Content creators under big tech-controlled social media platforms are looking towards blockchain-based content creation platforms, which promise greater transparency and equitable rewards.
Current Digital Content Creation Landscape
Creating digital content is a burgeoning market worldwide. Estimated to be worth US$11 billion in 2019, market researchers predict that it will grow at a rate of 12% CAGR through 2030. There are several factors at play behind this growth.
The declining cost of content creation has made the market easier to enter: the number of creators increase and, in turn, the gross revenue generated. Moreover, internet penetration is high, while the number of users with smartphones and tablets is surging at a commensurate pace. Another significant factor is the growing presence of a range of content creation tools and their fast adoption.
But, does a growing market translate to an increase in earnings for content creators?
Well, not necessarily. First, it takes a long time to build an audience, even after creating content each day of the year. While social media platforms get tons of advertising money, little of this revenue trickle down to the creators.
While the top content creators can earn substantial amounts — for instance, the top YouTubers raked in an estimated $211 million in earnings in 2020 — this is not proportionate to the rest. The highest-earning YouTuber, Ryan ToysReview, made an estimated $29.5 million in 2020. It's little wonder that 75% of children want to be YouTubers when they grow up. Not to dash their hopes, but the reality may be bleaker than they thought. While sources differ, the average YouTuber makes roughly $10,000 to $17,000 annually, hardly enough to cover basic expenses.
Most of the time, the earning stream is a direct channel between the advertiser and the social media platform. Many content creators hardly make enough — that is until they've garnered a significant following or entered into a distinct arrangement with advertisers or social media platforms.
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How Does Blockchain Help Content Creators?
Decentralization — through blockchain technology — breaks this monopoly of social media giants who eat up almost all the advertising revenue. There are blockchain-based content creation platforms that help make the process transparent — rewards, monetary or otherwise, for creators are proportionate to the impact they’ve made with their content. Here, we will discuss ten such platforms.
Flixxo
As a decentralized video distribution platform leveraging blockchain technology, Flixxo takes video content out from the clutches of YouTube, Amazon and Facebook. These companies have an unbridled monopoly over the production, distribution, compensation and monetization of video content.
Flixxo challenges this setup by helping content creators receive payments directly from consumers and connecting them more closely with the advertisers. Flixxo makes it peer-to-peer by eliminating intermediaries from the process, the basic principle of blockchain-induced decentralization.
Flixxo's native token, FLIXX, utilizes Bitcoin technology to enable transactions between Flixxo users. Users can spend FLIXX tokens to watch videos, exchange it with their peers and even spend the tokens outside the Flixxo app.
Theta
Theta is a decentralized peer-to-peer video delivery mechanism that leverages a new native blockchain, powered by users. The process ensures equal benefits for all the stakeholders of the content-consumption supply chain.
Viewers earn rewards for sharing excess bandwidth and resources and participating in the network. In turn, it ensures high-quality, smoother video streams without the video platforms needing to build expensive infrastructure. Bringing in users as relayers of video streams breaks the centralized nature of video delivery, ensuring more revenue flowing back to the creators and the platforms.
Theta has some notable advisors, including Steve Chen, co-founder of YouTube and Justin Kan, co-founder of Twitch. It also has some big name enterprise validators, including: Google, Binance, Sony Europe and Samsung.
Content Box
To break the big player monopoly in the digital content industry, Content Box (BOX) helps enable a unified payment system, a shared content pool and a shared user pool. It saves users from bearing the highest share of the production cost and piracy. It also rewards users for curating content. For industry players, the process helps lower profit-sharing disputes and operational costs for accounting and reporting.
Finally, for content creators, the availability of monetization channels increase, the payback period gets shorter, and Content Box ensures the payment is never perpetually pending. At the core of these solutions are a fast and secure blockchain, carrying out a multi-party contingent payment system and an identity and attribution service across multiple applications. The solution is easy to set up for small and medium-sized content creators.
Steemit
Steemit works as a blockchain-based social media decentralized app (DApp). Steemit's nterface is similar to Reddit, but many forums for communities and popular posts, but with a focus on cryptocurrency. It enables crypto communities to thrive, where users receive rewards by sharing their voices and opinions. There are three tokens to fuel the entire Steemit economy. The STEEM token is used for earnings by posting, commenting or upvoting comments in the Steemit community.
