Web3 Creator Economies - Cooper Turley

i got up next i have cooper turley of audience and of the creator community he is gonna explore web3 creator economies cooper what up hey what's going on man thank you for having me here floor is yours my brother appreciate it hey what's up guys this is cooper coming in live from east denver i've been a big fan of this event for quite a long time so again to present here is definitely an honor to me um quick shout out to everyone on the denver team you guys have been doing fantastic work i'm excited to be here so today i'm going to be talking about web3 creator economies as you just saw on that last slide um from a high level i've been working with a lot of creators just about how to use crypto in new and exciting ways and i want to spend this time today to just go through what i've been seeing how to build communities in web3 and how to use these new premises like nfts and social tokens to build new and exciting communities so with that let's get right into it so these days i'm working on quite a lot of things you know it's kind of a running meme at this point that i'm involved with more projects and can count you know i listed out a bunch of the stuff that i'm working on on the left side here my main gig these days is that crypto strategy at audios this is a decentralized streaming protocol that now has close to two million of the active users i think this is really important to emphasize it's a project that i'm really passionate about as someone who's really into music and i think the fact that we're building for such a large number of new users speaks tremendously to how far the space has come into where we're going um outside of that i've been doing a lot of token and governance design work with a couple teams social token management journalism nft collector advising a couple projects farming everything there's the farm doing some protocol politician work dow lover an investor at a couple companies so as you can see on the bottom there i see a lot of projects this is kind of giving me some perspective to basically figure out where are we now where are we going and how do we offer this technology to new users so that they don't feel overwhelmed when they want to come in and start using ethereum and crypto as a whole for me personally you know i've been really driven by this power of community for quite a long time i started off in the space as a community manager helping to figure out what this whole ico craze was you know over the years we sort of boiled down what it meant to have a true community you know i owe a lot of this to the thousand i was really early involved in and um especially as we get into a more digital world you know finding meaningful connections is really really important i think it's kind of difficult for us to figure out how to navigate these new digital ecosystems when it comes to telegram and discord twitter you know tick tock now clubhouse whatever it might be and so for me getting to find ways for people to connect with one another and more importantly finding ways for people to get paid to pursue their passion you know this is something that i think is really powerful about web 3 and crypto and so a lot of my time as of late has focused on helping creatives build compelling tools and basically find ways to monetize around what they want to be doing you know basically allowing them to work on the things that they're passionate about and finding ways to be sustainable off of that so today we're going to talk a little bit about crater economies as i mentioned before before we dive into that i think it's really important to emphasize that there's a lot of industries in this world where creative pursuits are really attractive you know you see these superstars releasing music every day these rock star dreams and whatnot but when it boils down to it most of these artists today are only capturing about 12 of the music industry revenue this is just one example of a crater economy that's heavily rivaled with middlemen and intermediaries and so part of what i want to talk about today is how i'm seeing different creators using web3 to basically change that notion to capture more value and to build community so diving into that what is a creator economy um there's a couple really amazing blog posts out there that i highly recommend reading the first one the passion economy by lee jain and the second one the ownership economy by jesse walden as you can see by these quotes here new digital platforms enable people to earn a livelihood in a way that highlights their individuality ownership economy rather than the platform's inner circle of founders collecting the value the users are capturing majority of that value themselves i think that these two premises of being able to be sustainable through creative work and being able to allow your fans to capture the shared upside of your success creates this really interesting flywheel that we've never seen in history before so what i want to do with this talk is kind of talk about how that's happening and how people are using web3 to do that as you can see here i have a nice little flywheel that'll kind of guide us through this presentation today we have content collection and community i think this is sort of the flywheel i'm seeing emerge for how you build a sustainable web through ecosystem and what i want to do is send some time diving into each of these pieces of the puzzle to help people understand how they can do this and what they can do within the communities they're working with today diving into content so one of the best things about web3 is exclusive content and exclusive access takes a whole new level you know we see tools like cloud land we see all these discord channels we see tools like mint gate um there's all these different places now where you can basically get content based on token holdings i think this is really powerful when we start to think about the ways that creators can engage with their audience you know in a world where most content is free and publicly available today being able to have exclusivity and give people a sense of shared ownership over exclusive content is really really interesting you know taking that a step further we're seeing a lot of stuff now with nfts on nifty gateway and super air where the market is determining the price of a lot of these different