Social Money: Redefining the Next Generation of Content Creators
The next generation of content creators will grow up in a world where they are able to retain and store the value they create through their communities, independent of platforms they use to cultivate that fanbase. This will be enabled through social money that is controlled directly by the creator and her community, cutting across all present and future technology platforms.
Power of the Platforms
Several billion dollar technology platforms today are valuable because they are able to capture the value that is generated on them by content creators, who use these platforms.
In the early days of the web, content was far more decentralized across individual blogs, forums, and personal websites. This gave everyday fans the ability and power to choose the content creators they want to follow, without a central control system that determined what content they are exposed to.
In the last decade or so, platforms that aggregate content have become the norm, and the decentralized nature of content discovery and consumption has sharply declined. This has made these centralized platforms all too powerful. Most of the value generated by creators on these platforms now accrues not to the creators or their communities, but to the platforms themselves.
The power has shifted too much towards platforms that aggregate, and away from the content creators and community that sustains these platforms. This has led to a shift away from the values espoused by these communities, and they have a limited choice in moving to another platform.
Swinging the Pendulum Back with Social Money
Social money is used within a community for social purposes, and for storing and exchanging value generated within that community. This enables expanding the pie, by generating value through exchange where none existed before.
There are several defining characteristics of social money that make it very appealing in today’s world.
Social money is inherently owned by the community and not beholden to the value systems and rules of a narrow slice of humanity that run the giant tech platforms. Social money that organically grows from a bottoms-up community system will almost always capture the value systems of that community more accurately than any centralized corporation can.
Social Money for Online Creators
Social money curated for online creators and their communities is a low-hanging fruit for adoption as many creators begin to realize they can take back control of their communities and economics. After all, social money is used by people who can interact via any medium (even offline) and thus goes against the power of aggregation that today’s technology platforms enjoy.
Social money tilts the power balance back towards the creators and their communities. Creators can truly own the value they generate online, irrespective of the platform. This is because the creator owns the economic relationship with her fans directly instead of being intermediated through a platform.
In such a world, platforms are more interchangeable and communities are the scarce commodity. New platforms will find it easier to innovate and compete, since they can ‘borrow’ and onboard these existing relationships between creators and fans. Creators can be at the forefront of this trend.
In order for this vision to come to fruition, it is important that social money exist independent of any platform, and truly owned by the content creators and their communities. This is why, at Roll we’re building the backbone of social money on the Ethereum blockchain. The Roll enabled social money ecosystems that thrive can continue to grow independently, without interference from any third-party, even Roll.
