A New Era of Media Begins With Tokenization

The promise of tokenizing the relationship between writer and reader, or broadcaster and audience, means that we finally have an alternative to the extractive models of strip-mining attention on the internet.

The most powerful layers of distribution, payment and production remain entangled in oligopolistic platforms where the platform’s owners – not the creators fueling those systems profit the most.

Media creators today can issue their own cryptographic token and design distribution and incentives around it to trigger a virtuous cycle for themselves and their fans. A simple token economics model could help media creators bootstrap funding for new projects, reward early fans and rally communities towards a common goal. In short, communities sho... See more

The tools and models for tokenizing these media relationships are being built right now. Collab.land is a system that lets media creators gate a Telegram or Discord chat group so that only fans holding a certain number of tokens are let in; the pseudonymous issuer of the $WHALE token is now amassing a digital art collection that backs his coin, eff... See more

Media on the incumbent web is in crisis. It turns out that paying publishers for clicks, endless loops of “content” and ads, all served on platforms far beyond their maximum-viable scale is ideal for misinformation, disinformation and the decay of trust.