The Creator Economy Paradigm Leap in Web3: NFTs, Accountability, DAOs, Memetization

Bill Gates once wrote in "Content Is King" published in January 1996: "One of the exciting things about the Internet is that anyone with a personal computer and a modem can post anything they create. Content.” This article laid the foundation stone for the subsequent wave of self-expression on the Internet. In the past two decades, the vigorous development of the Internet has allowed us to witness the explosive growth of the creator economy, and users' initial self-expression hobby has transformed into professional content creation.

So what is the creator economy? Simply put, whether you are a writer, painter, photographer, chef, developer or anyone else with a skill, you have the opportunity to generate income by creating content, and this economic production model is called the creator economy.

The rise of the creator economy depends on the development of various platforms. In China, we have witnessed the prosperity of Official Accounts, Douyin, Xiaohongshu, and Bilibili. There are also social media such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok abroad. Let a hundred flowers bloom. Content creators are no longer at the mercy of production and marketing companies, and creators can obtain potential audiences at low cost on major platforms. At the same time, creators are also looking for more and better ways to monetize content. Common forms include rewards, advertising traffic sharing, membership, business cooperation, etc., as well as subscription platforms such as Internet celebrity organizations and fans. Companies such as Patreon, GoFundMe, OnlyFans, and Substack have also emerged to meet the monetization needs of creators.

To a certain extent, the creator economy is based on the development of the platform economy. After the creators have worked hard and burned the night to produce content, the platform enjoys complete rights to data ownership, user relationships, and traffic distribution. . The platform controls the core monetization mechanism. Tens of millions of creators around the world are the driving force of this mechanism. There is no doubt that the platform is the biggest beneficiary in the creator economic market, not the creators of the content itself.

The creators and the platform are twins, but the platform, as the strong party in the way of traffic and revenue distribution, makes most creators face an embarrassing situation.

Dilemma 1: Creators do not have actual control over their works

In the Web2 creator economic structure, when the creator completes the publication of the work, the file storage, user access data, and monetization process are all integrated by the platform in a centralized manner. The platform is the actual controller of the ownership and distribution rights of these works. Not only that, some platforms may also use their own advantages to force users to sign some unfair agreements, such as exclusive rights, only allowing works to be published on the platform; or being required to give up the right to adapt their works in the future.

In addition, because the ownership of the content does not belong to the creator completely, the copyright of the content cannot be traced back to the source. Some "bringers" in Web2 realize their traffic monetization through the transfer and plagiarism of different accounts on different platforms.

Dilemma 2: The distribution of interests among creators is not fair enough

The platform masters all user information preferences, dominates traffic distribution rules, and content popularity and monetization largely depend on algorithms, triggering a vicious circle of unfair benefit acquisition.

Taking YouTube as an example, 10% of the top bloggers get 90% of the benefits, and the remaining 10% of the benefits are shared by more than 40 million bloggers. The unfair distribution of benefits is evident. The top anchors have benefited from the dividends of early growth, attracting a group of stable content consumers, and after the run, they have paid attention to high-quality creators. Although there is room for substitution and optimization in the content creation of some top bloggers, considering the base of user attention, advertiser resources, and the traffic algorithm of the centralized platform are more biased towards creators who have already gained attention, the result is Only a few creators can climb to the top and make a living. At the same time, except for a very few top creators, most creators do not have enough negotiating power when facing the platform, and it is difficult to get reasonable remuneration for their works.

Dilemma 3: Centralized Intervention Review

The centralized platform has a specific manual review system, which can directly intervene in monetization through content management or comprehensive review. This approach is fluid and lacks transparency, as moderators are likely to decide what content can be viewed or promoted based on their own wishes or moral judgment. Over time, you will find that whether it is algorithm or human intervention, unfair treatment will occur.

Disguised censorship has been criticized in the public domain. It is not uncommon for some bloggers to have their content deleted or their accounts deleted. The relevant data tied to the creators has also disappeared. This opaque operation has affected the enthusiasm of creators to a certain extent.

Dilemma 4: Platforms compete with creators

The user preferences and behavioral data brought by creators are the most valuable assets of the platform. They hope to lock users into their own ecological network to accumulate the largest proprietary database. Therefore, when some top creators are successful on the platform and followed by a large number of loyal users, the platform begins to compete with the creators, such as the termination of the contract between popular singers and record companies, and the top video bloggers being punished due to exclusive agreements. Events such as platform shutdowns also occur from time to time.

With the increasing number of content creators on the platform and the gradual drying up of sustainable monetization capabilities, the level playing field for creators to participate in the platform and share economic benefits through monetization has gradually disappeared.

Dilemma 5: Lack of Accountability Mechanisms

Compared to interactions in the real world, the web is anonymous. Indifference, disconnection, disrespect and other vices on social media are also eroding the platform. Some malicious "keyboard man" behaviors have even caused many content creators to suffer huge negative effects.

Maybe it's not just about anonymity and a lack of online governance, but more about a lack of accountability. Accountability stems from our full trust in the centralized platform. We believe that the platform can introduce measures to punish malicious behavior and protect creators and users from harm, but the facts are contrary to it.

