A Brief History of Social Media, The Rise of The Creator Economy and a Glimpse Into Our Web3 Enabled Future
Humble Beginnings
What began two decades ago as a convenient way to connect friends and family around the planet and share ideas, thoughts, and personal life updates, has evolved into a whole new way of doing life and work for creators and brands of all kinds. This has had far-reaching implications for our communities.
This new form of media today reaches us intravenously through our devices, enmeshed in our culture and entangled with our lives. It seeps into our minds and daily discourse. Social media is by any measure, a chimera, changing form to reflect who is using it, both on an individual level and in the aggregate; a vast digital organism in which each one of us is a cell.
Today social media serves as a proxy for internally-sourced validation; a jackpot of endless hearts and likes streaming in from strangers. Is being looked at the same as being seen? For a generation raised on aesthetic appeal as the arbiter of worth, does it even matter anymore? Content creation has also become a career path for many aspiring talents. Social media is the self-appointed stage, the self-syndicated broadcast channel where the most influencial inherit the Earth.
Hark, a Social Form of Media is Born.
Friendster launched in 2002 and is regarded as the first true social media platform. It was designed to connect users with their friends, though metamorphosed into a platform for online dating and social gaming. Friendster soared in popularity in Asia, amassing millions of followers and becoming a cultural phenomenon. However, this popularity was short-lived, and Friendster experienced a rapid decline due to technical issues and an inability to keep up with demand. By 2006 the platform fell out of favor and receded into the digital shadows.
Enter MySpace. MySpace appeared in 2003 as a social networking site for music aficionados and became the go-to platform for artists and their fans across the United States. MySpace empowered creators with personalized pages allowing artists to upload images, music, videos, and graphics. For many creators, this was arguably the genesis of their personal brand. MySpace paved the way for creators to showcase both their professional skill sets and their personalities.
Hot on the heels of MySpace was Facebook. Intended as a way for college students to stay connected across campuses in 2004, Facebook’s adoption skyrocketed due to its clean and intuitive interface, networking capabilities, and the continual innovation of new features. Facebook became the platform to lead the charge, and whatever your feelings about it might be today, it was the clear forerunner and a principal player at the start of the social media revolution.
The Faustian Bargain for Content Creators
The rise of social media has marched hand in hand with the rise of what is known as the creator economy. The creator economy is defined as the class of businesses comprising the 50 million independent content creators, influencers, and bloggers as well as the software and financial tools these prolific producers use to monetize their content.
The pivotal role social media has played in shaping the career path of the content creator cannot be overstated. These free-to-use platforms have empowered creators to build not only networks but livelihoods. Social media has been the digital soapbox and springboard to stardom creators were seeking, activating those willing to escape the prescription of the status quo. Social media allowed creators to be, well… creators, building a brand and business out of their passions, self-expression, and talents.
While quality creators can still rise like effervescent bubbles in the champagne flutes of success, the vast majority go flat. A survey conducted by Influencer Marketing Hub in 2021 found that 66% of influencers reported earning income from sponsored content. However, only 8% of influencers said they were able to live from their content creation alone. This means for the vast majority of creators, this lifestyle isn’t the ticket out they hoped for.
Content creation also came with fine print no one saw. Platforms like Instagram and YouTube, which once held the keys to creators’ freedom, started changing their algorithmic locks, leaving creators out in the cold. Instead of giving their creators fair compensation for flooding their platforms with countless hours of increasingly high-quality content, these tech giants hoarded the profits. “Social media companies are essentially exploiting user-generated content for profit. They’re taking content that people create and use it to generate advertising revenue, but they’re not sharing enough of that revenue with the creators themselves,” says Scott Galloway, marketing professor, and entrepreneur.
Since 2020, platforms have also been silencing creators’ voices, and using their media monopoly to suppress and censor views that oppose those held by the platforms. This move brought to light a hidden hazard for digital creators: the communities they’ve cultivated are not in their control. Communities can be held hostage and sold through advertising to the highest bidder, with only a token percentage trickling down to the creators doing all the work. Algorithmic dictates, ever-changing policies, and the constant threat of being demonetized or de-platformed altogether force creators to comply.
The once-free creators have to change their content to suit whatever flavor of the week the algorithms mandate, leading to an endless puffed-up parade of short-form videos, championing virality over value. Sara Wachter-Boettcher a writer and designer had this to say, “Social media platforms have created a situation where content creators are essentially working for free, generating value for the platforms but not receiving enough compensation for their work.”
