Building the New Creator Economy

Transcript

[Music] thank you hello uh hi thanks for coming my name is Shannon you came to the talk that was in the agenda building the new Creator economy I'm really excited to yeah spend the next 15 minutes with you all I'm head of ecosystem at live pure live peer is a decentralized video infrastructure protocol I'm not going to show it too hard in this talk I've been in the web 3 space for a pretty long time my crypto Journey began in 2011 I was regulating Bitcoin as a financial crime in Canada I

worked at the world economic forum for a few years with global CEOs who are interested in blockchain Tech so for a long time I thought crypto was supersus until I learned about proof of stake networks in about 2017 and went down the crypto Rabbit Hole starting my journey working on governance and Dows I actually had my own startup before joining live here in 2021 thanks to a friend of mine who's also in the audience and is part of the live peer community so with that I'm I want to talk to you about um the internet eras I'm not going to talk too much about we hear web one Web Two web three I could just say that but I think it's actually more interesting to think about the cultural narratives

around different phases um and episodes of the internet so we can think about you know the Classical period you know ancient Greeks made foundational contributions to math and science and kind of how how we think about the world how we reason about the world how we reason about ourselves so we owe a lot of our basic ideas um about how we understand the world to the Greek so I think we can attribute that to the classical founders of web one the open source internet protocols on which we all still operate the second phase popularly known as web 2 out actually call the Dark Ages I'm going to spend a bit more time going into why I think web 2 is actually the Dark Ages and where I think we are emerging which is the

Renaissance Era um of the internet and so yeah Monopoly is not great going to get into it um and then the Renaissance is really you know the on-chain era and what's behind that so yeah what what's so bad about the Dark Age of the internet um well there's really only a small number where we are now there's only a small number of corporations that have been able to develop the the resources to provide the Computing infrastructure and internet utilities at a global scale such that you can actually build applications on top of the open Protocols of the internet and build businesses on top of it um and those few companies we all know

them Apple AWS Google Microsoft Facebook they've really become Global powerhouses with outsized both I would say economic and political power on on the global stage individually each of these companies have at least a trillion dollars in market capitalization and and that Financial State is is larger than over 90 percent of nation-state gdps so these companies are large enough to be G7 member states so you know that's that's a problem so how how have they done that they've done it through pretty extractive business models that rely on user generated content and monetizing user data data started off as a strategy to pay the bills because actually

running internet utilities is really expensive and as they found out this was the fastest way to cover those costs and then because they realized that they were the only people in town able to do that they have been able to jack up their price a lot so that's kind of the basic economic disaster that we have today um some of the implications of that creators on the internet get an unequal share of the returns to the internet infrastructure today the Creator economy so it gets created on the Internet is valued at over a hundred billion dollars um in 2001 YouTube's Creator economy alone generates over 25 billion dollars and the pies not equally split as I just

mentioned you know 60 two-thirds of of creators are in less than 25 000 a year more than 25 percent earn less than a thousand dollars a year and it takes many years as a Creator to build up the following you need to get yourself at the top of the algorithm in order to get discovered and and not only that it's really hard to form a business um on the web 2 or Dark Age internet today because platforms don't give you any data about your audience or how you're doing so you're really operating in the dark um Innovation is also really stifled in a monopolistic technology environment so smaller internet companies smaller software companies smaller applications have had to sell you know to larger ones

over the years to cover their costs at scale so YouTube sold to Google in 2008 which sold to Amazon in 2014 and and they did that because they couldn't cover their costs and twitch actually continues to run at a loss for Amazon today and so you know related to this as as big companies have been hiring a growing uh hiring an Ever larger share of innovators and inventors and there's actually an interesting study that just came out you can find it on the Wall Street Journal showing that innovators once they get hired by big Tech do become less productive they actually issue for fewer patents but they do still make more money so that's probably not surprising to hear that

there's a study that's confirmed that if you're an innovator and you get the golden handcuffs of a big tech company you're less productive but you're making more money this is something I'm a little I'm like actually most concerned about which is the the stifling of our culture and of our creativity um I think and and that breed what happens online has implications offline and I really think the homogenization of our Global culture as a whole can be attributed to the culture that's developed on the internet and and that is driven by the advertising model um of these large software companies that the people creating content on their platforms need to the only way to get rewarded is by appealing to the

largest possible audience with your content so you really need a breadth of of narratives of visuals of whatever you're putting out that's going to appeal to as many people as possible and also you can't really engage deeply with your audience because you're trying to get to as many of them as possible and it's really hard to identify who they are as I mentioned um another implication of the kind of ad-based web 2 model of the internet today is the attention economy so because the content that gets created is about generating the most eyeballs for ads it's really appealing to our primitive dopamine High click brain um Kevin nowaki from git coin actually gave a really great main stage talk really

digging into some of the psychological trauma that's been created on the web over the last few years I really encourage people to take a look at that um and and I think ultimately platforms like YouTube like Tick Tock like Twitter like twitch they actually own the identities and the communities of creators so if you get de-platformed if you get kicked off Twitter if you get kicked off YouTube guess what they own your content and they own your follower base and you're kind of left with nothing and you have to from scratch so I think from a Creator's perspective that's probably the thing to be most concerned about about the Dark Age of the internet so what is the internet's Renaissance Era

um what is web three what is on chain what I'm going to call it the Renaissance so the foundationally I think what what um what underpins where we are right now is composable and tokenized compute and data and so you know the classical internet was open it wasn't and its Primitives still are open source so in in theory anything that's open source is by nature composable but what's new and I think interesting about web3 today is that open source code and data is now tokenized on chain and that just creates an entirely New Economic and Business model on top of the

