Cancel culture is here. Creators are facing an exodus from platforms that they’ve depended upon for years while other platforms are becoming more saturated. So, where do creators go to monetize?
New networks to reward creators are emerging. Last week, Rally Network, released more details of their blockchain built for creators.
The Rally team has been busy this year. First, they launched Taki, a Cameo competitor that rewards users with tokens and cash for making videos for fans. Now, they’re looking to expand their Rally network to more than just Taki.
Rally wants to take a page out of Compound’s playbook and follow a path to progressive decentralization. The rally network lets creators to use “Creator Token” to mint things like digital collectibles and create an economy for their fans. More details on the Rally network.
Genies launches an investment arm for companies using its digital avatars
Meanwhile, creator economies are becoming more creative. Genies, the digital avatar and talent agency, recently announced details on their investment fund for companies building with the Genies SDK.
While Genies doesn’t have a blockchain component, there are many parallels to crypto. Cryptonetworks and Ethereum competitors are trying to compete for developers/users and are trying to use ecosystem funds to incentivize developers. Genies knows that they won’t be able to compete with Snap for users on the Bitmoji SDK, so they’re looking to bootstrap the Genies ecosystem with funds.
Genies is particularly interesting because of the focus on digital goods for the avatar components.
These digital goods could eventually turn into a creator economy, very similar to what Rally is doing with Creator Coin. For example, users can earn digital avatar components for donating to a creator early. This will both double as a badge and a way to show off your flex to others. The avatar components could eventually be used as programmable access to keys to access applications using the Genies SDK.
Are creator micro-competitions the future?
One of the most exciting things last week was MrBeast’s “Finger on the App” challenge. On the first day of the competition, over a million people joined. Seventy hours later, four people remained. MrBeast eventually gave prize money to all the remaining winners.
These micro-competitions are interesting from several angles, but perhaps the most interesting is the status-as-a-service it provides to winners in a short period. The last standing players amassed hundreds of viewers on their Twitch streams in the final competition and eventually started to advertise their own businesses towards the end of the streams.
It seems like TikTok already makes this an infinite game by curating feeds into specific verticals and competitions within each micro category. But there’s a massive opportunity for creators to use time as a parameter to capture attention, similar to what HQ Trivia did. But instead of making it about the winnings, make it about the status.
Reddit wants to reward moderators, maybe with tokens?
Reddit is fighting to remain relevant as subreddits continue to be unbundled by other vertical networks. Last week, the Reddit CEO talked about ways to reward moderators of subreddits for filtering comments and keeping subreddits moderated.
“Reddit’s content moderation scheme differs sharply from the Facebook News Feed or the Twitter timeline. Instead of applying one set of rues for the entire user base, Reddit sets a “floor” of rules that no one can violate but allows individual forums (called subreddits) to raise the “ceiling.” (I wrote about this approach here last month.) This helps create a collective context for discussions, and allows users who have similar values to come together in a shared space online. It’s why I can go to my favorite subreddit, which covers the world of professional wrestling, and find an incredible assortment of relevant stories, pictures, and discussions every day. But it also works only because of the moderators who volunteer to enforce a subreddit’s rules from floor to ceiling — and those moderators are totally unpaid.
In describing how his thinking on the subject had evolved, Huffman said he had been moved by moderators’ stories about their struggles to keep discussions civil. It’s a truism of life online that every forum eventually descends into drama, and keeping participants from flaming one another requires constant, even heroic vigilance. But the moderators themselves often become collateral damage, Reddit executives said”—Casey Newton from The Interface
It’s becoming increasingly evident as to why Reddit has a strong interest in crypto: tokens align the moderators of the community with the long-term value of the subreddit. $BRICKS from /r/fortnite and $MOONS from /r/cryptocurrency provide a new way to reward moderators and contributors for providing value to the community in a low-cost and efficient way. It will be interesting to watch this further develop as Reddit starts to wrap up it’s Reddit Scaling Bake-Off.
I’m currently working on RabbitHole, a platform for new users to learn and earn by using crypto applications. If you’re interested in jamming on topics I mention in my newsletter or on RabbitHole, hit me up on Twitter @flynnjamm.