objects and collectibles that we're seeing today so one example i like to give is people's peace politics is he released these nfts for a dollar a piece you could only buy them for five minutes in an open edition and now they're trading as high as eighteen thousand dollars i think that the reason this is interesting is that creators now have ways to form markets around their creative work that are very fluid it's very in line with their community and they have ways to capture that upside and so as i mentioned in the last slide about the ownership economy what's really valuable here is that with these platforms you know using audio as an example you can really own the value that you create you know an image on the right-hand side you see here with spotify today you know the platform is taking about 88 of that revenue and the artist is only seeing 12 what we're doing to change that is giving the artist about 90 of that and allowing the community to share that other 10 of the value you know this premise of ownership and sort of sharing direct value capture with your users is really really powerful and it opens up this mechanism of direct community that feeds really well into this narrative of exclusive access and exclusive content so once you have some exclusive content what we're seeing now is that you're finding ways to be able to collect that content so the most obvious answer to this is non-fungible tokens nfts the last panel we were just on there had a lot of great insights about this topic and it's something that's becoming more and more apparent um i think on my end you know having been an nft collector for a couple months now you know seeing the upside in the growth of this market has been absolutely just fantastic to watch i mean in the bottom left there the chart speaks for itself you can see all these marketplaces they're doing historical records and volumes but to me it's not really about you know the sales numbers i think that in crypto it's easy to point to uh financial metrics as a mechanism of success but you know what i get really excited about is how you use collectibles in new and creative ways so stuff like proof of memory right being able to scan a qr code co-op one of the best sponsors in this in this ecosystem and one that's very close to working with eth denver you know having a piece of uh having an nft to prove that you went to a physical event being able to share that from now and through the end of time you know these principles are something that are really really powerful and when you add in a financial value to them and sort of create an experience around it i think it starts to get really really interesting so as far as the web 3 creator economies are concerned today i'm seeing a lot of work around audio nfts audio reactive nfts are nfts that have a music component to them that interacts directly with the underlying work and now what we're seeing is a lot of artists really leaning into using nfts as another revenue stream to monetize in the absence of touring so some examples of this wow rac that's uh there's a couple artists that are doing this really really good job with this and they're basically releasing nfts to better engage community and to create exclusive experiences around these digital collectibles on the right hand side of the screen here you can see this notion of crypto media this is an idea presented by zora which basically says that all nfts have a media component to them but now for the first time in history that media can have a market associated with it so you can think of this as a blog post a song um a piece of content on the internet that we see today like a tweet and the biggest difference here is that all that is now collectible right so in a world where it's largely been gaming items or digital art et cetera et cetera i'm taking this primitive and opening it up to any form of content that lives on the internet and giving it an investment layer we can now start collecting anything and everything that we consume on the internet i think this is really powerful i think it's a tool that a lot of creators are going to keep using moving forward the last one here that i want to touch on is community so this is a subject that i'm really passionate about but something i spent most of my time developing um more recently this notion of social tokens has been extremely intriguing to me you know there's a lot of talk around like what is the social token what makes it valuable as someone who's been in dallas and seen firsthand how valuable it can be to just be a part of a community i think social tokens are a way to do this in a little bit more mainstream friendly manner so on the right hand side of the page here you can see a map of just some of the many creators that are using social tokens today i honestly want to say this is probably like you know maybe 20 of all the social tokens that are out there this number is growing so fast that it's honestly hard to keep up at this point i'm working very closely with a project called seed club which is helping creators launch their own social tokens and i think this growing movement around encouraging creators to figure out how they want to monetize their brand how they want to issue a currency to better connect their community members and how to build experiences around these social tokens you know we're quickly going away from using personal tokens as a fundraise to entirely airdropping these tokens to an active community giving them tools and features to connect with one another and building meaningful relationships online so as i said at the beginning of this presentation web 3 creator economies are entirely about the community itself they're about you know forming connections amongst those peers and individuals and to me using these social tokens as a means of connective glue has been a really fascinating design space to work in so some things i want to touch on very fast are gated discord i mentioned a tool called cleveland earlier and what we're seeing today is a lot of these discord channels where you need to hold a certain amount of tokens to access them um this is a great way to sort of keep the barrier high to entry to mitigate you know people maybe with not the best intents or just spammers from joining and it also has skin in the game aspects to make these communities a lot more insightful and a lot more