Author: FaultProofBen
Before we begin, I want to give a shoutout to Dan Simmons for collecting Scaling Wars: L2 Stacks for Onchain Games, The Ultimate Guide to the Small Brain Games Ecosystem, and The WASD Weekly: 10/13/23 last week!
Thank you for your support 🙂
As always, you can collect every WASD piece (including today’s) by smashing the mint button above!
☝️☝️
If you do, you’ll gain access to our WASD Collectooor Telegram chat and earn the chance to be featured at the top of each Monday piece!
Gm!
Today’s piece will be a bit meta - Because I’ll be talking about WASD itself.
No Mark…not that type of Meta.
I’ve said this a few times, but I consider WASD to be an onchain media brand.
This is not just because we cover onchain games, the coolest, most interesting, and fun niche in crypto.
But because of the way we do so.
Since Day 1, every WASD piece has been released onchain and is collectible as an NFT on Mirror.
I decided to take this approach and eschew trad platforms like Beehiv and Substack because I don’t just want WASD to be another garden variety newsletter.
Instead, I want it to be a platform for experimentation with onchain media.
Crypto gives creators the tools to not only monetize their content, but also unlock new ways of distributing the value they create between themselves and their audience.
Because onchain games are inherently social and community-driven, I think they are the perfect backdrop to explore this frontier.
So today, we’ll do so by exploring some of the onchain media models that creators can use to achieve these goals (from the perspective of an actual one).
At the end, I’ll discuss how I’m trying to put some of my ideas into practice with a new initiative that I’m starting with this very piece: The WASD Contributooor Program.
The Contributooor Program enables you, the WASD community, to submit onchain gaming memes, clips, art, and more to be tokenized and used in our content.
And if you do contribute, you’ll get paid through Mirror and Zora.
We even have our first-ever meme submitted through the program from WASD Collectooor, the founders of Pods, and onchain media legend 0xLucas.
If you’d like, you can collect his meme below (or through this hyperlink), and 50% of the Zora Protocol Rewards generated from your mint will go directly to him!
👇👇
I’ve wanted to do a brain dump on this topic for a while, so let’s get to it!
One way gaming creators can leverage onchain media is by tokenizing their content as an NFT.
Given that you’re reading this on Mirror, you may have an understanding of what a content NFT is – But here’s a brief refresher nonetheless.
Content NFTs are ERC-721 or 1155 tokens issued on an L1/L2 and whose metadata lives on a blockchain or decentralized storage network.
These NFTs can represent any type of tokenized media, and they can be minted through various platforms like Mirror, Sound, Pods, and Zora.
For example, this very Mirror article is tokenized as an ERC-721 on OP Mainnet. Its metadata (i.e., the contents of this article) is hosted on Arweave.
(See - I told you all this would be a bit meta 😂)
Creators can generate revenue from content NFTs in two ways:
Mint fees
Secondary market royalties
There are a lot of considerations when it comes to pricing and supply, but that’s beyond the scope of this article.
I see content NFTs as having value for any type of creator or media org. They can certainly complement trad business models like sponsors and subscriptions.
However, I think they are especially valuable for newer, smaller creators looking to bootstrap their audience (Which is why WASD has gone with this approach).
I see three primary benefits to content NFTs which are:
1. Favorable Unit Economics
Content NFTs allow creators to sustain themselves from a small group of their passionate supporters.
Speaking from experience, it's really difficult to build an audience. It takes a long time and a lot of hard work.
Furthermore, while Web2 platforms help with content distribution, they extract a ton of rent, requiring creators to build massive followings to make ends meet.
Let’s take music as an example.
On Spotify, an artist generates $400 for every 100,000 streams they get. This is a big number, and many talented artists with passionate fans never get there.
Thankfully, the unit economics of content NFTs can help fix this.
Continuing with our music example, at $1600 ETH, a creator can generate the same amount of revenue from 100K Spotify streams with just 100 total mints at 0.0025 ETH ($4).
Now, getting to this level is not an easy task either.
But I think it's far more attainable for emerging creators, as the audience size needed to reach this threshold is much smaller.
2. Reduced Dependence on 3rd-Parties
Another benefit of content NFTs is that they allow creators to support themselves directly from the contributions of their fans.
This removes (or at least lessens) the reliance on third-party revenue, whether from sponsors, centralized platforms, or grants.
Revenue from these sources depends on factors that have little to do with your content, like platform rules, a marketing budget, or a governance vote.
This makes them an incredibly shaky foundation on which to build a media business. This is why you see orgs across all industries shilling their subscription products.
Although the revenue they generate is not as predictable as subscriptions, content NFTs provide creators with a recurring source of income sourced directly from their biggest fans rather than third parties with different considerations.
Furthermore, content NFTs are a far superior tool relative to subscriptions for…
3. Community Bootstrapping
We all marry our bags (or at least I do), but there is something about NFTs that hit different relative to fungible tokens.
I don’t quite know how to describe it, but when you hold an NFT, you instantly feel a strong connection to it, its issuer, and your fellow holders.
(I know this is how I feel about all the WASD Collectooors!!)
This makes content NFTs a great tool for emerging creators, allowing them to instantly tap into this bond.
Furthermore, they create a direct, onchain relationship between creators and fans.
