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What is the Creator Economy

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.

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.

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The Creator's Dilemma in Web2

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 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.

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.

▲ Centralized platform VS decentralized platform

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The paradigm shift brought about by Web3.0

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:

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NFT: Returning Content Ownership and Control to Creators

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.

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Introducing monetary accountability

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.

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▲ Examples of some pioneering Web3 services

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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.

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04

write at the end

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write at the end