Creators and content producers are no longer just publishing content to optimise advertisement and sponsorship revenue. Instead, creators are nurturing new communities and coordinating them through low-cost blockchain tools. There is a plethora of options available: wallets, tokens, decentralised storage, composable software, and new gathering spaces.
Unlike the previous playbook (described by Li Jin), where content is produced in the hope of eventual advertising revenue, web3 creators focus on content as a path to Minimum Viable Audience development. This audience becomes a channel to amplify the creators message (distribution), a source of new members, and a channel to gather community resources (bootstrap a treasury).
All in all, there’s a new generation of creators today. Each is experimenting with new revenue models, and eliminating their reliance on advertisement revenue.
However, unlike Substack and subscriptions, the creator content and community is portable, composable, and cooperative. While Substack is a solution to independent newsletters (the solo venture), web3 creators are building a network of multi-media (and onchain) businesses together.
The creator economy has dozens of creator archetypes. For example: YouTube Video creators, Instagram models, and Twitter influencers. Unlike them, web3 creators do not tie their content to each platform they publish on. Instead, web3 creators use web3 media: platformless, composable, portable, with trustless provenance.
Almost all cases of web3 media today are a combination of a token (the identifier with blockchain metadata) and a piece of content saved on decentralised storage (in-chain, on-chain, Arweave, IPFS, etc).
Production of web3 content has the following benefits:
Web3 media includes any content asset that leverages the blockchain medium. Here is a list of examples, non-exhaustive: