It’s an exciting day! Today marks the launch of Tippit, a web app and Chrome extension that makes it easy to financially support your favourite creators with cryptocurrency, so that they can continue to make great content.
The defining mission of Tippit: to make it as easy as possible to support content online, paving the way for the new economy of the decentralised web.
Put simply, Tippit allows you to “tip” the creators of content you most enjoy online, starting with YouTube. You can tip with cryptocurrency, without needing to know their wallet address or any other nonsense — and you can do so directly from YouTube.
Wait — voluntarily supporting content that is otherwise free? In this post I’ll describe why voluntary support is a vital and growing part of the internet economy and how it is allowing new types of content to exist and thrive.
The problem with ads
The de-facto business model of the internet and most content creators online is, of course, advertising. I’d like to take a moment to highlight some of the problems we now experience as consumers and as a society because of an over-reliance on ads.
Ads have shaped the way we think, as a culture, about online services and content. The money that supports online services no longer comes directly from us, the consumers, but from advertisers, and because of this we expect many services — particularly those which we use in our personal and social lives — to be free.
Many of us regularly pay 3 dollars for a cup of coffee, and we don’t think twice about it. Yet it would suddenly seem onerous to pay three dollars to pay for something [online] that actually gives us much more value than a cup of coffee ever could… What we need is a new ethic and culture of sponsorship, where each of us takes the time to support the work we value. — Sam Harris
The ad model facilitated free content online but at huge societal cost. In a post-Cambridge Analytica world, this cost does not go unnoticed. As a result, our collective attitude towards these issues is provoking genuine systemic change — just take the GDPR.
We are waking up to the other enormous costs imposed on us by the ad model. Ads have contributed to the death of nuance and have fuelled political polarisation in journalism. Today, even the world’s most respected newspapers resort to clickbait headlines designed to maximise traffic, because they have to sell ads against that traffic to survive. Similarly, the viral spread of misinformation which so painfully undermines our politics and democracy is directly linked to platforms on which advertisers are king.
All that matters is view count
Like it or not, the ad model is the primary business model on many platforms, YouTube included. This poses a problem: the ad model determines the type of content that can exist and thrive online.
The ad model rewards content which attracts the largest number of ad-consuming eyeballs:
creator income ≈ cost per ad impression × num. of impressions
Let’s consider the implications of this equation:
- To the creator, the cost per ad impression is a fixed variable. The creator’s only option is to boost view count.
- The cost per ad impression is tiny and is determined by the broader ad market. Yet the perceived value of the content in a given niche may be much higher.
- The cost per ad impression is the same for every viewer. Necessarily ignored in this equation is the difference between what you and I might feel the content was worth.
Content which delivers high value per individual is largely underserved by the ad model. Indeed, without a sufficiently large audience, much of this content cannot exist at all, despite the fact that a small audience finds the content highly valuable and wants it to grow. Here, a voluntary support model can achieve this; the ad model cannot.
Imagine you are producing niche, educational content. There aren’t that many people in the field, but the content you provide is of enormous help to those that are. In the fan support model, your content can be monetised according to its perceived value — which can be much larger than the fractions of a penny captured by an ad impression. Even with a small audience, content can thrive.
The crypto economy and web 3.0
A healthy internet economy is made up of myriad different business models. At Tippit, we want to bring fan support to the web at large, thereby facilitating the monetisation of a whole new category of content online and building a much richer digital media landscape.
We’re already in the midst of a cultural shift that is making voluntary support a viable business model for thousands of content creators online. If you remain unconvinced, consider that this revolution is already underway: for example, more than 100,000 creators receive monthly salaries from their fans over at Patreon.
“We ascribe to the idealistic notion that audiences don’t pay for things because they’re forced to, but because they care about the stuff that they love and want it to continue to grow.” — Hank Green
At Tippit, we’re leveraging cryptocurrencies to take the fan support model to the next level. Cryptocurrencies enable the peer-to-peer transfer of value, without intermediaries, possible — creators can leverage this to have a direct financial relationship with their fans.
Supporting content directly online needs to be easy and frictionless. Tippit aims to minimise the cognitive barriers to voluntary support by providing the very best crypto-native experience. For this reason we’ve focused heavily on user experience on the Tippit platform. We hope that the Tippit Chrome extension, personal Tippable Links and other features can provide the most seamless and integrated fan support mechanism out there.
Tippit is live, and you can start using it today. The following types of creator might find Tippit particularly valuable:
- Anyone who wants to the easy ability to support the creators producing content they value online as they are viewing it.
- Creators who have a direct relationship with their audiences. It’s important that your audience understands that their support allows your content to exist and thrive.
- Independent creators who own exclusive copyright to their content (thereby making direct monetisation legal and fair).
- “Niche” content which delivers high per-individual value.
- Creators who prioritise independence and do not want a reliance on ads to influence their work.
- Creators with audiences interested in cryptocurrencies.
Many hypothesise that centralised platforms like YouTube and others will be one day be displaced by blockchain-powered, decentralised alternatives. Who knows. What can be said is that 2018 has seen the battle cry of the space change from HODL to BUIDL; and as we build, we have an opportunity to augment not only the technological underpinnings of the internet, but also the economic.
If you don’t yet have Tippit, as a creator or a fan, get started at tippit.co. See here for more about how Tippit works and what’s in store for the future.
If you have any suggestions, questions or comments, please don’t hesitate to get in touch at mike@tippit.co. 😇 Thank you!
