pace with technological change. Digital assets such as YouTube channels, cryptocurrency wallets, subscription-based platforms, domain names, and websites are rarely documented in wills or formal estate plans. As a result, many digital assets remain unaccounted for. In some cases, heirs may not even know these assets exist. In others, access becomes impossible because no one else has the necessary credentials or private keys. When this happens, valuable digital assets can be permanently lost.

In addition to the above, many digital assets do not function like traditional property. For example, when someone creates a social media account or uploads videos to a platform, they often do not fully own the infrastructure that hosts the content. Instead, they operate under the terms-of-service agreements that may limit how accounts can be transferred. An account with millions of followers might generate substantial advertising revenue, but the platform (owned by some other organisation) ultimately controls the account’s existence. This creates uncertainty when trying to treat these assets as part of a traditional estate. In effect, many digital assets sit in a grey zone between personal property, intellectual property and licensed access.

Digital estates also raise a deeper question about the value of data itself. Individuals now produce enormous amounts of information through: content creation, platform engagement, analytics data, personal datasets used for machine learning or automation. In the future, personal data may become increasingly monetizable and transferable, particularly as artificial intelligence systems rely on large datasets for training and optimisation. If data becomes a recognised economic resource, individuals may eventually treat their personal data portfolios as inheritable assets.

As digital assets grow in value, legal frameworks need to evolve to answer salient questions more clearly. Such questions include but is not limited to: can social media accounts be inherited , who owns digital content stored on third-party platforms, how should encrypted assets be transferred legally, what happens to digital businesses without formal succession plans? - and lots of other important questions.

In conclusion, the concept of digital estate reflects a broader shift in how wealth is created and stored in the modern world. All signs indicate we are moving from an economy dominated by physical assets toward one increasingly defined by information, intellectual property, online platforms and data. In that context, the idea of a digital estate should simply be embraced as the next logical evolution of estate planning in a digital society. More discussion then should center around how quickly individuals, institutions and legal systems should adapt to the new reality of wealth creation and transfer.