Introducing Rally: Building New Ways for Content Creators and Fans to Thrive
By Kevin Chou, CEO and Co-Founder
Lilly Singh, Pewdiepie, Ninja and Baby Ariel. These are just the tip of the iceberg for a new generation of content creators, influencers, and gamers that are now some of the most influential cultural voices on the planet. In less than 15 years, these creatives have revolutionized content production and community building. As a result, they’ve elevated social media conglomerates like YouTube, TikTok, Twitch, Facebook and Instagram to a massive global industry.
The influencer marketing sector alone is expected to be valued at $15 billion by 2022 according to Business Insider Intelligence estimates. There’s explosive growth in creators all over the world, particularly in Asia and Latin America. According to a recent report, every second, 11 people use social media for the first time, with a total user base of nearly 4 billion people. It’s estimated that each of us on average spend 2 hours and 24 minutes on social media every single day.
The Future of Creator Support
Founded and led by execs from Kabam, YouTube, Facebook, Disney and Twitch, Rally is a blockchain project for creators launching in Q3 2020. Rally will merge the needs of the burgeoning creator economy with the core tenets of successful crypto projects. By doing so, Rally will forge an entirely new monetization path for creators by enabling them to create their own virtual economy and assets.
We’ve worked closely with creators who’ve built communities and content on multiple platforms to understand their goals, aspirations, and current challenges. We’ve witnessed first-hand the significant issues that creators face, including a lack of control in their fan relationships, bad economics and erratic policy changes. To address these needs, we’ll be applying Rally crypto’s core ethos of decentralization (progressively!), self-sovereignty, and a token-economic model that will offer creators new opportunities to engage with their fans while earning new monetization streams to lessen their dependence on any individual social media platform.
With Rally, creators will be able to issue their own fully customizable, branded cryptocurrency called Creator Coins that represents their unique digital brand to provide value and utility to their fans. Creators will then have access to an easy-to-use blockchain toolkit powered by Creator Coins that enables them to create scarce collectibles and content (non-fungible tokens or NFTs), loyalty programs, and a healthy tokenized economy. Most importantly, Rally will enable every creator to build a business model that will transcend any specific big-tech platform.
New Era of Fandom Where Creator and Fan Both Benefit
Rally aims to jumpstart the global creator economy for both content creators and their fans for a brand new era of fandom where both creator and fan benefit. As it stands right now, creators earn revenue via a small percentage of rev share from advertising, or sponsored posts. In Rally’s vision for the future, creators will be able to grow their audiences and earn more revenue by building their own virtual economy fueled by their own Creator Coin, where they can offer and reward new digital collectibles and digitally native experiences to their fans.
Furthermore, fans will be able to support and also participate in their favorite creator’s success. Not only will they have access to myriad new collectibles and experiences, but they will also be able to buy and trade in each creator’s personalized coin. As their favorite creator’s fame rises, so will their Creator Coin economy, meaning that both creator and fan benefit.
Imagine discovering Ninja playing Fortnite Battle Royale in October 2017 before it reached the mainstream the following year. Or stumbling upon trick shot aficionados Dude Perfect’s inaugural YouTube video in 2009 before they became household names. Instead of simply following them, you could support them via Creator Coin and be an active member of their communities. As Ninja fought his way to the top of the gaming world and amassed nearly 15 million followers on Twitch, if you were earning and holding his Creator Coin, you could potentially see them accrue value. Similarly, as Dude Perfect amassed 52 million subscribers on YouTube, any digital collectibles you earned or purchased, such as a rare, digitally signed autograph or a one-of-a-kind doodle, could also potentially accrue value.
Our core commitments at Rally:
- Progressive Decentralization To Empower Creators and Fans:
Progressive Decentralization: We are building a path for Rally to be a decentralized network where creator, developer, and fan communities are connected without a central platform company. The vision for Rally is not to disrupt the current social media landscape and eventually become the new monopoly. Rally’s destiny is to be owned, operated, and governed by the community of creators, developers, and fans it serves. We love the DeFi community’s innovation here, with protocols like Compound paving the path for projects like Rally to follow.
