Content, tools, and community are the three important factors for the rise of the creator economy. The large-scale rise of the creator economy is not out of touch with the development of social media.
Original title: “Let creators become CEOs, the rise of decentralized creator economy (Creator Economy)”
Written by: Fang Qinyu
Last year, the epidemic promoted the outbreak of the live broadcast industry, and a larger trend behind it was the emerging “Creator Economy” (Creator Economy) on a global scale. Whether it is Douyin or Roblox Corporation, it is essentially the “creator economy”.
More and more platforms are offering subsidies to creators to attract them to continue to provide high-quality content for the platform. Although subsidies may be a drop in the bucket for most creators, it creates the possibility that creators in the head can earn direct income from content to monetize content, instead of using free content to attract traffic for conversion— —The two business models are completely different.
The global social giant Twitter seems to see a model that is more advanced than the “creator economy”, that is, the decentralized creator economy. Twitter announced the launch of the decentralized social media project Bluesky in 2019. The project was cold-launched in August of this year. Twitter founder Jack Dorsey announced that former Zcash (encrypted privacy project) core developer Jay Grabe will Leading Bluesky means “another step in the decentralization of Twitter and social media.”
The biggest difference between the decentralized creator economy and the creator economy of this generation is the distribution of benefits. Due to decentralization, the “intermediary” in the interest chain of “creator-intermediary-social media” may be completely eliminated. Some people may not catch a cold, but the consequences for the centralized world may be shocking. For example, Cheetah Mobile relied on its advertising partnership with FaceBook to achieve rapid growth. In the past, the overseas advertising revenue only reached about US$800,000 per day on the APP side. After FaceBook adjusted its algorithm and opened its advertising platform to more third-party advertising platforms, Cheetah Mobile lost all over 100% of its quarterly revenue growth rate and is heading for a loss year by year.
The disadvantage of creators under the centralized creator economy
Web 2.0 allows users to self-generate content to upload to the Internet. This concept was first proposed by Dale Dougherty, Vice President of O’Reilly Media.
The emergence of online media first divided the cake of traditional media, while the emergence of Web 2.0 redefines content producers and has carried out a profound change in the content industry: content producers are composed of a small number of experts or professional institutions—everyone can It is the content producer, and large-scale platforms use distribution and algorithm mechanisms to basically monopolize the creator’s labor and the way audiences receive information, and become the biggest winner.
In the context of the catalysis of the epidemic and the rise of home culture, the “creator economy” has risen.
The current “Creator Economy” does not protect the interests of creators. Compared with the platform, creators are still at a disadvantage. Most of the shares are extracted by platforms and channels, and they may even have no ownership of brands.
The recent dispute between Li Ziqi and MCN has exposed the weak position of the creators. Due to a dispute with the company, the account of “Li Ziqi” has not been updated for 2 months. Now it has been revealed that Li Jiajia, the actor of “Li Ziqi”, has an equity co-sale contract. Li Jiajia may lose the right to profit and trademark of Li Ziqi’s IP Right, Li Jiajia himself became the company’s content creation tool.
Li Jiajia’s own response to this was “a good means of capital.” The mainstream public opinion also remained on the equity relationship between Li Jiajia and the company and the contract itself, and the “Li Ziqi” brand may be damaged after a fight with Li Jiajia. There is actually no good solution for how to prevent such things in the future.
So, is capital digging holes for content creators? In fact, before the Li Ziqi incident, similar ills had been exposed in the pop music industry and the art field because of the unequal status with the channels.
The pop music industry and the art industry have begun to test the waters of NFT, and are trying to initiate a creator revolution and promote a decentralized creator economy.
Singaporean Chinese singer-songwriter Chen Huan-jen auctioned off his new original work “Nobody gets me” on Opensea in April this year. This is the first time a Chinese singer has sold his music in the form of NFT. Before launching the NFT, he said that the free platform devalues the music value. It is not easy for him to live with musicians of his generation. He expects the next generation of musicians to work harder. He hopes to test the NFT and bring it to the next generation of Chinese-speaking musicians. Dawn.
Rappers such as Jay-Z, Snoop Dogg, Juice J, etc. have also tested NFT in their personal capacity and established direct contact with fans and the community. In addition to singers, some innovative music copyright platforms are also seeking decentralization in order to break the current monopoly of digital music giants, such as Audius, Voice Street, Melos, etc., to tilt creators, and use the circular economy within the platform to encourage, Attract creators.
The NFT art trading platform is the most direct for the royalty reform of artists. After the emergence of platforms such as Opensea, each circulation of artworks means that artists can enjoy a share from it.
Decentralization of social media
Content, tools, and community are the three important factors for the rise of the creator economy. The large-scale rise of the creator economy is not out of touch with the development of social media.
It is precisely because creators have more motivation to make personalized expressions on social networks, and the content produced also has monetization value, so there is a broad “creator economy”, and in this process, social networks are designed for creators “Like”, “Follow”, “Subscribe”, and “Repost” are all key buttons to pave the way for the creator economy, and the essence of the creator economy is the creator’s capital-on social media, it is expressed as the user’s self Generate capital.
Without decentralized social media, decentralized content creation platforms are niche. NFT, as a means of payment or identity symbol for carrying cultural content, will promote the historical process of decentralized social media. Therefore, Twitter’s enthusiasm for NFT is not accidental. The driving force behind Twitter’s enthusiasm for NFT is the development from decentralized social media to a decentralized creator economy.
In 2019, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey stated on his Twitter that centralized social media has encountered obstacles in development, and Twitter has begun to study decentralized social media. Jack Dorsey mentioned that Twitter once had the opportunity to develop into a decentralized Internet standard application such as the email protocol SMTP. However, due to the situation at that time, Twitter finally chose a different development path and became the present. Social media.
In addition, he believes that building a decentralized media department and looking for publicly formulated standards will also help solve the current proliferation of false information in centralized social media and the bad ethos of keyboard man.
With the explosive development of NFT this year, Twitter restarted the plan that had been stranded and announced it in a high profile this month. These measures are actually interlocking. The first is to change an important function of the creator economy “reward”, support encrypted payment, try to verify the user’s NFT avatar, and set up a fund at the same time. In fact, it is to solve the problems of payment, identity verification and content monetization for the future of decentralized social media. In this series of measures, there is also the issue of social currency that needs to be dealt with urgently in order to connect creators, fans, and communities more smoothly. .
As of press time, Twitter executives have released a video about the new feature that users can set NFT personal avatars, which shows that Twitter is ready.
The decentralized creator economy must participate in decentralized social media. That is to say, it is not enough to have Netflix, HBO, and Disney. Facebook and Twitter are also needed to join. Only with decentralized social media can a decentralized content production ecosystem be built faster, and the right to speak will be given to creators-everyone is a creator, and the creator becomes his own CEO.
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