Next comes STEEM POWER, implying that you can stake or power up STEEM to enjoy more influence on the platform. Finally comes the STEEM Dollars (SBD) that — much like a stablecoin — are on parity with the US Dollar.
Mycelia For Music
At its core, Mycelia For Music is a research and development hub for music makers.
It promises that earnings reach every stakeholder of the musical content creation life-cycle equally. Furthermore, it assists creators with their music-related metadata and commercial value.
Mycelia For Music is the brainchild of Grammy-award recipient and artist Imogen Heap, who aims to provide the tools needed for music artists to progress in their careers.
Mycelia ensures that all parties involved in the process earn full acknowledgment and payments. It also aims to ensure that the commercial, ethical and technical standards are maintained while the music services industry keeps innovating. The project is helmed by a group of creatives, technologists and industry professionals, with the common goal of exploring new technological solutions that can create a positive impact on the industry.
Brave Browser
The Brave browser has a unique model, where users earn rewards, in BAT tokens, by viewing privacy-respecting ads. The browser users stay in full control of the number of ads they want to see per hour. With these rewards, browser users can support their favorite web creators.
Furthermore, with online privacy and personal data a growing concern in this internet age, users would be glad to hear that Brave has the strongest privacy-preserving network communication with its servers of all popular browsers and extensions. Brave blocks all ads and trackers, randomizes fingerprint, blocks third-party storage and more to protect user data.
There are currently over 38 million Brave users, and they would also be able to spend tokens on premium content, gift cards and more. Soon, creators could feature Brave Ads, helping them earn more ad revenue than existing models. To date, more than 300,000 creators have joined the Brave Rewards model.
Pixsy
Pixsy aims to help original creators, especially photographers and graphic designers, protect their visual content, by copyrighting their images and earning what is rightfully theirs.
It does so by combining image scanning software with their team of legal experts to help content creators combat image piracy. Pixsy features an easy-to-use, fast-to-setup interface for get onboarded, and claims to cover the whole infringement case process if they do not win.
Pixsy was named the best online image protection platform, and recently merged with Binded, a blockchain-based image copyright platform. On Binded, every image added to your vault gets a unique fingerprint saved permanently to the Bitcoin blockchain. Creators get a copyright certificate as proof, protecting them from copyright infringement.
GAZE TV
GazeTV works as an innovative social platform that has its own token incentives and reward functionalities. The eponymous coin of the platform makes it possible for the creators and audience to interact directly with themselves without any intermediary in between.
The maximum supply of GAZE tokens is 1 billion. It is available on exchanges, such as LATOKEN and ZC.com, with trading pairs of ETH and USDT.
You42
The purpose of You42 is to allow creators and influencers to maximize the monetization of their work, without having to lose control.
The platform entails a mix of original high-quality music, video, and games. The platform has its own U42 token, an ERC20 token issued on the Ethereum blockchain. The token helps users buy advertising and promotions on the platform. At the same time, one can use the tokens to acquire digital credits, letting users purchase content and merchandise.
Aioz Network
The Aioz network (AIOZ) is a layer-1 blockchain-based content-delivery network that opens up a new era of internet streaming.
The AIOZTube is a video-sharing platform that helps creators convert high-quality content to cryptocurrency. The subscription video service AIOZ OTT allows people to stream their favorite shows and movies paid for by coins from AIOZ Wallet. Finally, there is AIOZ TV, a live-streaming app that turns real-life events into a business by broadcasting user moments for coins.
Should Content Creators Make the Switch?
Many more such networks are coming forward to democratize the content space and turn it more equitable. Blockchain technology — with its inherent properties of transparency and decentralization — is helping a big way to break the monopolies of large-sized social media platforms. The system is profitable for the advertisers and creators alike as they do not need to connect through expensive third-party routes.
While many platforms are still in the early stages and have not acquired as many users as the likes of Facebook, TikTok or YouTube, it may not stay this way. Ultimately, consumers of content will follow where the greatest source of content originates — and that lies collectively in the hands of only one group of people: content creators.
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