Monetization has always been a top priority for Creators.
After they discovered from 00' to 10's they could monetize their audience through Web2 platforms and that it was possible to earn a living from their passion, Creators then realized from 10' to 20 they could actually BE the brand, BE the product, and could do for them what they were doing for others.
Indeed, the emergence of new technologies cumulated to a paradigm shift in how GenZs see the Work has led us to a new era for creators.
Crypto, and tokens specifically, seem to be the path to help these creators achieve financial freedom and live from their passion, creating content online. Even major Creator-focused Web2 companies already understood. Tokens can revolutionize how creators make money online. Patreon is already looking into crypto tokens as another way for creators to monetize communities.
So how and why tokens, through Ownership and direct value creation, will replace the old ads/brand sponsorship monetization framework? And how will creators leverage this technology and monetize their audience compared to the traditional way? That's what we're going to find out in this essay. Let's get into it. 🔥
The Creator Economy results from a complete paradigm shift in the way more people, and GenZs specifically, are seeing the Work. It's indeed more and more common to post on the internet, share photos, join forums, curate articles and make money out of it. The internet levels the playing field, and anyone can use their hustle and savvy to amass a following and monetize that following.
However, there are still two major problems for creators today: Ownership and Monetization.
Creators don't have Ownership because of the ads-driven business model most Web2 social platforms, where creators build their audience, are using. Indeed, in Web2, the process of monetization for platform usually goes something like this:
But this outdated business model forces current social networks to keep a walled garden around their content. Indeed, opening their data would mean killing their business model. Their main way to monetize is to sell those data to for-profit companies to target specific audiences. This business model gives users and creators no choice but to continue using these apps as they have already created an audience on these platforms. On top of that, this business model creates a situation where creators who actually produce the content are underpaid, under-monetized, and don't fully capture the value they are making.
With this broken ads-driven Business Model, creators don't have much choice but to rent the audience they don't really own to brands keen to pay a lot of money to access it. As you can imagine, this model is unsustainable for creators, and we need to give them back Ownership over their content and ways to monetize it more efficiently.
There's a famous essay written by Kevin Kelly called "1,000 True Fans," predicting that the internet would allow more people to make a living off their creations. Rather than pursuing widespread celebrity, he argued, creators only needed to engage a modest base of "true fans"—those who will "buy anything you produce"—to the tune of $100 per fan per year (for a total annual income of $100,000). Li Jin later argued creators would eventually need only 100 true fans to make a living off their passion.
I believe Li Jin is right. New crypto technologies allow creators to monetize their content more efficiently. In recent months, and with creators becoming increasingly aware of Web3's capabilities, we saw more of them experimenting with new monetization models and earning life-changing money.
While there are many ways for creators to leverage the crypto technology , it seems there are two main ways for them to monetize more efficiently their content: