Why is the number of likes on Social Media a metric of the past?
The most common way to measure someone’s success today is by looking at their number of followers on social media, at how many likes or how many comments they get in every picture, post, or tweet. In this article, we will go through why these metrics can matter less as time goes by, especially with web3 and from a Content Creator’s perspective.
The size of a fanbase, with everything else being constant, definitely represents that the Creator produces good content, and produces good content about a popular subject. When it comes to marketing and advertising, there’s no doubt having a large number of followers and likes is beneficial for everyone trying to make a living as a Content Creator, since it helps give them exposure, which in turn, encourages more people to join in and become a subscriber, or a follower, or whatever other possibility there is. It is way more challenging to follow someone that only has 4 or 5 followers, in comparison to someone that has 1 million, so the more followers someone has, the more likely they are to get even more.
Of course, there are some strategies to get more followers, you can follow a bunch of people everyday and unfollow the ones that didn’t follow you back after a few days, and that can make you acquire thousands of new followers. Some people even buy followers. However, these are not your “fans”, they are shallow connections at best. A fan is someone that will talk about you, refer you to friends and family, buy your merch, praise you, and trust you, without expecting anything in return. Having someone being a follower and occasionally consuming your content to that someone becoming a real fan is a long way.
Real fans often get overlooked in the pursuit of social media metrics, but the reality is that to be a successful Creator, you don’t need millions of followers, but a reasonable amount of real fans. You might argue that you do need millions of people listening to your songs on Spotify, or watching your videos on YouTube, or liking your pictures on Instagram, for you to earn any significant income, and that is true, but only because these platforms only pay you a small fee of the total value of your content. It is the same as it was before there were any streaming services or social media platforms: Creators only got what their music label, publisher, studio, or other intermediate paid them.
However, you can have a direct relationship with your fans in a way where there’s no big platform collecting most of your gains, so you get to keep all of their support instead of just a small percentage. Crowdfunding platforms like Patreon and Kickstarter have revolutionized the way in which artists and creators monetize themselves, and people who actively use these platforms can very easily understand the power that a small group of fans can have on someone they like and support.
With Blockchain, Creators have yet another way to monetize their work, and they can have an even more direct relationship with their fans or community. A good example of that is RAC, a Grammy winning artist that has made about $39,000 (12.5 ETH) just from selling one of his songs to 100 real fans, which in Spotify would be equivalent to 9.75 million people listening to that song. This is just a quick example of how a lower number of fans can be equivalent to millions of people if they are truly loyal and want to support their favorite artists.
In cobogo, we have come up with a new monetization method for Content Creators, to be funded by their own communities. Instead of making a donation or a monthly subscription, with cobogo you can support your favorite YouTube Content Creator (and all types of Content Creators in the future) sustainably, through staking. By staking, fans will be able to have a Staking Position that will give them access to special content, exclusive Discord/Telegram groups, vote for future videos, and any other perk the Creator wants to offer.
It works as follows: fans buy CBG tokens, stake those tokens in their favorite Content Creator’s pool, and earn rewards on a block (minute) basis based on the current APY (Annual Percentage Yield). They can withdraw their CBG tokens anytime they want, stake to multiple Creators, and everyone they stake on will also earn the rewards. In addition, they get to keep the principal, meaning cobogo is a type of investment. That’s where cobogo is game changing, it matters less if you have 5 or 5 million followers, or if your content is very niche and can’t reach a larger audience. The funding coming from staking rewards will depend on how much your followers are willing to stake on your pool.
We have written an article here on Medium explaining more about how you can support your favorite Content Creators using Blockchain, and if you’re totally new to cryptocurrencies, you can check this section on our documentation that explains some of Blockchain Basics. Nonetheless, what we want to communicate with this article is that if you don’t have thousands or millions of followers, there’s an alternative path to success and to financial freedom. Rather than trying to reach the unlikely 1% most watched YouTubers, you could aim at building a direct connection with a small number of privileged fans that will genuinely appreciate your work and support you for it.
About cobogo:
cobogo is an aggregator of protocols that has the goal of funding Content Creators sustainably through their own community. It is a dApp that leverages Web 3.0 to monetize Creators while maximizing their growth and community building abilities.
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