engaging so one community that i'm working very closely with is called friends with benefits fwb this is a culture crypto community and we've now seen close to a thousand people come into that group all holding these tokens and having these really amazing conversations around culture the future of technology you know not only the price of bitcoin but the trends and nfts and social tokens and kind of talking about the aspects of web3 that kind of go under the radar a lot of times and there's actually very few discussion about price and i think that when you start to center these creative communities around you know what makes crypto special what is it why am i here who are these people i'm interacting with you start to see some really interesting relationships emerge so for me when i think about creator economies these digital networking opportunities or these abilities to meet other people you know hold the same tokens as you or that they share the same ethos as you it kind of opens up these playgrounds where you know you can go and meet people irl you can go and have zoom chats with them whatever it might be but you know the important thing to keep in mind here is that's all possible because of community and using things like social tokens we can now form deeper relationships around community that we've ever formed before um what i'll say is as a kind of a cool example here an artist i've had the pleasure of working with name rec launched a social token a couple months back you know this was a huge community event and i think on my end seeing someone with this high status profile is him launching a social token want to show me that this is a very very big very big design space that is only now just getting explored you know rac is probably the most well-versed musician when it comes to crypto that i know personally but since then the amount of conversations i've had with creators that are saying hey i want to do nfts i want to do a social token i've never touched crypto before but i want to start using web3 to better build a community and monetize on behalf of my growing families you know these conversations have shown me that crypto is no longer about the financial value of ether or the speculative nature of a new layer one blockchain you know we now have tools and premises to actually create these entirely new ecosystems and by giving creators the tools to basically leverage this technology i think we're starting to see a huge trend around how to do this in a much more meaningful way than what we've ever seen before so you know the obvious question here is how do i do this you know i think that everyone can see that there's value in doing these things but it's an obvious answer that people don't really know where to get started so what you can see here on the screen is a couple different pictures on the left hand side we have the nfc issuance landscape and on the right hand side we have a couple logos from teams that are working on social tokens and what i want to call out here is that it's not scary to lean into crypto you know i think it sounds a lot more intimidating than it is what you're really looking for are partners to hold your hand and this is why i've been playing a big role in the artist management side and on the social token management side it's just helping people to get started so you look at this picture on the left hand side and you say okay there's 35 different projects that i can issue an nft through where do i go who do i want to work with and what does this look like and part of the role that i've been playing is guiding people through these different platforms giving them the pros of cons of each and helping to connect them with the teams to make their drops and to make their experiences as valuable as possible on the right hand side we see the exact same thing hey i want to make a social token there's a bunch of different places i can do this i've made a social token how do i distribute it how do i build out this ecosystem these are all questions that are going to get more and more important over time i think it's really important to emphasize that we're reaching a tipping point now where all these amazing celebrities and creators want to get into crypto we need to be really delicate about how we guide them through that process you know i see a very obvious um red flag emerging where a lot of these creators are coming in and doing token sales you know they're selling an nfc for a lot of money they're making money off crypto and then all of a sudden everyone's like oh you know crypto is work crypto is here to succeed but in my mind you know the financial value associated with these campaigns and these programs is just about the least exciting piece of the puzzle here you know i like to say that a lot of people have followings in this world but very few have community and so trying to use these tools like nfts and social tokens to create these ecosystems around creators i think it's really really powerful in the bottom right there i've been working with some teams on integrating source credit into their discord channels for those who don't know it's an amazing tool to track contributions to any social channel and more specifically it gives you a way to make unbiased claims over who should deserve to earn value in that community so for example if you have a discord channel you integrate source cred you can generate an internal score and allow those contributors to earn real tokens for the value that they provide to discord based on the parameters that you set and so giving these fans and these community members ways to earn financial value for being an engaged member in a creative economy this flywheel just keeps going and what you see is people keep coming back for more they find that they're meeting people through these communities they're learning how to use the technology they're doing all this cool and exciting stuff that you know as we take these premises and we go beyond discord we go natively to platforms like audience we go natively to superair nifty gateway whatever these platforms are we're starting to see this web3 creator economy become really really important and so what i like to say is that the tools are here today you know it's definitely a little bit clunky and it definitely requires a bit of a learning curve but for those that are willing to to dive in and