In the world of Web3, the "creator economy" will rule the new era
Many years ago, the "mainstream media" dominated the worlds of entertainment and journalism. A handful of companies control what most of us read, watch and listen to. In order to be part of the conversation, we have to be employed by one of these media conglomerates, or make ourselves important enough to be featured in the stories they tell. Every day we watch pre-scheduled TV programs, listen to pre-recorded radio programs, read newspapers written by journalists on editorial orders and books and magazines established by major publishers, and even spend evenings in movie theaters watching a small number of productions. Movies released by studios.
However, the Internet changed everything. It was a very slow and tortuous process, but the medium was dispersed over time. We found a lot of different types of content that we hadn't been exposed to before, and that we would have loved. What's more, much of this content doesn't belong to traditional media companies, it's more like it's written, spoken or filmed by regular people like us. So, in a sense, the Internet has given people the confidence to produce their own content. Today, people are happily consuming the content produced and distributed by these content creators without having to endure the lack of information brought about by traditional companies for various reasons. This is the era of the creator economy, a very different era.
Before introducing what is the "creator economy" in detail, let's have a rough understanding of the development stage of the world economy:
A century ago, people lived in an industrial economy, the age of manufacturing. Most people (at least men) earn money by exerting their physical labor in some form of factory (or "modern farming" with improved farming methods). Most people make "stuff" for a living.
However, by the 1950s, after the Great Depression and World War II, people gradually transitioned to a consumer economy, and in search of more ways to spend their money, people began to earn income by providing services to others. Trade flows became more global and people wanted more "goods" from all over the world. For example, TV, as a classic medium of traditional media, can timely and fully display the latest and greatest products. It continuously encourages people to spend more on consumer goods to keep up with the pace of the consumer economy era.
In the Internet age, people have entered the era of knowledge economy. Advanced science and technology have eliminated many traditional jobs, especially in manufacturing and some services. This development context has provided favorable conditions for the birth of the creator economy model, where people seem to have found a way to make money simply by marketing their "practical or silly" skills, offbeat hobbies and interests online.
What is a creator economy?
As the Internet continues to evolve, the fundamental paradigm of the Internet has changed. People are no longer just using it for information gathering and storage, but many new potential uses have been discovered, such as social media and video sharing. The creator economy has grown out of the internet giving people the opportunity to express themselves online. In many ways, the creator economy is made up of people working on their dream jobs, and it gives people the chance to focus on their passions. People of the previous generation may have to go to work in traditional shops, offices or factories, and go home at night to participate in some leisure activities that they don’t like. The dream of the professional they secretly hope to be the most is handed over to Taiwan. Actors, musicians and athletes on the Internet "in their place". And now, more people can make money from their passions and dreams. Who would have thought that an average student could sit at home and play computer games for a living. And how many amateur writers would expect that they could earn more handsomely from their craft than professionals? All of these changes are the "creator economy".
The relationship between DAO and "creator economy"
In the past 2021 annual inventory reports, no matter whether it is A16 or Messari, as long as there is any content related to the "2022 hottest label forecast", you will inevitably see "DAO" and "creator economy". The image of a key word. The reason is that the natural attributes of DAO determine that it is the optimal carrier that can carry the "creator" economy today (or even in the future?).
A Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) started as a simple concept: an organization, created by an idea and driven by developers, to automate business functions and processes by leveraging all the fundamental principles of smart contracts and blockchain. The core idea is to flatten the complex business processes that various organizations are struggling with, and promote the transfer of assets to a very future-oriented digital interaction direction (let me call it D2C), also called "completely eliminate centralization". By replacing intermediaries (hubs), DAOs themselves act as digital intermediaries that provide transparency and scale, giving them the status of organizations without the traditional organizational structures of entities, groups, governance, charters, and other forms of collective action. So far, while the traditional centralized organizational structure is being challenged, the development of DAO is giving birth to a new creator economy, which brings together artists, lawyers, self-media and creators from all over the world to create ideas.
In a permissionless cryptoeconomic system based on blockchain and Web3 technologies, DAO provides a unique structure that can naturally support a creator economy, community tokens. As a hub of interest for creators (individuals or groups) and their communities, community tokens not only decouple traffic and implementation, but also greatly improve the availability of community resources. With the help of community tokens, the community's support for creators is no longer one-time consumption, but to obtain asset rights in the form of investment, and participants who jointly build the community can also obtain corresponding returns (short positions or rewards). Through this structure creators can fully utilize their talents and time, obtain flexibility and benefits, and use it to promote the development and construction of the community. Creators and DAO embody a natural governance structure, which I call "Borderless Online Collaboration between Indigenous People and Native Projects in the Web3 Era".
