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The Web3 Renaissance: A Golden Age for Content
The promise of DAOs is alignment of incentives through stakeholder primacy and a removal of the need to extract value. The result: a democratized, disintermediated content landscape where creators have control over their work, how it’s distributed—and how it’s valued.
Katie Parrott • The Web3 Renaissance: A Golden Age for Content
Web3 has the potential to unlock incredible opportunities for everyone who contributes and creates on the internet: a true Golden Age of content that we’ve all been looking forward to.
Katie Parrott • The Web3 Renaissance: A Golden Age for Content
While Gates’s essay is remembered for its prescience about the direction the internet would take, what’s less well-remembered is that he also sounded a warning: “For the internet to thrive, content providers must be paid for their work,” he writes. “The long-term prospects are good, but I expect a lot of disappointment in the short-term.”
Katie Parrott • The Web3 Renaissance: A Golden Age for Content
On streaming platforms, each stream of a song contributes the same amount of revenue (approximately $0.004 per stream on Spotify), regardless of that fan’s particular intensity of affinity towards the artist. In contrast, on platforms like Catalog or Sound, superfans are purchasing NFT music for thousands of dollars each, with creators earning what... See more
Katie Parrott • The Web3 Renaissance: A Golden Age for Content
-By introducing digital scarcity and restoring pricing power to creators
Katie Parrott • The Web3 Renaissance: A Golden Age for Content
While it’s true that the internet has made it possible for virtually anyone to publish content online, it’s also true that, a quarter of century after “Content is King” was published, earning meaningful income as a content creator has proven elusive.
Katie Parrott • The Web3 Renaissance: A Golden Age for Content
For fans, the possibility of profit amplifies their incentive to support a creator. Interestingly, it also introduces an entirely new segment into the creator’s orbit that had never existed before in web2: speculators. Importantly, all of these users—by virtue of becoming owners of an asset that is aligned with the creator’s success—have an incenti... See more
Katie Parrott • The Web3 Renaissance: A Golden Age for Content
Jesse Walden defines “patronage+” as patronage with the possibility of profit, a phenomenon that is introduced through tokenized ownership. That investment element was an impossibility in web2 without an on-chain record of ownership like an NFT or a social token (imagine trying to resell a TikTok video that was downloaded from the app).
Katie Parrott • The Web3 Renaissance: A Golden Age for Content
At the heart of the story of how the internet broke the media business model is the simple fact that the internet was not built to facilitate the flow of money. Payments weren’t built into the internet’s infrastructure—it was considered too risky. Marc Andreessen called this “the original sin of the internet.”
Katie Parrott • The Web3 Renaissance: A Golden Age for Content
A new generation of technologies is emerging with the promise to change the balance of power in the creator economy. If the pre-internet/web1 era favored publishers, and the web2 era favored the platforms, the next generation of innovations—collectively known
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