really give it a chance you know we're seeing people making more money um off of these crypto primitives today than they have off of decades of the creative work that they've done um going back to my original point what's amazing to crypto what's amazing about crypto to me is just this notion of sustainability you know it's not about getting rich it's not about having a retirement fund because you sold a couple nfts you know you have the peoples on one end of the spectrum that raise millions of dollars but more importantly it's these small artists that can raise a couple hundred dollars off the back of these creative works that they put out you know they can monetize directly from their fans they're not going through these large bodies and these black boxes that take months to get paid they can create ecosystems where they get paid in real time and they can see direct financial upside from their growth of their communities and investments they're making into these tools like discords and into these social tokens etc and so this is where a lot of my time has been spent at it's something i'm becoming increasingly more passionate and it's something that i'm really looking forward to as we keep building out over the next couple months so what's next you know we covered a lot of stuff today we covered exclusive content on platforms like audios we covered nfts on platforms like zora and super air we covered community gated discords we covered collab land social tokens all of that there's a lot of tools on the table what i'll say for any creator that's watching this or anyone that may know creators there's a couple key rules that i think are very much the same amongst all of these first and foremost build for 100 true fans it's not about getting a million people on your discord it's not about making biggest flash on twitter it's about finding those very key contributors who are going to come back and participate in each and everything you do i think if you can find a hundred true fans who are actively engaged in your community on a day-to-day basis the rest will figure itself out you know the tools are on the table to monetize and the single most important thing you can do is build the deepest relationship possible with your community there's a great role called the 90 10 one rule what this says is that 90 of the community is going to be lurkers 10 are going to be passive contributors and one percent are going to be active contributors so going back to this hundred true fans rules don't design your experience to expect everyone in your community to participate really focus on that one percent and do what you can to empower them you know some great examples i've seen of this is what balancer is doing right now with their valors community where each of these core contributors are getting a fixed amount of tokens per month for being active contributors helping the steward community facilitating governance discussions you know you can really lean into empowerment in a number of different ways and um what's cool about crypto is that a lot of these people this is their first time entering the space you know giving them a special role in discord really moves the needle in terms of how involved they feel in that community you know giving them a shout out on twitter from an account that has a lot of followers you know these are things that keep people coming back for more and it's things that really just emphasize why this web 3 movement is so powerful and why this line between community and team is able to be blurred in such an effective manner as you can see here participation over speculation i think with nft social tokens really any tokens in general we all get caught up in what is the priceless token what's the market cap what's the fpv but it's just about participation you know i've seen personally that for all these web 3 creator economies the more you lean into the value created around the participation and the less you talk about token price the more successful that project's going to be you know the last thing i'll say here is don't be afraid to try there's probably about 100 creators in the world doing this in a meaningful way right now i think if you're listening to this presentation or if you know someone that's willing to listen to these type of ideas they are literally on the forefront of what's going to become an incredibly huge industry over the next 10 years so as you can see in the bottom left-hand side there's never been a better time in history to be a creator if anyone listening this has questions about what's going on please slide into those dms you can find me on twitter koopa troopa i talk about this stuff non-stop and um yeah it's been an incredible year you know i'm really looking forward to seeing everyone that's watching this irl hcc coming back up devcon hopefully sometime next year it's been a weird couple uh years here since the last eighth denver but um i'm feeling really good about where things are and i think we have a lot of cool stuff in the pipeline so just want to say thank you again to the organizers and i'm looking forward to talking to everyone soon yeah absolutely cooper everybody uh probably feels very similar so thank you very much cooper that was amazing um really really great uh to take a tour around that space so thanks for sharing your insights on community and that's one thing we can really all really need to keep uh at the forefront is really if you don't have the community piece you know the the people will find a technology that they you know enables them to do what they want but the core community has to be there the other thing that's really exciting is you know artists being able to leverage this technology you know it's the same type of thing that artists have done in every other medium whether it was instagram whether it was facebook or you know whether it was on television back in the day or radio even before that they've traditionally artists have adapted to the mediums and in order to communicate their message so i think this is just one more step absolutely and thank you again for having me i know after this we have john coming up i'm a huge user of super big fan of the platform so i think you guys are in for a real treat indeed indeed we have uh we have john on deck so uh thank you very much cooper i appreciate it thank you guys have a great day cheers