Infrastructure for the Creator Economy

all right all right welcome everybody thanks for being here this is uh a little conversation on the crater economy infrastructure um really excited to have this group of panelists here we're going to have a nice open conversation um there's some really incredible projects um being built by all these lovely people on stage with me so um we'll just start off with some quick introductions my name is Alec I'm an artist I'm also working on building uh Creator tooling for Revenue sharing and also run an artist Collective called campfire with some other folks in the room so we'll just go right to left here sure quick introduction hi everyone uh my name is Adrian Stern I'm the CEO and co-founder of reveal where we are building a on-chain earning infrastructure for for creators and businesses uh basically Revenue sharing and making sure creators can access their funds more more easily I started my career in the music industry I played in a Swiss reggae band that started touring internationally started managing the bands started producing other artists eventually ran an independent record label so did that for about 10 years after which did a 180 came to the US and worked in banking for a couple of years that's when I learned about blockchain and after three years of being sick of working in an environment uh went back to school and started ideating on different things eventually landed on what is revealed today where I'm kind of bringing my past experience as a Creator and working in banking to try to help creators better manage their own chain earnings hello Adrian hi guys my name is Nikki bean I am the head of community at decent.xyz we are a web free infrastructure and tooling company helping creators Brands organizations really integrate nfts and their technology into their day-to-day operations um I've been in web 3 for about a year and a half now I'm really on the community building side working with independent creators to really help them take control of their you know experience in their careers whether it be inside or outside of web3 I'm just really passionate about helping you know the independent people succeed and so I'm really stoked to be here with us amazing people of a group of people who are also on that wave as well GM everyone I am ldf I am sometimes what people would call I guess a Creator I see it more as being like a chaotic person of the internet uh in my past life I had roles at Reddit and Facebook specifically working with gaming e-commerce and crypto companies that were building communities and I was really fascinated in what individual creators were able to do outside of any one platform by building communities and being kind of like a headless brand themselves that could take a lot of different forms and so to me that was what made crypto and some of these Primitives super interesting and being able to own and control more than just financial information and so being able to build experiences on top of those transactions was very interesting to me and so I decided I couldn't participate in building tooling unless I just decided to do the work myself run into the problems that individuals were facing and there are a lot of them we have a lot of work to do so really excited about the conversations that have been happening this week the people that are putting in the work on the tooling to make this easier for more creative people to be able to build really awesome experiences that are going to make this industry more approachable and more exciting for more people so really excited to be here today hi everyone I'm Bradley Freeman I'm on the growth team at Lens protocol which is part of the Ave companies uh I focus our lens focuses on uh giving creators ownership of their relationship with their followers all of the content they create and the data having full visibility into the data that you generate um my background is I previously worked at Tick Tock um where the sort of my entry into web3 I helped create tick tocks nft project which was all around helping creators understand the value of the content they create and build direct relations with their fans and lens is really like the grown-up version of that so super excited to be here with all these guys awesome thank you all for the intros um there are so many we don't have a ton of time we have about 20 minutes here and there's a lot of different directions that the conversation could go I'd like to do just a little bit of context setting kind of before we start though if anybody has kind of a an operative definition of the crater economy like as you understand it would love for anyone to kind of share yeah no no pressure by the way uh it doesn't need to be a dictionary definition but yeah uh the Creator economy to me or the promise of the Creator economy is the idea that you can have a career and a livelihood uh through your creative passions there's this uh I think most of us grew up with the idea that you can either be a starving artist or get a corporate job and be unhappy and make money and that really shouldn't be the choice and the promise of the Creator economy is to achieve The Best of Both Worlds I think all the projects that we're all uh working on the folks we work with are we share this mission on some level awesome thank you would anyone else like to share anything else as you kind of think about it I think Brad covered it that's perfect yeah I agree I agree okay so a couple things that come to mind with that definition in mind or that promise in mind are how are as participants in the Creator economy how are our contributions compensated and how are they recognized right I think those are the kind of two key elements so um Adrian I'm going to direct this this first question I guess at you because what reveal is building is kind of handling that first part of how are the contributions actually compensated what um what do you see as the kind of key unlocks of blockchain and web3 in general for new methods of you know compensation for independent creators yeah sure I think one of the really interesting things that blockchain is enabling is kind of a transition from you know