Some suggestions for realizing the real borderless collaboration between DAO and "creator economy" in the future
1. Provide creators with broader ownership and convenience
Ownership comes in different forms: creators increasingly value owning a neutral channel of communication with their audience and expect to have a direct monetization relationship with end users. Some creators have also set up their own websites, possibly self-hosted using their own domain names, as a way of building more direct fan relationships. Creator and user ownership of data, relationships, content, identities, and interactions will weaken platform lock-in and lead to a shift of power from platforms to actors, enabling them to operate outside the few.
But we can go a step further and let creators and users control their own destiny: the software itself can become community owned and operated. In a cryptonetwork, this may require the distribution of tokens that confer governance rights. Whereas in the Web2 platform, user ownership can take the form of participating in the community as investors and advisors (possibly enabled through tools such as Fairmint, Republic, Cabal or Stonks). For DAO organizations, making creators core members of the team can make creators more motivated to contribute to the community they jointly own, provide creators with opportunities to make decisions that contribute to the success of the community, and engage with them on the platform Create incentive alignment among participants.
Regarding the content itself: While most Web2 platforms do not claim ownership of user content, they grant the platform the right to use, distribute and modify their work. For example, Instagram's terms of use state, "You hereby grant us a non-exclusive, royalty-free, transferable, sublicensable worldwide license to host, use, distribute, modify, perform, reproduce, publicly perform or display, translate and content creation derivative works.” In other words, users are effectively handing over control of how, where, when, and under what circumstances images can be reused to the platform—losing ownership and control, resulting in their Devaluation and commoditization of content. But we can go further along this path of controlling our destiny. We can decentralize the whole thing, content management system, content storage, domain name system.
2. Credible neutral creator mechanism
Vitalik Buterin writes about the importance of establishing a trusted neutral mechanism, in which he describes, "If it is easy to see that a mechanism does not discriminate against or oppose any particular mechanism just by looking at its design, then it is a trusted neutral mechanism .” The four elements of credible neutrality are:
(1) Do not write specific people or specific outcomes into mechanisms,
(2) open source and publicly verifiable implementation,
(3) Keep it simple
(4) Don't change it too frequently.
Another way to think about credible neutrality is the idea of a "veil of ignorance." In this thought experiment, citizens are asked to make choices about society from behind a "veil of ignorance" without knowing their gender, race, ability, taste, wealth, or social status. Correspondingly, applying the "veil of ignorance" to creator platforms enables one to test the fairness and impartiality of policies, monetization mechanisms, funding and product mechanisms. It's easy to see how today's Web2 platforms lack trusted neutrality and fail to reason through a "veil of ignorance": algorithms that decide what content to display are not publicly verifiable, and removing certain creators or content happens arbitrarily. Facebook's (now Meta) Oversight Board, for example, is an imperfect attempt at credible neutrality, with 20 people in charge of the Content Review Board division, all of which are effectively appointed within the company. In contrast, Mirror WRITE RACE (for example) is a weekly public voting process in which existing users of the community-owned and operated publishing platform Mirror decide which new members to bring in. "Are we, the Mirror team, the sole gatekeepers of the platform? Is this fully in line with our values? Do we even have the time to do so? The answer is no, no, no," the team wrote. While potential members may not like the results, But the process is open, neutral and publicly verifiable.
3. Creator-friendly business model
A business model defines the incentives that drive user-generated content. Offering a more direct monetization model (where users pay creators) can encourage creators to align their content with value to end users, rather than creating content that maximizes watch time or virality. Additionally, the platform should set a minimum withdrawal rate. Bill Gurley outlines the strategy behind platform charging rates in his post: "In order for your platform to be the 'defining' place to trade, you need industry-leading pricing" Candidates are able to increase their acceptance rate for better placement. This is in stark contrast to most creator platforms today, which set take-up rates unilaterally and sometimes even backwards.
4. Creator interdependence and solidarity
In today’s creator economy, as it exists on centralized social platforms, creators face direct competition with each other, constantly vying for fleeting attention. Looking forward to the future, I hope that a better community platform and a more benign competition mechanism can be established to encourage creators to support each other, rather than the success of one creator today at the expense of the success of another creator.