Centralized Platform VS Decentralized Platform

In Web2, attracting users through creators is the original profit method of the platform, in which creators do not directly trade with recipients, but with blockchain technology, creators no longer need to rely on the central platform to push content and realize cash. Based on the infrastructure of blockchain technology, creators can monetize content and directly interact with fans under the social media protocol on the currency layer, which can realize the paradigm shift from Web2 to Web3. Let's take a look at the specific aspects A large jump is produced:

NFT: Returning Content Ownership and Control to Creators

Any unique idea content can be represented by NFT. As a creator, you can connect any creation platform to your wallet address and create an account to start creating. When your creation is complete, your work will be "deposited" into your wallet address as a non-homogeneous token (NFT), and you have absolute ownership. When you want to commercialize your work, you can connect the wallet to any content distribution platform so that your content can be automatically identified. This form of content distribution can provide irrefutable and transparent timestamps and copyright ownership on the public chain, and can also bring new monetization capabilities to artists and knowledge workers.

The monetization process is automatically realized by smart contracts, NFT attribution is realized through decentralized cross-chain oracle machines, and point-to-point performance and content access data analysis and feeds between works and individual users are completed, such as cost per impression (CMP), per click (CPC), subscriptions, ad impressions, etc. Tokens from different works, different platforms, and different protocols will form a liquid settlement network, and the tokens of various protocols will flow into the creator's wallet as the final ecological token of the creator.

Therefore, creators have complete ownership of their works and a monetization network. The same is true for your user relationship, which will be recorded at the protocol layer. No matter which platform you migrate to, all user interaction data such as your user subscriptions, fan relationships, and social records will always be with you.

Introducing monetary accountability

Civility comes from our ability to take clear and enforceable steps for accountability when norms are broken. The Internet does not need brutal censorship or centralized regulators, it only needs a decentralized accountability currency layer to curb bad behavior, reward positive contributions, return to quality and responsibility itself, and continue the real creative content experience, thereby avoiding competition for clicks, Phishing and other provocative behaviors are convenient, thereby positively guiding network civilization.

When the decentralized currency accountability system plays a role on the platform, creators can directly monetize from their fans or other compliant online interactions, avoiding opaque behind-the-scenes operations such as algorithmic and other traffic tilts. This method has both positive and negative effects. Positive: creators can directly get sponsorship and rewards from users; negative: fraud, brutality and other dishonest behaviors will not get any benefits. That is, more precise and democratic reward distribution mechanisms that reduce crude or provocative content, decentralized services that democratize the network by eliminating single points of failure, and equalize financial access channels through P2P structures.

The decentralized network also involves how to investigate spammers and malicious slander in Web3. Web3 social media requires users to deposit minimum collateral tokens in order to interact with the platform. The collateral can be automatically returned to the user within the interaction cycle, but those who spam and maliciously spread rumors will immediately lose the collateral. The price of this behavior is not very high today, and in the future the platform will change the incentives so that it is no longer profitable.

Some examples of pioneering Web3 services

DAO: Let Creators Own Their Own Decentralized Platform

Using blockchain, one can transform the platform into a decentralized community run by creators. At present, many creators have established decentralized platforms with the help of technologies such as blockchain. DAOs and other collective ownership mechanisms create a way to break platforms’ centralized control over creator environments, enabling creators to collaborate without external intermediaries dictating the terms of participation. In a DAO, the governance system is determined by the members, and there is no pressure from outside shareholders to extract profits. In contrast, in a creator DAO, the owners, or participants, are the ones who create, distribute, consume, and value content.

DAOs align incentives with stakeholders and remove the need to extract value, resulting in a democratized, decentralized content landscape. Here, creators can take control of their work, how it is distributed, and how it is valued. Fans who are passionate about creators' works will be willing to pay more for these works, allowing creators to better capture fans' willingness to pay. Ultimately, content creators no longer need to have millions of fan traffic to survive, but It is possible to survive on the funding of a few passionate people.

'Memetization' will inspire greater creative drive

Meme is the Chinese translation of memes, and "memeization" is a unique cultural phenomenon in the development of Web3. Based on the ability of Internet users to quickly copy and spread, many memes (Memes) are completed on the basis of content created by predecessors, more or less referring to interesting, widely spread, and infectious online content, such as A picture with text, or a video, etc. Many "ghost animal" videos we see on station B are also in this category. It stands to reason that subsequent creators should also get a certain amount of remuneration for their secondary creations, but under traditional Internet conditions, it is difficult to trace the history of adaptations of works, so obtaining remuneration for original creations becomes nonsense. In the Web3 era, this problem can be solved to a certain extent. For example, based on Mirror's revenue distribution function, users can not only clearly restore how many predecessors' "memes" the production of a certain work is based on, but also directly give corresponding rewards to the adaptation objects through smart contracts. In this way, people's enthusiasm for originality will be mobilized accordingly.

The creator ecology of Web3 has begun to take shape, whether it is based on the blockchain, NFT underlying system or the self-built token system within the platform. Creators can use ecological tools to complete initial content production, and complete the revenue realization process through platforms, trading markets, communities and other channels. Although Web3 cannot help all creators get complete fairness immediately, it can at least help some creators who need help to obtain freedom of ownership and a relatively fair and transparent market distribution mechanism.

At the same time, the direct dialogue between creators and users is realized through the constructive way of the community, and the spiral positive feedback loop is brought about by the decentralized currency accountability system, so that the excitement of users will spread like wildfire and spread to others , we look forward to Web3 finally bringing us back together.