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

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.

There are four main ways that that will happen:

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

-By introducing new programmable economic models that spread wealth -across the creator landscape

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 more

-Most importantly, by creating pathways for creators to own not just the content they produce, but the platforms themselves

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).

This is the story of how the web2 internet broke the business model of media, and how the advent of web3 signals a disruption to that business model that tilts the scales in favor of creators. Without native monetization methods built into the web2 internet, the predominant business models were opaque, advertising-based, and dependent on closed-gar... See more