The Tough Choices Facing Creators
How do we decide what is worth supporting? With the content of yesteryear, we voted with our ears, eyeballs, and wallets in a straightforward manner, in a decision that was entirely ours to make. It was easier to express our support directly, by tuning our televisions; spending our money on movie tickets, or purchasing physical media of our favorite works.
The world of digital content has made supporting the content we enjoy a more complicated calculus than would exist in years past. The growth of subscription models has introduced a requirement for continued, ongoing blanket support, regardless of how much or how little content you consume. And that ongoing financial contribution to a platform’s bottom line doesn’t give you any say in the decisions it makes on the content you do like, no matter how popular it might be.
Digital advertising undergirds much of the content we enjoy on the internet, but that can be equally fraught. Websites can become so beholden to the ad dollar that they render themselves slow and unusable. These sites are bogged down with ads that can go so far as to turn otherwise willing consumers apoplectic, driving them to use ad-blockers for a better experience. Short of technological workarounds, users are given no choice in when they see ads or what ads they are shown.
Independent creators are often short of choice themselves, tied to the platforms they use in order to earn money for their work, and therefore tying themselves to the terms these platforms set for creators and consumers alike. Being one of many on a large platform means having no say over how much you earn from your work, or where that money comes from, or any of the other practices that said platform might engage in separate from uploading your posts to followers. There’s little doubt that those conditions result from the imbalance of power that exists in both content distribution and technology choices, but on the matter of choice, what options do creators have?
Necessary for both creator and consumer is a more direct means of support and transaction that benefits both parties. Consumers want to support the content and creators they enjoy directly, and creators want the ability to forego the current models of distribution for a new system that offers more control, more revenue and less noise. RightsLedger offers both creators and consumers the opportunity for a new relationship between both ends of the creative process, allowing creators to protect and distribute their work in a way that gives fans the ability to show their support directly at a price that both agree to be fair.
If you’re looking for a new way to monetize your content, join the RightsLedger Telegram channel to learn more about what we’re building.
