Why staking is better than paying for subscription services
If you are a creator interested in integrating Access Protocol, fill out this form and our team will get in touch with you
A common question we’ve received is “why is staking ACS in order to unlock paywalled content a better model than paying stablecoin or ETH.” On the surface, token-gated unlock of content is viewed as an overcomplicated user experience — after all, buying a token is an extra step when you could just implement a standard paywall and monthly or annual subscriptions.
The answer may be familiar to creators who have attempted to monetize via subscriptions. The primary problem with regular subscriptions (i.e. pay $29.99 a month) is not user experience — it’s economics.
The traditional subscriptions business model is one-sided, rigid, and value-extractive by nature, meaning that publications receive 100% of the value from their users prior to delivering any value to the consumer.
For example, when a user clicks a piece of content that is of interest, they generate an ad impression. Likewise, if the piece of interest is paywalled, the user pays out of pocket before seeing or receiving the value from the article.
Typically, consumers pay a fixed subscription fee every month or every year and in return they receive access to content. There’s no consumer benefit to supporting a creator beyond receiving access to said content. Additionally, there’s no incentive (or ability in most cases) to support a creator beyond the dictated price. The consumer-creator relationship is purely transactional in this sense.
Access protocol enables stronger relationships between consumer and creator. For every creator that enters the ecosystem, the utility of the $ACS token strengthens, and vice versa for creators as users enter the ecosystem. (Reach out to us if you are interested in learning how Access can onboard your users into our ecosystem!)
Instead of a strictly value-extractive relationship, Access Protocol offers a positive sum experience to both consumers and creators where both participate in the expanding ecosystem. Additionally, creators are incentivized to develop a forward-looking value proposition to grow and retain users over time.
If users feel the value they are receiving exceeds the minimum staking threshold they can choose to stake more assets. This enables a new type of “super supporter” behavior that rewards both the creator and the user equally, while not costing the user anything on an $ACS basis.
Access Protocol allows creators to generate a higher revenue from a larger portion of their user base.
Creators are already seeing pushback to these business models, with most publications seeing just a ~0.6% audience penetration rate. Subscriptions are a bad business model for digital media publishers and content creators. For reference, Bloomberg’s 60–80 million monthly active users have generated less than 400,000 paying subscribers, equating to a ~0.6% penetration rate, considered best in class.
There are many ways in which Access improves user experience, which will ultimately be reflected in higher penetration rates.
Higher penetration rates and wider distribution can be achieved in an ecosystem where users can generate more revenue for creators without paying out of pocket. Incentive structures between consumers and creators are no longer at odds if publications and creators deprecate existing subscriptions models.
So why use $ACS staking to unlock content?
When approaching this problem, we understood that a creator desires recurring fees and the user has a preference to not pay anything out of their pocket. Both of these desires are achieved through staking.
A Web3 wallet may provide a marginally better onboarding experience than traditional logins and credit cards if implemented correctly, but that’s not a game changer. Tokens that incentivize a decentralized community to grow an ecosystem are.
