This article is for those who want to bring change to the creator economy, including Creators, Readers, Curators, and Buidlers who endeavor to create value in the current market. 0xCreator DAO is looking for more like-minded partners if you are passionate about the creator economy in the Web3 era and are eager to be a Buidler (product, dev, ops, BD…). Suppose you are one of the kinds, this article will help you understand what we are doing and what we want to achieve. (There is a registration questionnaire at the end of the article)
With Web3, everyone's talking about the creator economy, and PFP (profile picture) NFTs have suddenly made it possible for lots of artists to get their work valued. But this is just for visual artists. What about all the other creators, like writers, musicians, and videographers, whose work can't be put up as avatars? How can these groups of creators get paid for their work compared to the traditional Web2 tools?
That's why we think paid content is the key to democratizing creation and solving these problems. With paid content, anyone with the talent and skills to create can make and sell their content and get paid based on its value. It doesn't matter what kind of content it is - everyone can benefit from creating and selling their work.
The ad model is the most common, but it's not always fair to creators of high-quality specialized content. They may not get as much attention as popular creators, so they don't make as much money from ads. Plus, people's attention is limited, so only a few lucky creators get a lot of it. This isn't about their creative talent, it's just the nature of the ad economy. So far, creators haven't really achieved "democratization of creation" like we thought we would in the early Web2 days. Back then, people thought that mobile devices, ads, and easy user-generated content would make it possible for anyone to make a living from their creations. But 15 years later, it's still hard for niche content creators to make a living. Free content is still the norm on the web, and many creators have to give up their creative independence and lower the quality of their work to get attention on social media. On top of that, platform monopolies have a lot of power because they control the distribution of content.
If paying for content is the way to make sure creators get paid and motivate more high-quality content, then it's important to talk about "ownership of your work." This fits in with the idea of Web3 too. When you pay for content, there are two key "rights" involved: the right to read the content, and the copyright of the content. Here's how it works: as a creator, I own the copyright to my work, and then I can sell the right to read it. Someone who pays for the right to read it gets to see the whole thing.
In the Web2 era, it wasn't really possible for this process to happen. As a result, neither the copyright nor the reading rights really belonged to the creator or reader, and they couldn't be fully and freely traded. For example, if you bought a WSJ membership, you couldn't sell it to someone else.
But in the Web3 era, NFTs make it possible for creators and readers to have sovereignty. Anyone can create, buy, and own content without relying on a specific platform.
Just like how "establishing ownership is the foundation for trade and economic rules," if we can really define and assign ownership to someone (which is possible with Web3 and NFTs), then we can build economic rules on top of that in a flexible way. This would create a market system that efficiently matches supply and demand. In other words, as long as creators are making valuable content, they can efficiently sell it to the right readers, and if readers have specific content needs, they can give feedback to creators to encourage them to make more valuable content.
Specifically, Web3 can implement several such stories 👇
Moving the read permission on chain: Creators can turn the reading rights to their work into rNFTs, and readers can pay for them. If a reader's friend wants to see the article too, the reader can pass along the rNFT. For limited content, the author can set a limit on how many copies are released, and readers can collect them until they're sold to someone else.*
Decentralized distribution of contents on the chain: Authors can give a bunch of rNFTs for their work to different curators - people who share and distribute quality content, like distributors in the traditional industry who help authors reach more readers. Whenever an rNFT is bought, the smart contract automatically splits the revenue between the creator and the curator in a pre-agreed ratio, so the author doesn't have to sell their work all by themselves.
On-chain economic rules can improve transaction efficiency: Many authors struggle to set a good price for their content because they don't have access to a wide enough range of market information. But there are people, like the aforementioned curators, who have a lot of market awareness. They're the ones who can help creators price their work. All we need are some rules that let these people price the work as best they can. For example, if an author releases a limited number of works but doesn't specify the price, they can let the curators do the quoting. The curators can try to price the work based on how good they think it is and how much they'll make from distributing and selling it. This way, the work can be priced more appropriately.
More flexible ways to sell articles on the chain: On top of that, the subscription-based newsletter model can be even more flexible. Someone who writes a column can issue their own subscription NFTs, write their own articles, and send the rNFTs for each article to their subscribers. They can also use the subscription revenue to buy rNFTs of other authors' articles and send those to their subscribers.
Another benefit of on-chain transactions is transparent identity information. All purchases are really in the hands of the creator, not locked away on a closed server. Whether you're a creator trying to build your own community of readers or a reader looking for like-minded people, you can create a Discord and use a bot to only allow people who have bought a specific rNFT to join the server. Creators can also use airdrops to give paid follow-up content to the addresses of previous buyers of a particular work as a reward for their core readership or a way to start building a new readership.
All of this is something that traditional Web2 paid content platforms can't do. They keep all the content and reading rights records locked up on their own servers, and you can only buy things. You can't define any other transaction rules. In this case, the "reading rights" aren't really defined. The assets themselves aren't free to trade. So we can't use the logic above to make it easier for all kinds of content to make money. Blockchain and NFTs can change this. This is what the creator and paid content economy should look like in the Web3 era.