Creator Owned Economics: Each creator has full control and ownership of their own assets, and will have a voice in governance of Rally Network. No fees will be charged today or in the future, since Rally is a decentralized network, not a centralized company! The community will only be responsible for fees charged by fiat onramps/offramps or public blockchains like Ethereum gas fees.
No Fear of Being De-Platformed or Demonetized: The community sets the rules and governance of the token. While Rally will hold the keys to governance at first, we intend to turn them over to the Rally community as the security and stability of Rally increases to the point where it’s feasible to do so — and as quickly as possible.
2. New Monetization Opportunities for Creators:
New Methods: Rally enables new monetization opportunities that simply aren’t possible with fiat payments or simple virtual goods locked in a central database that can’t travel beyond the walled garden.
Generate long term asset value without cannibalizing existing revenue streams: We’re taking decades of experience designing robust virtual economies with new forms of virtual currencies and assets, and giving them to every creator. Creators will no longer rely solely on a small slice of the advertising revenue shared by a platform to drive their livelihood; rather, they’ll have a basket of assets they can truly own, design and build for the long term.
3. Enable Fans to Participate in Creators’ Success:
New Economic Incentives for Fans To Help Fuel a Creator’s Success: Another failing with big tech platforms is the lack of direct participation and rewards for fans that contribute to a creators’ success. Rally will provide access to new economic incentives for fans to both help and participate in a creator’s success. Imagine a fan helping to promote a creator’s new video through their social media networks, and earning token rewards with real economic value in return. Rally enables a future where fans and their favorite creators both benefit.
Shared Success: Rally will enable a network where creators, fans, and developers all have their success aligned with the broader network. The important absence of a singular platform controller in the network avoids long term monopolistic competition of the platform against its own ecosystem.
Getting Started…
In Q3, we’re launching our Creator Coin with Twitch streamers, a class of creators who are already well versed on virtual currencies. Our initial approach is to have streamers award Creator Coin to fans that subscribe to a higher priced tier on Twitch. Think of it as a cash back program — fans provide more monetary support to streamers on Twitch, and in return they receive some Creator Coin from the streamer which they can then hold and/or redeem on the streamer’s channel. These initial “super fans” will be the early adopters that form the core of these emerging creator economies. We will also integrate Creator Coin functionality into Taki, a customized video tipping app, which is already helping creators earn a few thousand dollars a month recording personalized videos for their fans.
In Q4, we will unveil more ways for fans to use Creator Coins on Twitch itself via Twitch Extensions and chatbot features. Shortly after that, we will open up the network and create more on-ramps and off-ramps to bring more participants into the ecosystem as well as provide multiple liquidity options.
Next year, we’ll work with a developer ecosystem to build integrations and use cases across other social media platforms, and further down the line we’ll open the door to developers to access key smart contracts, deploy our governance tokens and network rewards for contributors, and hand over governance to the community.
While Creator Coins form the basis of creator economies, looking further out we also plan on layering in scarce, blockchain-based digital assets (also known as Non-Fungible Tokens or NFTs) to facilitate robust digital marketplaces around creators’ brands. We’ll be giving creators more tools to mint, manage and monetize their own Creator Coins and NFTs. While these Creator Coins and NFTs will leverage ERC-20 and ERC-721 standards, Rally will introduce powerful tools to pool liquidity and use bonding curves to make the user experience seamless and provide instant liquidity to micro-markets. We’ll be sharing more details on that soon.
We imagine a bright future for content creators and their fans. One where creators not only achieve greater reach and fame, but also financial security built on the solid foundation of long lasting relationships with their fans. One where creators will pioneer new business models and practices that will influence the next generation of content creators. We are ready to take this first step, in lock step with you.
In the coming weeks, we’ll share more information on the Rally Network and Creator Coin. For now, please follow us on LinkedIn or Twitter for updates. Interested creators can reach us directly at creators@rally.io
Thank you to Ian Lee, Jesse Walden, Li Jin, Nick Tomaino, Jehan Chu, and Josh Williams for reviewing earlier drafts of this post and providing valuable feedback.
