spotlight

will be spending the next few days on here trying to establish the /spotlight problem statement and the proposed solution. the why, the what and the how.

the [harder-than-it-seems] goal is to explore the opportunity on a practical level, while mixing in some more abstract thinking on creator monetization

c1/2

so, how do creators make money on the internet?

in a lot of ways, ofc. subscription, advertising, sponsorship, etc.

https://warpcast.com/mjc716/0xfc2b8f64

🧵👇

these are distinct on the surface, but when you dig a bit deeper, it’s plain to see that the success you have monetizing a content business, in whatever form, runs downstream from the *attention* you command. 

we’re all here because the promise and potential of composable crypto is to blaze new paths. and there are definitely some exciting experiments underway


Zora

“minting” is arguably the first crypto-native monetization tool to break through, and projects like /zora are experimenting with different ways to structure the value stack


but you will have a hard time convincing me that minting is that different from traditional forms of patronage, like collecting a piece of art or buying a magazine

democratizing, yes. unfamiliar, no.

and don’t get me started on apps for trading your friends lol. many of us have had plenty of fun and made a bunch of money buying and selling representations of our friends, but I don’t really believe that thinly veiled speculation is the future of the content economy

on the flipside, what’s cool about @hypersub is that it harnesses some of the speculative impulse of onchain finance to add crypto-native value to a legacy primitive (subscriptions).

subscribers share in the creator’s upside as a function of how early they were to discovering them.

there’s probably a touch of speculation involved, but it’s genuinely a new model.

hypersub is exploring new ground, but I think we can get a lot more radical in how we re-imagine creator business models.

circling back finally to the initial point in the thread, the attention you command as a creator is *the* key variable, yet none of the business models of the internet efficiently reveal that value.

/spotlight is an attempt at that.

this statement is not all that insightful on its own. and I know I’m grossly oversimplifying.

but what’s revealing is that the principal monetization primitives of the internet map pretty closely to the analog methods they derive from.