0xCreator DAO believes in such a future 👆.
0xCreator DAO is working to turn this vision into reality. The members of the DAO will include buidlers, creators, curators, and readers.
The buidlers are responsible for building the infrastructure for everything in the DAO, including our first product: Picnic. 0xCreator DAO wants to explore all the possibilities mentioned earlier and make a difference in the world of paid content, eventually forming an open content ecosystem. But we need to start somewhere and gradually add more features and mechanisms to make the ecosystem thrive.
Picnic is our first step. It's a tool for creators and it aims to do two things: first, give creators full ownership of their work through copyright NFTs and create multiple homogenous reading rights NFTs for each copyright NFT; second, bring in curators to find and distribute the highest quality content and sell the reading rights NFTs on different platforms. Putting reading rights on the chain is great because it adds more distribution rules and makes it easier to sell content. The key is to reward curators for distributing content through an incentive model.
Specific product user cases are as follows:
Creators use Picnic to publish their own creative content and can use it to mint rNFT, which represents the right to read the content.
Creators will set a percentage so that everyone can see the free content section at the beginning and subsequently decide if they want to pay to purchase the corresponding rNFT to unlock the full content.
There are two types of curators. The first group is a hand-picked group of people who have good taste in content and some influence. They get an exclusive "Curator NFT," which lets them see all the content on the platform for free (including the paid stuff) and create a special sharing link for the work they think is worth sharing. The second group is readers who have bought the article themselves and become curators of it at the same time.
When readers are on social media, they might see links to articles shared by their idols/friends or recommended reviews that catch their eye. When they click the link and read the free part of the article, they can use cryptocurrency to buy an rNFT and read the whole thing.
When readers pay for content, the money goes directly to a smart contract, which splits it between the creator and the curator. This way, creators can use the help of individual nodes to get their work out there more widely and socially.
Picnic is targeting a similar market to Substack, where creators can even upload their work directly to the platform. Picnic has a lot of curators who help quality creators distribute their content and make more money.
The smart contracts make it easy for the process I just described to happen smoothly. If we used the traditional banking system, there would be a lot of friction and it would be a hassle. In the future, we'll add more features like helping creators automate their pricing and helping them make decisions about how much to pay curators for distributing their content.
By the way, text-format content is just the beginning. We also want to bring in other formats like music and video. The economic model and product design that works for text content will work for these other formats as well.
This is what 0xCreator DAO is all about - bringing together creators, curators, readers, and buidlers to create a Web3 paid content platform. It's like Web2 platforms like Substack and Medium, but better - it's more efficient at distributing paid content, helps creators make more money, and helps readers find great content.
We've developed the first version of the product prototype and are testing it out. We're excited to have more partners joining us in building it together.
Web3 is all about putting the community first, and using the community's power to incubate and bring products to market. The DAO is our way of making this happen in the real world.
To get this project off the ground, we need a team of buidlers working together, including a product developer, engineer, and DAO system buidlers, among others. Picnic has lots of features that we need to buidl out gradually. We also need a really important role called the Connector, who will bring in quality creators, curators, and readers to help the product grow through network effects. Early creators, curators, and readers are especially important because they contribute a lot to the early network effect.
0xCreator DAO is going to issue 0xCreator DAO Token (CDT for short), and CDT holders get a share of the platform's dividend income. In the Picnic product, the product itself takes a 10% transaction fee (this might change later - the DAO can decide together). This fee is the DAO's revenue, and CDT holders will get a slice of it based on how many CDTs they have. In the beginning, we're not going to sell CDTs to anyone. We'll only give them to people who contributed to the DAO, like the buidlers, BD people, and early users who brought value to the network. As the project moves along, we might do a private placement of some CDTs until the project is more mature, and then we'll list a small amount of CDTs on the public market.
CDT will be given out to buildlers first, and we'll use different methods to evaluate each buildler's contribution and give out token rewards. Next, the contributions of early creators, curators, and readers will be judged by the number of transactions they made. The DAO will have specific rules for giving each person token rewards based on the number of transactions they contributed. The earlier you get involved in the project, the more you'll be rewarded for your contributions.
Ultimately, we hope that the whole product will be completely decentralized, meaning that buidlers, creators, curators, and readers will all own and govern the ecology together through a DAO. In the beginning, we'll use a more efficient, committee-based governance system to get things kickstarted. As the project progresses, we'll adjust the governance system until it's in a healthy state. If you're curious about how the DAO works, keep an eye out for future charters, proposals, and public sections on our DAO Notion page.
We've been a small team of 10 people working on these Web3 ideas about philosophy, product development, and so on. Our thinking has come a long way, but there's still a lot of room for improvement.
If you're a buidler who's passionate about Web3 and have skills in product design or development etc., fill out this application form to join us.
If you know a lot about creators, curators, and influencers, join us as a connector by filling out this application form.
If you're a creator, curator, or influencer who wants to be a connector, fill out this application form.
And if you're an influencer who wants to use your influence to spread more quality content to everyone, fill out this form to join us as a curator.
Let's buidl together!🙋