Before we proceed, I’d like to credit Li Jin for many of the concepts presented in this article. Her works on the evolution of the Creator Economy inspired us to begin our journey with Atlas.

At Atlas, we envisage a future in which every individual’s contribution to the world is fairly rewarded. To understand how this future will be realised, we must first travel back in time… to the inception of the internet.

There was no commerce in the early days of the internet. Payment integration was thoughtlessly excluded from early browsers, notoriously labelled the ‘original sin of the internet’ by Marc Andreessen. Users could only create, starting with personal websites and later developing content platforms such as Reddit and MySpace. But in the absence of monetisation, there was no incentive structure to drive the Creator Economy forward.

In the mid-2000s, this changed. A new wave of platforms rose to prominence, including Facebook and YouTube, which enabled creators to suddenly monetise content at scale. Those who had accumulated vast swathes of followers could now earn through ads and sponsorships. To build the largest audience, viral content was king. This is when we saw the rise of ‘clickbait’: attention-grabbing headlines designed to draw users into low-quality interactions. Talented creators publishing niche content struggled to make any revenue at all, while the top 1% reaped disproportionate rewards. This problem was endemic to Creator Economy 2.0.

The mid-2010s saw numerous platforms like Skillshare and Substack swiftly enable the direct monetisation of fans. Creators could now regard themselves as brands in their own right and earn from their unique identities, skills and knowledge. In this Creator Economy 3.0, even niche creators with thousands or even hundreds of devoted fans were able to generate meaningful revenue.

Today, with NFTs exploding in popularity, we have entered Creator Economy 3.5. We now have the concept of digital scarcity and verification of ownership. Creators can verify who owns their content and deliver greater value to them over time, while fans are incentivised to support their favourite creators to inflate the value of their tokens. The creator-consumer relationship is slowly becoming more economically aligned. But it is not there yet.

A long, winding path lies ahead before we realise a true community economy; an economy where creators and contributors are able to generate and share wealth symbiotically. For now, the lion’s share belongs to the top 1% and trailing creators are still unfairly rewarded. Monolithic platforms with mercurial algorithms are still monopolising benefits. To achieve Creator Economy 4.0, we must leverage the power of the third web in ways that transcend speculative generative artwork campaigns.

In today’s Creator Economy, there exists a long tail of unknown ‘Middle-Class’ creators regularly contributing in seldom-seen corners of the internet. Success is often elusive for this hidden talent; breaking into the top 1% is dependent on who they are, who they know and where they live.

We believe that Web3-enabled social commerce will disrupt this paradigm and unbridle a new era of talent meritocracy. We have already seen early examples of this, such as RTFKT launching a line of virtual sneakers in collaboration with little-known teenage artist Fewocious. The collection sold for over $3 million in under five minutes.

At Atlas, we’ve also demonstrated the power of Web3 to rapidly unlock a global community to support the talents of an artist unknown in NFT circles. Our latest campaign, ‘UNEXTINCT’, raised $100,000 in paired NFT and physical artwork sales to support the reintroduction of a species extinct in the wild for over 20 years. This was the first time Tim Flach, a conservation artist, had ventured into the NFT space. Yet in three weeks (and amidst a market meltdown), UNEXTINCT achieved 40,000 followers, 2.4 million views on a single viral TikTok, a partnership with Nifty Gateway and 20 media publications including Forbes and NFT Now. The NFT artwork became the first ever to be projected onto one of The Wonders of the World, Christ the Redeemer in Rio. But perhaps more importantly: Tim Flach’s immense artistic talent and voice as a conservation academic now has a truly global reach.

Armed with this formula — a work in progress, of course — we now stand at the precipice of a revolution in the very fabric of our economy. Atlas will spearhead this revolution by building a future in which contribution is proportional to reward.

We’ll dive into what we’re building at Atlas, and how it’s going to level the playing field for creators worldwide.

Before we proceed, I’d like to credit Li Jin for many of the concepts presented in this article. Her works on the evolution of the Creator Economy inspired us to begin our journey with Atlas.

At Atlas, we envisage a future in which every individual’s contribution to the world is fairly rewarded. To understand how this future will be realised, we must first travel back in time… to the inception of the internet.

There was no commerce in the early days of the internet. Payment integration was thoughtlessly excluded from early browsers, notoriously labelled the ‘original sin of the internet’ by Marc Andreessen. Users could only create, starting with personal websites and later developing content platforms such as Reddit and MySpace. But in the absence of monetisation, there was no incentive structure to drive the Creator Economy forward.

In the mid-2000s, this changed. A new wave of platforms rose to prominence, including Facebook and YouTube, which enabled creators to suddenly monetise content at scale. Those who had accumulated vast swathes of followers could now earn through ads and sponsorships. To build the largest audience, viral content was king. This is when we saw the rise of ‘clickbait’: attention-grabbing headlines designed to draw users into low-quality interactions. Talented creators publishing niche content struggled to make any revenue at all, while the top 1% reaped disproportionate rewards. This problem was endemic to Creator Economy 2.0.

The mid-2010s saw numerous platforms like Skillshare and Substack swiftly enable the direct monetisation of fans. Creators could now regard themselves as brands in their own right and earn from their unique identities, skills and knowledge. In this Creator Economy 3.0, even niche creators with thousands or even hundreds of devoted fans were able to generate meaningful revenue.

Today, with NFTs exploding in popularity, we have entered Creator Economy 3.5. We now have the concept of digital scarcity and verification of ownership. Creators can verify who owns their content and deliver greater value to them over time, while fans are incentivised to support their favourite creators to inflate the value of their tokens. The creator-consumer relationship is slowly becoming more economically aligned. But it is not there yet.

A long, winding path lies ahead before we realise a true community economy; an economy where creators and contributors are able to generate and share wealth symbiotically. For now, the lion’s share belongs to the top 1% and trailing creators are still unfairly rewarded. Monolithic platforms with mercurial algorithms are still monopolising benefits. To achieve Creator Economy 4.0, we must leverage the power of the third web in ways that transcend speculative generative artwork campaigns.

In today’s Creator Economy, there exists a long tail of unknown ‘Middle-Class’ creators regularly contributing in seldom-seen corners of the internet. Success is often elusive for this hidden talent; breaking into the top 1% is dependent on who they are, who they know and where they live.

We believe that Web3-enabled social commerce will disrupt this paradigm and unbridle a new era of talent meritocracy. We have already seen early examples of this, such as RTFKT launching a line of virtual sneakers in collaboration with little-known teenage artist Fewocious. The collection sold for over $3 million in under five minutes.

At Atlas, we’ve also demonstrated the power of Web3 to rapidly unlock a global community to support the talents of an artist unknown in NFT circles. Our latest campaign, ‘UNEXTINCT’, raised $100,000 in paired NFT and physical artwork sales to support the reintroduction of a species extinct in the wild for over 20 years. This was the first time Tim Flach, a conservation artist, had ventured into the NFT space. Yet in three weeks (and amidst a market meltdown), UNEXTINCT achieved 40,000 followers, 2.4 million views on a single viral TikTok, a partnership with Nifty Gateway and 20 media publications including Forbes and NFT Now. The NFT artwork became the first ever to be projected onto one of The Wonders of the World, Christ the Redeemer in Rio. But perhaps more importantly: Tim Flach’s immense artistic talent and voice as a conservation academic now has a truly global reach.

Armed with this formula — a work in progress, of course — we now stand at the precipice of a revolution in the very fabric of our economy. Atlas will spearhead this revolution by building a future in which contribution is proportional to reward.

We’ll dive into what we’re building at Atlas, and how it’s going to level the playing field for creators worldwide.