Note from the author: After one month of case studies, data analysis, and in-depth interviews, as well as sorting out more than 40 Web3.0 projects such as Mirror and Lens, we have built a complete framework for the Web3.0 creator economy. The market's current vague definition of SocialFi has re-proposed the new concept of "CreatorFi". Based on this, this report clarifies the current development status of the Web3.0 creator economy, and makes a prospect of its future imagination.
"Abstract" At the end of 2021, Li Jin published an article titled "Web3: The Golden Age of Creator Economy", which made exciting assumptions about the creator economy in the context of Web3. A wave of the Web3.0 creator economy. With the technical support of the blockchain, the creator economy has taken on a new look. Creators have once again obtained the ownership of the content, with more monetization models, and the relationship with the audience has changed.
In the more than a year since Li Jin's article was published, many meaningful practices and explorations have been born in the field of Web3.0 creator economy. However, unlike mainstream encrypted tracks such as DeFi and NFT, the current Web3.0 creator economy is in its infancy, with a small audience, lack of content production, vague market cognition, and few strong competitors. blue ocean. Through case and data analysis, BlockBeats deeply studied the development status and problems of the Web3.0 creator economy, in order to provide entrepreneurs with a more insightful entrepreneurial direction guide.
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introduction
Before starting this article, we need to understand what is a "creator"? The word "Creator" was first proposed by Youtube in 2011, with the purpose of replacing the non-professional title of "Youtube Star", and was later widely used to address various Users who produce content on Internet platforms. According to Wikipedia, the term "Creator Economy" refers to a new economic model that allows creators to earn income by creating digital content with the assistance of Internet platforms. We can also regard the creator economy as a subset of the Passion Economy, which focuses more on Internet platform content and is a business model in which Internet users build audience communities and generate economic benefits with the help of a series of creator tools .
Li Jin is a former a16z partner and co-founder of Variant Fund. She is also one of the earliest investors and practitioners who focused on the creator economy. She is a senior expert in the creator economy field. Many of her views are oriented to industry practitioners role. In his "Creator Economics Course", Li Jin gave creators a three-tiered definition:
• Creators produce assets for consumption, aiming to create value for the audience and themselves.
• Creators are influencers born out of digital and democratized media channels.
• Creator is a "digital cult leader".
According to Li Jin and others, creators at different stages have different definitions. In fact, people have never had a standard definition on the question of "what is a creator", but no matter what type of creator, they have some common characteristics. Creators emphasize individuals, most of them start their own businesses, and hope to bypass the application portal and directly face their own content consumers.
At the current stage, Internet content creators mainly distribute their own content through social media and other platforms, accumulate fans, and obtain income through brand sponsorship, advertising sharing, paid subscriptions and other models. With the development of social media such as Facebook and Twitter, and streaming media platforms such as Youtube and Spotify, the "creator economy" has gradually become a mainstream economic model in today's society. However, with the popularity of the creator economy, related research reports are constantly entering the public view. Looking at all aspects of the creator economy, we have gradually learned about the many challenges that the creator economy is currently facing.
According to Linktree report data, 66% of creators regard online content creation as a sideline, and 36% of creators have produced content for less than a year. Among these early creators, only 6% earned more than $10,000, 35% did not earn enough to make ends meet, and 59% did not monetize their content at all.
For a creator,Content, audience and business model are the three most important elements in his career, the three of them are closely connected, and are related to the success or failure of creators and their sustainable development. Among them, the content part is the cornerstone of the other two elements. Being able to produce content and loving production content is the basic condition for becoming a creator; the audience is the source of value for creative content, and works without an audience cannot be realized; while the business model is It determines the sustainability of the creator's income, which also directly affects whether the creator can continue to produce high-quality content.
A high-quality creator can continue to produce high-quality content, continuously develop the audience, and build a stable and sustainable source of income on this basis. Due to the development and popularization of Internet technology, the threshold for content creation has been greatly reduced. Most of today's Internet content creators have not received professional training, and most of them rely on their own talents and luck, struggling in the stage of content production and audience development.
Among high-quality creators with content and audience, indirect monetization models such as advertising cooperation have become the mainstream. According to the CBInsights report data, 77% of creators rely on advertising cooperation for monetization, of which 70% of creators earn less than 10% of their total income from cooperation, and 12% of creators make every brand cooperation income of less than $100.