up front flat fees being paid to some creators to participation or Equity if you will into the upside of a project right when you think about the music industry for instance uh the graphic designer that would draw the cover art of an album would be paid you know 500 bucks maybe 2 000 bucks if they're really a great artist and that's it right flat fee up front you're done with your work in the web 3 space what we're seeing is the creator is different collaborators get a percentage of the revenue generated by the project obviously you know higher risk but more upside I feel like we're seeing this trans position to like more Equity into how creators collaborate and so the the not only is it kind of a more collaborative space because of the equity that everyone has but we're bringing in new types of collaborators right in you know let's say in a pfp project you might have developers you might have marketers you've got designers you've got all these different folks collaborating on a project and have you know a share of earnings so uh we're really excited about that at reveal because we feel like it's enabling uh fairer you know Creator economy for all the different collaborators and more upside for all of them and we're giving them the tools or at least we're trying to build the tools for them to be able to share that Revenue in a trustless way without having to rely on middlemen I think this is the second part of my answer to your question which is the big shift is that now creators can own the way they want their earnings to be read distributed right in music in film you have a lot of intermediaries who will usually collect the royalties of these different types of assets and somehow redistribute those funds back to creators often that that's like done in a black box well now on chain you can have these Revenue share agreements you know executed in a trustless way so there's a lot more transparency and a lot more efficiency in terms of redistributing the funds back to creators but also the creators can actually own the smart contracts that are executing that redistribution right so overall more power to creators which I'm excited about yeah for sure thank you for sharing that I think anyone in the room who's like hip to the the music industry specifically you know it takes a long time for payouts to actually happen and when they do ultimately happen it's like there's not a level of transparency as to how much each entity is getting paid and why and who's who decided why so it's definitely a great opportunity for transparency and Equity yeah I'll I'll just add like a quick little story but I wrote a song for a Chilean artist and made it on his album it took 18 to 24 months for me to be paid out my royalties and no other industry is anyone willing to do work and be paid out two years later but in the Creator economy and specifically in music that's like everyday life for musicians and I feel like web 3 is enabling a different way of of executing those payments which is much more efficient yeah for sure for sure so there's a high degree of control in web 3 relative to the way things have been done before right and how funds are actually distributed and shared but also you know there's a high degree of control and customizability of like how are you actually releasing your work how are you designing your releases and I think that that's where decent is really interesting um you guys have like a whole Suite of different tools and different avenues that creators can take to different standards that creators can use across different chains as well right to release their work so I'm curious Nikki what you see as the kind of like the key unlocks of the Creator economy and specifically like decent yeah so there's like no real like answer like what is the key to releasing you know as a Creator and the beautiful thing about web3 and like the tooling that across all of these different you know companies that are being represented up here and you know specifically decent is that we're trying to give you all the option to figure out how you want to do it and so there's a couple different ways that you know at least decent is specifically trying to help you know give creators the ability to try out all these different tools and different approaches to doing so you know first being multi-chain um there's a lot more than ethereum out there and I think that all these you know L2 chains like polygon which lens is building on you know optimism are we trim all of those it's in key it's key to use those to you know to experiment to figure out you know what works at a lower cost lower gas also just different ways of releasing your nfts as well too you know there's um what we know and Love and You Know music nft specifically is you know a fixed Edition drop you know sell out but there's also ways where you can you know price your nfts on a bonding curve you can you know do it non-financial nfts and ways to you know build up your brand and Community awareness you know like Len says and we work with a lot with land as well too just different ways that you can approach you know how and customize how you want to be a Creator in this on chain world that we know and so the way that I would approach releasing would be different than Adrian the different ldf and different and Bradley and that's the cool thing about what we're doing is we're giving you the option and not telling you how to do it which I think is great yeah for sure I love like open protocols and like the ethos of web3 of like here's all these different Legos and like the ones that you decide to kind of stack in order to achieve what it is that you want to do it's it's kind of up to the Creator to do that um something I find super fascinating about decent is the rentables um which is a brand new thing by the way for anyone who hasn't heard I'd be curious if you could just give a quick overview of that just in case anyone hasn't heard because I think that's a really interesting oh my favorite topic ever yeah so um decent's rentables are based on the ERC 4907s and basically we're really excited about this new wave of just giving New Life to nfts um in a way that's not