Firehose #190: 🎸 Creator equity. 🎸

Web3 is a new vision of the internet. It takes us away from today’s centralized internet, where data is stored in servers managed by trusted counterparties like Facebook and Google, to a decentralized internet, where a trustless network of peer-to-peer servers manages and verifies data.

The power shift from aggregators to the creators and their fans will be a massive value transfer away from middlemen to those who make things people love, and to those who enjoy them.

Yet, it’s still quite hard to build an audience online when you (a) don’t have name ID from another platform, (b) aren’t a naturally talented social media promoter, or (c) are creating in a small niche. Even if you are able to build an audience, it’s really hard to monetize it on a big platform unless you’re absolutely massive.

If you want to sell a product online, publish a game, or distribute a new app you built, you must pay a tax to one of several dominant aggregators. “Real estate” on the internet can therefore be much more competitive than it is in the physical world, where you pay a market-based rent, but foot traffic comes for free.

When the scale of investment is proportional to the addressable market of the project, even the smallest creators can bootstrap. Furthermore, their success is financially aligned with the goals of their audience. Equity isn’t just defined in a corporate context; it can be defined on a creator-, or even project-level.