“When airdrop?” Try why airdrop.
Details of the upcoming SNGLS airdrop to SNGJ holders and a bit on Singular J’s reason for being
As you may recall, Singular J is an artist-centric platform built to help content creators better monetize their creations. It’s powered by the SNGJ token, a utility token used across the platform. You may also recall that there’s an airdrop coming up (the first of three), in which we will airdrop SNGLS tokens to SNGJ holders. Today we’ll discuss a bit more about why we’re doing this airdrop and the impetus behind Singular J as a platform, but first…
The airdrop details.
The snapshot of all SNGJ holders will take place at block height 10,180,800 (currently estimated to occur on June 1st) and the tokens will be dispersed on June 5th.
We are airdropping SNGLS tokens to SNGJ holders. In case you missed the announcement of all the Singular June airdrops, we’re airdroping 25 million SNGLS tokens. Every address that is holding SNGJ during the June 1 snapshot will get a 15% airdrop of SNGLS tokens, rounded down. Let’s say you’ve got 1,003 SNGJ at the time of the snapshot. That means you will receive 150 SNGLS on June 5.
You will need to move your SNGJ off exchanges and into a wallet to which you control the private keys in time for the snapshot to be eligible to participate. Examples of such wallets include Metamask, Torus, Fortmatic, MyEtherWallet, and MyCrypto, but any wallet that supports all ERC-20 tokens should work.
You may be asking yourself, “Why would you airdrop SNGLS?” Good question. The reason behind this airdrop is to educate our token holders about the larger SingularDTV ecosystem. As a strategic partner of SingularDTV, Singular J plans to leverage the SNGLS Media Distribution Protocol, a decentralized, censorship-resistant means of distributing digital content. This protocol has its own gamified components, including content mining and DAO governance. Additionally, by using its own incentivization mechanisms, the Media Distribution Protocol will enable Singular J to host and distribute content at minimal cost. (Centralized content delivery is expensive; even ubiquitous centralized platforms like Youtube suffer from massive content hosting costs, to the point where parent company Alphabet refuses to comment on whether or not they are profitable.) This will keep content costs associated with the Singular J platform low, a key strategic advantage. But cost savings is only a tiny part of what excites us about decentralized technologies.
Why create Singular J?
A long, long time ago, nearly a year before the first bitcoin was mined , Kevin Kelley wrote that a creator would only need 1000 fans to make a living. The math, by Kelley’s estimate, is quite simple: if you can get one thousand people to pay you $100 in a year, you can sustainably earn a living. However, Kelly adds in his updated essay that this only works provided:
“[Y]ou must have a direct relationship with your fans. That is, they must pay you directly. You get to keep all of their support, unlike the small percent of their fees you might get from a music label, publisher, studio, retailer, or other intermediate. If you keep the full $100 of each true fan, then you need only 1,000 of them to earn $100,000 per year. That’s a living for most folks.”
Kelley’s pitch here seems incredibly simple, and yet in today’s world increasingly radical. Creators are reliant on platforms to get their content in front of audiences, and those platforms tend to extract wealth. Youtube, for example, revolutionized video sharing, making it possible for entirely new types of content creators to easily distribute short videos to fans. But Youtube also keeps the lion’s share of advertising dollars spent on its platform, ensuring that creators only keep a fraction of the value that their content generates. Even the rules surrounding who is allowed to monetize what content on Youtube have been subject to change on a moment’s notice. (For a recent example, see Youtube’s sudden policy change to demonetize all coronavirus-related content and the sudden reversal of that policy for select creators only a week later, but this is merely the latest episode is a troubled history that trends toward favoring advertisers over content creators.) Unfortunately, Youtube is far from an exception, it merely exemplifies the behavior of today’s platforms, which prioritize their own bottom line over supporting creators. Even platforms like Amazon’s Prime Video Direct that exist (supposedly) to help creators leverage mainstream distribution portals, in this case Prime Video, have been known to suddenly and dramatically change their royalties policies to the detriment of creators.