just like them as the end goal and so with uh rentables you're able to um lease out your nft for a determined amount of time by you to a renter to have that as like in their like as a user in order for them to you know for token gaining for subscriptions to you know really just anything across the board you know we're seeing it like at like a restaurant reservation like the possibilities are literally endless in terms of how you can tap into this technology and so we're really stoked to see like how these use cases are being brought into it whether it's you know Alec as an artist bringing in you know uh like try before you buy into his community to see what's it like to be part of Alex artist's experience or you know just the world is like pretty endless when it comes to rentables and so I was really excited to see how creators and you know organizations just continue to tap into those yeah um I think it's really cool like it's kind of obvious right that the creators themselves can monetize how they want to but I think it's a really interesting um line of thought like as the collectors and the curators as well you have opportunities to monetize the things that you've collected um and yeah there's just a lot of um a lot of possibilities that that introduces that you know we'll we'll see how how things go over the next few years but um curious to to hear your perspective Bradley on this just because I think that lens also has um you know built in the curator experience is very much part of how you're thinking about things as I understand it um so I'm curious like if you could speak to the to the design of lens and like kind of web through social more broadly the role of not only like the the creators themselves like the artists but also the the curators the folks who are you know helping you know in in their own way to build these platforms and build these ecosystems totally so uh for those who don't know uh on lens if I make a post that I say can be collected as an nft I'll say I'll charge a dollar per post um and then ldf here can share it like a retweet I can specify let's say a 20 referral fee so she shares it and then Nikki collects it because of ldf's share which we can actually see because it's a chain of logic on like that it's visible ldf gets 20 or 20 cents on the dollar of every sale attributable to her uh and that means while it's cool the idea that you can uh you know retire perhaps on generating income from sharing content what's even cooler to us is the idea that you can be there's a new status associated with being a curator so we measure creators because how many likes do you get how many followers do you have any streams do you get but it's a totally different thing to say I drive 20 of so-and-so's Revenue or I'm responsible or attributable for 50 of someone's followers um and speaking to this there are 360 creators or users on lens who have successfully shared a post that got collected because of their share and the average revenue for those users is 25 nice and so there are creators or your users curators on lens who are made out earning creators on Tick Tock who get millions and millions of views and have really no monetization to show for it so we really do think of curators as a class of their own that have a relationship with creators and also with collectors as well and by the way you're not one of these everyone is all of these it depends on the context so when I'm posting my tick tocks that no one watches to lens tube I'm a Creator but when I'm Leinster and I'm sharing posts that I think are interesting like from Alec especially I'm playing the role of a curator and then when I'm on Beats which is a music app on lens and I'm collecting music I'm playing the role of a collector so everyone is all of these in different contexts love that love that um I think that gets to another really interesting point right it's not just like the YouTuber or the twitch streamer who has a hundred thousand followers who's participating in this economy it's increasingly all of us especially as the incentives kind of expand to include more folks for different types of activities and this is where I think um Disco is especially interesting where it's like again it's not just like this the mega influencers it's everybody all of our data is is valuable and you know the the space the ecosystem at large is stronger and hope more sustainable if individuals have control over their data and their identity right so I'm curious um I mean ldf we could go I also want to talk about your video content because um I feel like you're doing something lately that is like really nostalgic for me in a way that I can't explain as an individual Creator but first i'm just curious to hear your perspective on on Disco on on-chain identity how this kind of enables the Creator economy and then if you also want to speak to you know your personal stuff well we have so I'm very aware of that right now but one of the things I wanted to touch on just uh given again my background coming from like traditional social media one of the things that bothered me the most was this classification inside some of the traditional platforms of a creator that was very different than a user and how those groups were treated extremely differently and to your definition of kind of the Creator economy enabling individuals to you know make a living from the value that they're driving through these platforms one of the things that never made sense to me was the fact that creators were really just power users of these products who had found a way to monetize that value in other ways that were outside the ecosystem themselves and so to me the promise of kind of web 3 social is this idea of changing the definition of what a Creator is to being a participant in the ecosystem and as you gave a bunch of really great examples allowing people to help capture that value as they're creating it because even though we're used to describing a Creator as someone who maybe is posting content and getting a lot of views or driving a bunch of traffic uh actually a lot of really valuable interactions are happening in the comments of these uh videos that are building