So you say you could have done it sooner, but it was good to wait for blockchain because no one else believed you?
I’m not saying that. But there is some truth in that framing. It has less to do with blockchain and more with competition in the marketplace for creators, and we feel a sense of urgency to be the de facto platform for them. Instagram, in particular, has had a huge market adaptation with creators for a long time. Now many other platforms have come to know the value of creators. As more power has shifted from institutions to individuals, competition for creators and companies of creators has exploded. And it’s given us a strong incentive to do a lot more to help creators make a living directly, rather than indirectly.
Traditionally, creators build an audience and monetize that audience. Branded content on Instagram is probably an industry of about $15 billion – I don’t know, many billions of dollars. Now we’re building more ways for creators to make a living. So this week we announced the first test of NFTs, testing affiliate marketing, experimenting with monetization sharing and longer form video. We have launched subscriptions, which we are still testing.
Let’s talk about your hypothetical country singer, Lisa. She sells a subscription to her content on all platforms as blockchain tokens. But pretty much every major use of a blockchain requires a number of other brokerage services as well: Lisa probably wants software that matches transactions with a list of actual subscribers so she can give them access to her content. And maybe she needs a CRM, and maybe she needs analytics. And she also still relies on the platforms themselves to distribute her content. Their algorithms could amplify or suppress her stuff, or remove it, or the platforms could go bust. So isn’t Lisa just as committed to centralized platforms as before, and in some ways even worse off? She doesn’t necessarily have everything under control, but she’s in place for everything.
I absolutely disagree with the characterization at the end. But for that I agree with everything. In this world, yes, she has dependencies. But the idea here is that she has options and she can move without losing her community. For example, she could switch payment providers, she could move platforms – if she got kicked off Twitter, she could start using YouTube and still maintain all relationships with all her subscribers. Yes, there is an expectation that her subscribers have of her, but she has a lot more independence. I also want to point out that subscribers can vote with their pocket, so if she doesn’t produce good content, they will presumably stop paying. That’s actually a healthy incentive.
Blockchain is a public record of transactions. Theoretically, it’s anonymous, but if someone really wants it, they can probably find out who your subscribers are. If it’s country music subscribers, it probably doesn’t matter. But if Lisa makes BDSM videos, or has a radical political newsletter, it’s different. Also, Lisa’s competitors may find it useful to know who is subscribed to her or how many subscribers she has. How does she protect that information?
There are some really interesting privacy implications and trade-offs about what you store on the publicly accessible blockchain. It may have been anonymized and hashed, but it’s publicly available so you can count the subscribers. It’s going to be one of the more interesting things as we try to design this system, in collaboration with the community.
