The Ugly Truth | How Social Media Platforms Ruin Content Creators’ Lives

Would you pay to have content you created to be owned by another company and still feel good about it? Yeah, sounds absurd. Well, it is absurd, and we all have to deal with this reality: popular social media platforms let you upload your content promising you money and fame in return. But the platform owners get a lot more.

Not only do today’s platforms take ownership of your content, they make you pay to be featured on the main page, or they sell your content and take up to 100% of the revenue.

Popular content creators concerned about ownership issues started a video campaign to win their content back. All the videos were about the problems of

• Owning
• Earning
• Controlling

A decade ago singers, photographers and other content creators earned based on their talent and popularity. In the digital era everything is more complicated. Artists go out of their way to create and share something amazing hoping to please their audience and monetize their content. But the system favors business owners and social media platforms.

So how it does this work, and who gets the trophies?

First, to post content on a platform, you have to agree to the platform’s terms of use. These terms vary from country to country and network to network, but overall they enable the platform to take a percentage of your income and partially or entirely become a copyright owner of your content.

Second, the platform dictates your service fee and your content’s worth. Some popular platforms take up to 30% of an artist’s revenue. To earn a mere $3000, an artist needs 500,000 listens or views. If the artist is not world-famous, the revenue will be pretty small.

To protect content creators’ rights, the European Parliament passed the EU Copyright Directive to keep big social media platforms from letting users share unlicensed, copyrighted material. Even though this seems to be a great solution for artists to start earning again, controversial Article 13 or so-called “meme ban” will face a final vote in January 2019.

The problem is, the legislation requires the hosting platform to restrict users from uploading copyrighted content. The only way to do so is to scan all the data on the platform which some argue could lead to widespread censorship.

The U.S. imposes similar but milder regulations: the Fair Use and the Music Modernization Act. The so-called “Fair Use” law allows an individual to share any copyrighted content if the individual parodies, uses for educational purposes or comments on the content.

How can content creators take back control?

Even with these regulations, content creators still have to deal with piracy. Imagine: you upload your new single on a platform that promises you to protect your rights and give you 95% of the revenue, but your song is stolen and sold by a third-party. The issue is global and requires a systematic approach.

How can platforms and content owners BOTH win?

Social media platforms want higher revenue, more users and paying advertisers on their platform.

Content creators want to share their content with the world, gain fame, earn money and protect their copyrights.

What if there was a platform that let content creators fully own their content copyrights? That let content creators directly control and monetize their work with no middleman? Where no one could steal their work? You might think that no company or social media platform owner would ever let that happen — they would lose too much. But what if the company also got what it wants?

When everything is fair, more creators and advertisers will be willing to join the network to revolutionize the way it all works.

Join the social media revolution!

Request early access: https://postopoly.app/