And monopoly streaming media platforms like Youtube and Spotify distribute platform advertising revenue to their creators based on content traffic, and we often hear news that Youtube creators earn millions of dollars a year. However, the vast majority of the traffic revenue of these platforms is allocated to the top 1% of creators on the platform. This model of determining income distribution based on content traffic rather than interaction popularity makes it difficult for most creators with small fan groups to obtain considerable income on these large platforms. Therefore, the creator economy market has also developed relevant application scenarios for audience retention and transfer for these creators.
The creator economy has been built on the basis of Internet socialization from the very beginning. In the era of Web 1.0, subscriptions were made through e-mail, RSS and other communication technologies. After the birth of applications such as Facebook and Twitter, social media platforms became the first front for creators to attract and retain audiences. According to the "Creator Life Cycle", Li Jin divides the creator economy application into three modules:
• Audience acquisition and growth,This is the process by which creators find market fit (CMF). Such applications are mainly social media platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, etc.; in recent years, some short video streaming platforms, such as TikTok, have also been developed. Of course, old midfield video platforms like Youtube are also included.
• Enhance engagement and audience retention,This is the process by which creators cultivate real fans. Most of these applications are portal navigation tools, such as Linktree, ConvertKit, etc., and media applications that can generate deeper interactions with audiences, such as Apple Podcasts, small universe and other podcasting platforms.
• content monetization,This is the process by which creators build a business model. This type of application has a clear business model, and creators can guide real fans to realize content monetization on these platforms according to their own creative forms, such as Substack, Only fans, etc.
With the rise of short video streaming platforms such as TikTok and Instagram that reduce the difficulty of creation, as well as audience retention and content monetization platforms such as WeChat public accounts, Substack, and Only fans, the creator economy has once again gained vitality. In 2021, Spotify founder Daniel Ek even bluntly stated that he would vigorously develop the creator economy on the Spotify platform in the fourth quarter earnings conference.
Also in the same year, the SocialFi track with the slogan "Decentralize Social Media" gradually emerged. The core concept of SocialFi is to build a cross-platform, composable social network for users on the premise that users have data ownership, and provide economic compensation and incentives for creators and audiences during the interaction process. It advocates removing data barriers between centralized platforms and helping creators better achieve audience retention and content monetization.
Of course, to realize this vision requires a completely different technical structure from Web2.0. In the context of Web2.0, applications independently control everything from data storage to user interaction, and the industry presents a point-like layout. Web3.0 realizes the technology stack based on composability, thus presenting a more three-dimensional ribbon layout. Currently, the technology stack of the Web3.0 creator economy has three layers:
• chain layer,This layer mainly includes decentralized storage infrastructure, such as IPFS, Arweave, ceramic, Livepeer, etc., as well as application chains optimized for content social interaction, such as CrossBell, Farcaster, DeSo, etc., which provide the basis and guarantee for data rights confirmation.
• protocol layer,This layer includes social protocols based on public chains, such as Lens, Orbis, etc., to ensure the ownership and composability of social relationships.
• application layer,This layer includes content applications based on protocols and application chains, providing a user experience that competes with Web2.0. Such as Mirror, music NFT applications, etc.
If the technical structure of Web3.0 is regarded as a technical upgrade of the traditional Web2.0 creator economy, then ideally, the Web3.0 creator economy will have the same or even larger potential market as the "predecessor". However, most individuals and institutions in the current encryption industry do not have a clear concept of the Web3.0 creator economy, but generally summarize it as a "SocialFi track".
Similar to the traditional creator economy, the emergence of the category "SocialFi" also shows that the Web3.0 creator economy is still in the very early stage of development, that is, the pure social stage without content support, which is exactly the Web3.0 creator economy The crux of the bottleneck in development. Through the discussion in this paper, we believe thatThe most promising development direction of the Web3.0 creator economy is "CreatorFi", which combines social networking and content creation.
In the new Web3.0 context, creator economy has been given a new definition. In our opinion, it is a positive externality economic model formed by individual or collective content creation based on decentralized ownership technology and community interaction as the core. From this definition, we can also derive two subsidiary economic structures of the Web3.0 creator economy, one is an "ownership economy" based on decentralized ownership, and the other is a "co-creation economy" based on community interaction. This article will also study the development of Web3.0 creator infrastructure and the exploration of the most cutting-edge co-creation forms from these two sections.
