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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
... See moreKatie 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
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
If the pre-internet/web1 era favored publishers, and the web2 era favored the platforms, the next generation of innovations—collectively known as web3—is all about tilting the scales of power and ownership back toward creators and users.
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
-Most importantly, by creating pathways for creators to own not just the content they produce, but the platforms themselves
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
The lack of payment infrastructure is the reason why so much of the internet is monetized via advertising. Rather than requiring users to pull out a credit card and type their information into a website, users could be monetized frictionlessly and indirectly, paying not with their money but with a different asset: their attention. That precipitated... See more
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.”