When creators get paid fractions of fractions, they require far more views, clicks, downloads, listens, etc. to earn a livable income. The only option becomes getting studio backing or signing with a record label in order to get the massive marketing outreach to earn all those views. And so, despite technology revolutionizing the way content is consumed, creators fall back into the false dichotomy of signing away their creations to rich corporations or living in obscure poverty.
But it’s not all doom and gloom; a third option has emerged, and increasingly is becoming more viable. Additional creator-centric platforms and services have emerged, enabling content creators to effectively self-distribute their work and better monetize their relationship with fans. These platforms enable the type of “direct relationship” that Kelley describes, and this value exchange is proving to be more lucrative than previously imagined. In a recent publication for Andreesen Horowitz, investment partner Li Jin argues that 100 true fans is probably a better benchmark for creators today given the upwards trends in payments from superfans. She points to evidence from creator platforms, specifically: “On Patreon, the average initial pledge amount has increased 22 percent over the past two years. Since 2017, the share of new patrons paying more than $100 per month — or $1,200 per year — has grown 21 percent.”
Singular J was in part born from this trend, as an artist-friendly platform built to help content creators find a sustainable alternative to make a living. But we wanted to take our platform a step further.
Wait, what does blockchain have to do with any of this?
While we are heartened with the growing number of platforms like Patreon striving to help creators effectively find and monetize their 1000 (or 100) True Fans, even these platforms are far from perfect. With Patreon specifically, the platform has generated over one billion dollars for creators since it launched, but it has failed to capture much of this revenue for itself. In its current iteration, CEO Jack Conte has expressed doubts that Patreon will be sustainable. We started thinking: how could we use decentralized technologies to do better?
Blockchain is an ideal solution for several reasons. For starters, it truly enables direct peer-to-peer value exchange in a way that fiat platforms simply cannot. (Patreon has long been hamstrung by needing to pay credit card processors, losing roughly half of the fees it would have taken in to credit card companies.) Perhaps more exciting is the opportunity to leverage the gamified aspects of blockchain technology, though.
For anyone who has already read Singular J’s revised white paper, you know that Singular J takes a unique, gamified approach for creating tokenized content subscriptions. (For those of you who haven’t read the white paper, read it now. Go ahead. We’ll wait.) We wanted to create a unique, crypto-enabled version of the subscription experience, one that would allow creators to fairly monetize their work while incentivizing fans to act as word-of-mouth marketers for that creator. But this new type of subscription is really just one value add from blockchain.
Singular J is a platform, but it’s also an economy built around the SNGJ token. The SNGJ token has absolute utility within this economy. It’s a means of payment from fans to artists, whether it be paying for a one-time download or trying out our new tokenized subscriptions. It’s the currency for artists to redeem to pay their bills. It’s also the biggest store of value for Singular J as a platform. As stated in the white paper, Singular J will NOT impose a platform fee and extract wealth. Instead, actions on the platform will trigger burning (or deletion) of SNGJ tokens, reducing the overall supply and preserving the token’s utility. By burning tokens rather than collecting fees, Singular J demonstrates its commitment to providing real utility with the SNGJ token and thereby building an economy, one to unite and benefit all its economic participants: content creators, fans, and even the platform itself. Singular J doesn’t profiteer off and exploit content creation in favor of its own bottom line; instead, it is tokenomically architected to thrive only when its fan-creator ecosystem flourishes.
June is just the beginning.
While the airdrop might be the flashy attention grabber, this airdrop (and the two other airdrops coming up later in June) are merely small parts of a larger educational campaign. We invite everyone to take a look at what we’ve got going on under the hood and to get involved as the SingularDTV ecosystem collectively starts rolling out its new projects as early as late June with the launch of the snglsDAO. Singular J and SingularDTV have never had more blockchain experiments going on at one time, and we’re only getting started.