Web3, the People’s Champion
Web1 allowed users to read content on the internet and at that time spanned the early 1990’s-the early 2000s, the internet was seen as a form of online library or encyclopedia of information available at the click of a button. It marked a turning point for the accessibility of information and convenience.
Web2 allowed users to both read and write, spawning social media, blogs, forums, online chat rooms, as well as early forms of e-commerce from the early 2000s onwards.
Now in 2023, Web3 shifts the landscape yet again, allowing users to not only read and write but to own and participate. The use of tokenization and added financial layers of Web3 bring exciting new opportunities for creators and their communities who can have a say and have a sense of belonging with the brands they love. Digital ownership, smart contracts, NFTs (non-fungible tokens), and the blockchain herald a dawn of transparency, and a tectonic shift in the power dynamics between people and the platforms they use.
Coal under enough pressure will crystallize into diamonds. Coral under the barrage of the waves grows stronger, richer in color, and more vibrant. The pressure on creators under the rule of Web2 platforms has necessitated change. This collective demand for greater accessibility, freedom of expression, and desire for increased transparency, has led, whether directly or indirectly, to the advent of Web3.
Web3 removes the middlemen, allowing creators to connect directly with their fans, no longer at the mercy of algorithmic gatekeepers. “The shift to Web3 is going to empower creators to own their audiences, to own their content, to own their monetization, and to have much more control over their own destiny.” — Alexis Ohanian, co-founder of Reddit. Creators can now own the connection to their communities directly on the blockchain, ceding control from the platforms to the people once again. Creators can tokenize their value and they can even tokenize exclusive access to experiences, backstage passes, or unreleased music. These tokens reside as digital deeds of ownership (NFTs and their embedded smart contracts) that holders can redeem for their contained value or sell at a markup on open markets.
Having a Stake in the Stars
One platform poised to lead the charge of this new Web3 revolution is StarStake. According to their site, StarStake is a platform where “superstars are born and superfans are made.” StarStake embodies the collaborative principles of Web3 and is on a mission to restore balance to the creator economy, fairly rewarding creators for all their hard work and also meaningfully rewarding their fans.
“On StarStake creators keep the majority of everything they make. They can earn rewards and cash out their earnings with the click of a button”, says Chris Hawk, CEO and visionary behind the platform. “We’ve gone to great lengths to empower creators and reduce their barriers of entry.”
Unlike traditional SAAS (software as a service) models which charge recurring monthly payments, StarStake promises that users; both creators and fans alike, will enjoy no monthly fees or upfront costs. Creators can build their brands their way, through a robust suite of included Web3 tools. They can easily build personalized profiles and sales pages. There’s also an integrated Web3 design and creative studio called CreatorHub, where users can create tiered-loyalty members clubs called sNFT “BrandClubs,” These can be used to tokenize access to both physical and digital products and provide holders with a variety of insider perks.
Perhaps one of the most innovative features in restoring the equanimity for users is in how StarStake treats fans. “Rewarded fans are loyal fans. We have a gamified reward system called the FanEngine,” says Hawk. “Our goal is to build fans for life.”
While the creator economy turned digital content creation into a livelihood, platforms like StarStake glimpse a future where even super fandom can become lucrative. Instead of fans being no more than numbers and names hidden in a sea of data, fans have an identity, and creators can see their unique contributions. This allows creators to reward top fans for their support. “Completing challenges set by the creators, as well as sharing, making purchases, and collecting, lets fans earn their way up to SuperFan status,” says Hawk.
Fans can unlock financial rewards, a percentage of sales, and exclusive access to their favorite stars and brands. Web3 smart contracts inside the NFTs distribute rewards to the top fans automatically and creators can build new promotions and incentives on the fly in minutes to promote their latest project or product. This marks a new form of collaborative commerce and mutual monetization that Web2 platforms did not nor could not provide.
The Future for Creators and Their Communities
Although the current Web2 platforms try to impose sanctions on their community, like clogging the path of a growing tree with cement, creators, being what they are, will always wriggle free, and budding stems will find a way to crack the concrete slabs in search of fresh air and sunlight.
Put differently, the community of users on a platform is like the electricity that powers a circuit board. Once a user base withdraws its power, the platform is forced to shut down or dwindle into obscurity and irrelevance. The platforms that thrive in this new Web3 era will be the ones that make it their mission for their communities to also thrive with them, sharing in the spoils and bringing their people prosperity. As transparency becomes the modus operandi for new platforms wishing to succeed, new levels of loyalty and trust can be reached for those who embrace these new paradigm values and build them into their architecture. Creators deserve to create unimpeded and in a time of artificial intelligence coming to the fore, perhaps it’s our collective intelligence that will steer this ship to sunnier shores.
