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Social Tokens and the Future of Media

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For writers, streamers, and anyone who makes a living distributing their creative output across the internet, social tokens present an opportunity to realign the interests of creators and their communities.

Original title: "Social tokens and the future of media"

Original author: Joon Ian Wong

How can the media make readers willing to pay for subscriptions, and how can they make money to survive? This problem has always existed behind the industry, and now it is magnified and presented in front of us. So how does the media solve this problem at present?

Some media companies seem to have found an excellent breakthrough. The New York Times Company, relying on reader-paid subscriptions and digital advertising, earned $450 million in the first three quarters of 2020, surpassing its print business for the first time in history.

But when we look at the entire industry, the entire media industry is experiencing a cold winter. The Poynter Institute is updating a list of media layoffs and closures every day. As the page keeps scrolling, the cruelty facing the media industry is far beyond people's imagination. The Poynter Institute also reports that in 2020, more than 60 outlets have closed.

The long-tail income of those media serving local or niche communities is where the current business model fails: They don't have a large enough audience, have poor traffic, and don't have readers willing to pay to subscribe.

So far, the solutions people have proposed are not enough. Substackerati, for example, seems to only help writers who already have a readership willing to pay to read it, as the Columbia Journalism Review points out. And more importantly, this subscription model is exactly the reason why some technology platforms snatched the media business and caused the media to start to decline.

Creator Economy Web3 Solution

< p line="86CC">Subsequently mentioned are "creator economy" and "passion economy". These models create a sustainable economic base for writers, streamers, and producers of "content" of all kinds, but they don't do enough. These solutions are really just a slightly fresh take on an old model in order to get more clicks or sales.

People have a third option: tokenized media, with a tokenized community. You may be wondering, hasn't someone already tried this but didn't get very good results? Yes, tokenizing everything is not a panacea. But today's encryption ecosystem is very different from 2017, just like the rapid development of the DeFi field in the summer of 2020, it is unbelievable.

The basic idea behind the third option is that writers, streamers, and anyone else who creates media products on the Internet People can reduce the exploitation of their value by the platform by transferring value from the centralized platform to the decentralized network. And these values will become the value support of encrypted tokens, which will be held by creators and communities. And this forms a virtuous circle, as both creators and their fans will increase the value behind the social token through economic activities.

This is, as investor Jesse Walden puts it, a brand new "fan club."

Community Funding has a long history

It is not new for communities to customize the rules behind the currencies they issue to achieve their own goals. As a researcher-in-residence at Rally, a startup creating infrastructure for creator tokens, I dig into the literature on related fields, from anthropology to fan studies, to discover the value behind social tokens.

From sociologist Georg Simmel's "perfect money" theory in 1900 to French anarchism The "Bank of the People" proposed by author Pierre-Jospeh Proudhon, which gave birth to symbiosis, as explained by sociologist Nigel Dodd in "The Social Life of Money" , a range of thinkers have proposed utopian solutions using dedicated currencies.

Over time, various communities have experimented with some of these ideas. During the "LETS and time-banking" movement of the 1980s and 1990s, hundreds of communities in North America issued their own local currencies, which were not issued by a central bank but Released after collective consent of community members. In the field of encryption, this idea has been revitalized by the Circles UBI project.

Lessons about community ownership can also be found in the history of the cooperative movement. Behind the cooperative structure is the idea of employee-owners as opposed to investors. More recently, Trebor Scholz and Nathan Schneider reinterpreted co-op in the internet age, giving rise to the concepts of platform cooperativism and exit communities. Scholz and Schneider's idea is to align the interests of users of large platforms more closely with those of their owners; and envision companies not only looking to get investors out of blockbuster stock market listings, but employees and users to unlock that value.

Social Token Overview

The encryption field has an almost instinctive grasp of these new models. Walden, formerly of a16z and now of Variant Fund, is targeting investments in companies building an “ownership economy” that looks like a cooperative but has a crypto tinge.

IDEO’s venture department has announced that “Crypto-Social”, the fusion of personal tokens and community tokens, will be The next critical breakthrough and has hired early experimenter of personal tokens Reuben Bramanathan to do the work.

Ryan Selkis of Messari is bullish on the concept of "social tokens" and has invested in social token platform Roll to capitalize on this a trend. Selkis wrote in Messari’s annual forecast that these types of tokens, while at first looking like toys, will be hated by some investors in the crypto space, but will eventually gain their acceptance after the explosion.

There are so many investors and their theories, how many of them are really effective? The answer is, quite a lot. At the center of the social token economy are platforms that help people issue tokens. Two of the most notable examples are a16z-backed Rally and Roll, which have received funding from the likes of Fabric Ventures.

Taking advantage of Ethereum’s famous composability, a new batch of tools has also been born. The most widely used tool is Collab.land, which allows the community to control various social media channels and only allow users who hold a certain balance of social tokens in their wallets to browse change. According to the company, Collab.land is used by more than 400 communities, totaling more than 40,000 users.

Also, there are some fresher tools. Unite Community makes it easy for users to airdrop tokens on Twitter; Llama simplifies the task of managing community treasuries. Both tools were born during a hackathon organized by the Seed Club, a social token incubator whose first members include renowned Grammy-winning musician and personal social token issuer RAC. In addition, there are two tools, Dfame and Coinvise, which provide new ways to control media content, mint and distribute tokens.

There is also a newsletter called Forefront reporting all the situation and is tracking which tokens are currently in stage of outbreak. Messari expects the top social tokens to have a combined market capitalization of $200 million as of October, according to Forefront and Coingecko.

Summary

Around social All the issues of handing over tokens are far from solved. For example, how do fans who might hold tokens as mementos be protected from speculators selling tokens to devalue them? How to manage the complexities of decentralized liquidity, increasingly noisy Discord servers, and airdrops? Issuing a social token by a creator means that he is faced with a whole new and complex set of tasks, but he does not know what to expect in return.

This brings us back to the solution to the problem facing the media on the Internet. For writers, streamers, and anyone who makes a living distributing their creative output across the internet, social tokens present an opportunity to realign the interests of creators and their communities.