around the inspiration that they found from the individual that started something for them and so actually it was funny when I got into the web 3 space I got back on Twitter for the first time in 10 years and I was so excited about the idea of having more dialogue that was back and forth where I would see someone post a thought starter that was a half-baked idea that people all of a sudden rallied around made real and now because they could mention nft because they could you know get a quick signal from the market that said there is value here and we're willing to show you that maybe you should continue pursuing this you don't need to leave your job and Bank on the fact that you're going to get sponsorships because you've built up this major audience and so allowing a lot more people to see see themselves as creators and to try a bunch more things before they find what might be monetarily valuable to someone else but might have social value for them that might introduce them to people that they otherwise wouldn't have met has opened the doors for honestly a lot of product feedback that's super valuable for these platforms to say we don't have to go convince uh venture capitalist that we're going to rebuild Twitter because you know Twitter is valuable I actually watched a ton of web like 2.5 I guess you could call them platforms really struggle to raise money because Venture capitalists didn't understand how they would monetize with the same models that would compete against an Instagram or a YouTube but they weren't using blockchain as a crutch either where they actually had new features that were something they were frustrated with that didn't exist inside existing platforms and so as individuals are doing more and more of that work by existing across these different spaces on the internet allowing them to take that information with them to different contexts so that they're not locked into you know getting stuck somewhere that they did find traction I might post videos on Twitter that do well but then a new application comes out I don't want to have to choose between starting over or uh yeah like relying on the fact that there was value there so just making it additive behind a person instead of attributing all that value to where it happened in the first place is something that is another big promise of Social and in my opinion and in disco's opinion there is a lot more data that might not need to exist on a blockchain that still needs to have that same portability and so things like you know my preferences for dark motor light mode or my gender and Age and information that doesn't need to be publicly available and posted on a blockchain can still have those same properties so yeah just give more optionality to individuals to make things happen with each other and then figure out what tooling needs to get built around that to make it easier for other people to do the same thing is really really cool to watch um to to your last point right we only have a couple minutes left here um but the one of the last things you said was like the tooling that that needs to exist in order for this stuff to be possible um I'm curious to just use these last couple of minutes because the topic here is infrastructure um do you guys see any any obvious missing pieces of infrastructure what are the missing pieces is it just time and like the you know the time for the the protocols that we're all working on to mature for uh more folks to come in and experiment or are there any kind of big gaps in terms of infrastructure that anyone's seeing I have one um all the data on lens and on a lot of other applications is on chain but just because it's on chain doesn't mean it's understandable or useful uh we are seeing like when a new Dune dashboard comes out around like your followers and it just shows you what number follower someone was and when they followed you that's great there are like 240 different dashboards that have little bits and pieces of data about like your lens engagement and if I need to answer one question of who's collected more than three of my posts and who else do they follow and I have to go check five different sources to try and answer that and still maybe not be able to that's a huge problem so I'm really excited to see more like data analytics and visualization tools there's one I'll shout out Bellow that Adam Levy from the mint podcast is created which is awesome we love Bellow yeah but that is definitely the data analytics make it useful to creators now that it is on chain and accessible is number one in my book for sure I think I was going to say more Super users like I think we're starting to get to a point where people are getting familiar with maybe one product or one kind of Suite of products and starting to find success which is amazing we need case studies I want to see more people putting more of the Lego blocks together to say you know how do we show creators that aren't using these tools right now what was never possible before um and getting outside of maybe even what exists but what they want to see Exist by breaking things by putting them together by making those more packaged and more seamless and then the analytics to back that up is I want to see more of it well we have 30 seconds this is a call to action these are four really great Legos up here between reveal decent disco and lens for anyone who's interested to to use um and you were going to say something you got 36 20 seconds I'll just say I think uh you know what a lot of us are are looking to do is also simplify access to on-chain tools and make these tools simpler because that's what's going to help on board the next wave of millions tens of millions hundreds of millions of creators and eventually they're fans and so you know I think that's that's part of our mission at reveal making access to unchain earnings as simple as possible and we're always happy to collaborate with anyone who follows that mission awesome well I think we're at time I don't know if we have time to take questions we do not um well thank you all so much for being here encourage everybody to tap in with these folks um here's to the Creator account