I think this can unlock many cool experiences, especially in the context of gaming.
For instance, collectors can gain entry to tournaments (Like we did with 🏆 The WASD Cup 🏆), raffles, giveaways, early access to games, whitelists for mints, membership into a guild, and much more.
A newer way creators can bootstrap themselves is through SocialFi platforms like FriendTech.
On FriendTech, users can link their Twitter to create a private chat room.
To access it, other users on the platform have to buy a token known as a key, which is priced and issued on a bonding curve. The way in which creators monetize is through trading fees (on FriendTech this is 2.5% of every sale).
FriendTech is incredibly polarizing, but I think it can be a good fit for “exclusive content” like trade ideas and, shall we say…other types of content.
From a gaming perspective, aside from token talk (which onchain games will certainly have), I could also see keys being used in other ways, like to represent membership in a guild.
That said, I don’t think the SocialFi model is as universally applicable as content NFTs.
Given the current lack of customizability over bonding curves and pricing, I think keys today can pressure creators to make the number go up (This is also true of high-priced paid mints).
Some may embrace this challenge - But others may not want to take this on and risk damaging the vibes of their community if their key price tanks.
Furthermore, trading revenues are also far less predictable and recurring than mint fees.
Nonetheless, I think SocialFi is here to stay, and I’m extremely interested to see how platforms like FriendTech evolve.
WASD does not have a SocialFi presence today, but in the long run I would expect this to change. 👀
Both content NFTs and SocialFi keys largely focus on using crypto for ownership or access.
However, one of the most exciting and under explored aspects of onchain media is how creators can use it to redistribute value between themselves and their fans.
In Web2 and even Web3, platforms, creators, or media orgs accrue all of the value they generate.
While content NFTs and Keys allow fans to share in some upside, it doesn’t enable them to directly tap into the revenue generated by the creator they are supporting.
Thankfully, the tools are in place to change this.
Let’s take content NFTs for example.
As I discussed above, content NFTs can generate revenue in two ways:
From mints
Royalties from secondary sales
This can be programmatically split between different parties, and this data is of course public.
As a result, this creates an incredibly strong degree of trust (It’s pretty easy to tell when someone is screwing you over).
These attributes enables creators to finally share some value with their community without the need for them to purchase an asset.
I’m a hands-on guy, and I think only talking about on-paper potential is boring.
So, I wanted to experiment with this idea in prod.
Enter The WASD Contributooor Program.
Now, the moment you’ve been waiting for…
Introducing: The WASD Contributooor Program!!!
The WASD Contributooor Program is my first attempt at redistributing value between myself and the WASD community.
As you all know, I like to keep WASD fun and bring my articles to life with a hearty dose of memes and Midjourney visualizations.
However, I know I’m not the only one in the WASD Nation with a meme game. And as you can probably tell by now, I like to experiment with onchain media.
The WASD Contributooor Program tackles these two birds with one stone, enabling anyone to submit memes, clips, or art to be tokenized on Zora and featured in WASD articles here on Mirror.
If your content gets included, you’ll get paid!
I’ll be splitting the Zora Protocol Rewards, a 0.000333 ETH (~$0.5) fee that creators on Zora earn per free mint, 50/50 between myself and the contributooor.
This means that as a contributooor, you’ll earn 0.0001665 (~$0.25) every time someone mints your work.
Here’s how you can get involved, and some more color on the implementation:
Every Monday I’ll send out a request for content to be used in upcoming articles via a tweet.
Contributooors will submit content to be used in WASD articles by replying to the tweet or dming it to me directly.
I’ll mint my favorite of these submissions as NFTs on Zora.
I’ll embed the NFT in our articles on Mirror. This way, people can mint it directly through the article.
I’ll then split any protocol rewards from mints 50/50 between myself and the person who contributed the content (AKA the contributooor).
Each of these mints will be free, forever editions to start. This could change in the future, in which case mint fees and royalties will be split 50/50.
And that’s it!
I think this is a fun way to get you all involved in WASD content, and show how onchain media enables creators to distribute some of the value they create back to their community at no cost to them.
(You don’t have to buy any token, key, or NFT to send me a meme!)
I’m also very curious to see how big everyone's appetite is to mint onchain gaming memes!
If you want to get the party started, you can mint the aforementioned, inaugural WASD Contributooor Program meme courtesy of 0xLucas!
Let the contributoooring commence!
As we can see, there numerous ways in which onchain gaming (and all) creators can utilize onchain media.
This includes content NFTs, SocialFi, Creator-Fan Value Redistribution systems (I need to come up with a MUCH better name for that), and probably many other models I haven’t even thought of yet.
I cannot wait to continue experimenting with this, and to see what mechanisms other creators create (pun absolutely intended).
On a more serious note, I also think it's very important to do so.
Our meatspace media sucks, and I think it's responsible for many of the issues plaguing our world today.
If yesterday’s false alarm Bitcoin ETF announcement is any indication, our media here in crypto is not much better.
If we want our new, onchain worlds to be better than our old ones, we need to change our media.
That won’t happen until the incentives of media change - Which will only occur by remaking their business models.
I think the onchain gaming ecosystem is a great place to start doing this.
And hopefully WASD can play a role in making it happen :)
Thanks for reading!
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See you all on Thursday!
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