internet so yeah uh unchain is the new online um I I do buy this slogan um and and public blockchains are really providing that for a telegram uh for a more vibrant and flourishing digital economy so I I think the most important layer of what's happening is the um is that the web 3 infrastructure layer and it is the permissionless open decentralized compute networks that provide the again the infrastructure on which you can build applications and create user experiences online and using token economics to bootstrap these networks has really created a supply of competitive markets for those digital Commodities and that's gpus CPU

bandwidth that compute capacity that's needed to serve applications and again I think the functionally permanent composability that smart contracts and cryptography provides to open source protocols and data um so it's the the protocols themselves and the code gets tokenized but the um the content and the assets and the data that people create and put on the internet are now also tokenized and that gives us the opportunity to attribute asset ownership to individuals through private private Keys which we commonly know as wallets um this is an example web3 if you go to the web3

index.org this is a list of some of the oh my God five minutes okay okay go to that go check that out it's web3 infrastructure projects um live peers there it's people who are decentral using decentralized compute networks to do foundational things like transcoding storage search and query um yeah uh the web3 stack this is um I think a good visual to show um how the developer environment in which applications are being built with all of these different basically software services that are using decentralized compute and and figuring out new pieces of the web3 stack and the vision

um is that all of this kind of mechanical infrastructure enabling the internet um is abstracted away such that developers can focus their efforts on higher level problems of product development and user adoption this is a visual of open actions from lens V2 which Donnie introduced again on the main stage on Monday I think this is a superb example of a user interface that's really maximizing um the idea of composability um so who benefits from a composable on-chain internet technology providers can specialize in a particular area of service provision app developers have more creativity they can take their code with them content creators consumers um and so I think we're with this we're

really entering a new era of Internet entrepreneurship and that's kind of what I would call the digital Creator economy it's actually we're talking about entrepreneurship on the internet and it's moving from platform economies to multiple Creator economies and the Renaissance I argue will actually be video and why is that because the internet is is actually video and I really think video is the frontier for the the new digital economy so today 80 of all internet bandwidth so all traffic on the internet um is video it's easy to understand why um it's as close as we can get to being in person online is by um by sharing and watching videos together um and yeah the demand for video is is truly exploding

um the the video streaming Market is expected to hit over a hundred billion dollars um in 2025. um you know just exponential growth people would rather watch video than than consume other types of content online um and consume it matters for your kind of Commerce on the web because we know that most consumers rely on video to make purchasing decisions um so whereas people you know used to rely on websites or online reviews um they now really prefer even short form video content in order to make decisions and that's a page from HubSpot um so yeah over 90 of businesses use

video as a marketing Tool uh today um 75 of viewers watch content on their mobile devices so we know that you know the internet is increasingly mobile as well more and more social apps are actually incorporating short form video Instagram which started off as a video sharing app is now like a short form live stories app Twitter a couple months ago just made a huge pivot into video you can now upload videos on Twitter so the internet is really moving towards video um and um the the new on-chain internet does need a new con new consumer video applications and that's because today the video apps are the ones dominated by

the large infrastructure providers who are you know as I mentioned earlier just taking such a huge share of Creator Revenue YouTube takes about 60 cents on every dollar that a Creator makes today it's really hard to access the apis for these projects so it's really not a composable environment so what do we need to do to bring online video to on-chain Applications I'm going to close just by running through yay I have one minute um two slides of some calls to action here um what what should you build if you want to bring online video to on-chain Applications I think one of the first things to think about is actually video metadata standards for Content authenticity and provenance

um so if you put content on chain um that's going to get an identifier a hash to decentralized storage but what happens when you share that video content what happens when it gets remixed because when you put video online to broadcast it it needs to be transcoded that means the file formats get compressed and repackaged in multiple different ways and live here does that in a decentralized way but it gets really hard to track the Providence of that piece of video content over its life cycle it's really important that we do that for two reasons one is to protect people watching videos so that they don't get deep faked and they know that they're watching a video by who

they think it's created by and the other is to protect creators and to provide a chain of Providence so that they get economic guarantees every time a video is shared I think a great place to start we're at um okay social application so existing Define nft marketplaces um those are places where asset exists but there's really no interface on top of a lot of these assets so um you know Zora has over 700 000 collectors today open C has almost two million active users those are ripe spaces for our social and video application development how should we be building this stuff let's please be use case and user driven in our development of

um on-chain applications who really needs another L2 ask yourself that question think about new business models productizing micro actions with micro payments small is beautiful you don't need to become a monolith lens has done a really great job demonstrating what's possible um to date they've enabled creators to earn almost half a million dollars with over 90 percent of that Revenue being driven by select posts rather than subscriptions which I think is hugely instructive for those like small actions that you can start to monetize and productize financial inclusion we really need to bridge defy and creators currently they're considered two

entirely separate user groups but what if when you earn revenue from your collect post on lens that automatically got put into a D5 pool to earn yield what if that defy pool is actually composed of web3 infrastructure tokens where you could actually then start to both own and earn rewards on the actual internet utilities that you're that you're consuming finally moderation tools um you know as as we develop new social platforms we need to be able to come up with consensus on what content is safe and not safe I think we also need to be looking at quality versus quantity

content and web3 I think is a great space for news media and journalists to come in and get rewarded for their content we haven't really seen that yet so I'm excited to see that I can't believe that was 15 minutes thanks I'm yeah I'm Shannon that's my my Twitter handle shamvasion shand.lens on lens I didn't show live pure but I'm happy to show it um afterwards does do we have time for no questions okay cool I'll be there thanks