# From Content Creator to Digital Ownership

**Published by:** [Zombie Shepherd](https://paragraph.com/@zimteemo/)
**Published on:** 2022-09-20
**URL:** https://paragraph.com/@zimteemo/from-content-creator-to-digital-ownership

## Content

** Historically, artists of all kinds have had problems with finding adequate ways to sell their art and connect with their audience. Musicians and painters need venues and managers to get them opportunities to be seen by audiences. Illustrators and filmmakers cold-call and email portfolios for commissions. Contests, festivals, and every other form of competition-based opportunities devalue professionals and lower the standard of expected compensation for artists’ and creators' work. Everyone struggles just to be seen, and by the time the audience becomes real, a mess of intermediaries have sprung up to make themselves inseparable from the cash flow. As the digital age emerged with a promise of lowering that barrier, artists are able to start building communities- and grow in popularity via social media and streaming services. As artists’ exposure has increased, the work has been repackaged to sell ad space for other products but the compensation and consent have been almost completely removed from the process. Creators are limited to very few ways to connect and interact with the audience and almost no way to retain them if they lose access to the account. The creations, while technically not property of the platform, may as well be, because the uploader loses all access to it if they are flagged for any reason, even fraudulent claims. As the engagement algorithms have evolved over the last decade social media feeds optimize towards continuous scrolling, and whatever can grab attention in the shortest amount of time. It has become even more detrimental to art itself as everyone focuses on making “content” that will be boosted and rewarded by the algorithm rather than focusing on what brought artists to these platforms in the first place; the ability to share the work with a much larger audience. These are all the hidden costs of free services: censorship, not having true ownership of the work, the ability to control its use, how it is displayed, or transparency and consent into how the data is being used. Enter NFTs (non-fungible tokens); these begin to address some of these issues with a focus on peer-to-peer, trustless transactions that smart contracts unlock. NFTs allow for cryptographic digital ownership by unique token identifiers and metadata differentiating digital assets from each other. Smart contracts are cryptographic programs that only run when predetermined conditions are met such as a reserve price plus other transaction fees. These allow for trustless transactions on Web 3 and NFT marketplaces. Suddenly, no intermediary is taking 8% or more simply to process payments on digital transactions. Artists can also code royalties on their work to retain revenue on future art sales. This is a huge potential as creators in most fields are only able to profit from their work one time. Even if the value of that work increases exponentially the artist is systemically and contractually removed from the ability to capture those profits. With NFTs, there are still platform fees of 3% or less and the royalty can be a deterrent to some buyers but overall these financial tools allow a collector to know with confidence they are supporting the artist or project directly. Of course, there is still a high barrier to entry of getting into Web 3 at all. A whole new set of apps, programs, jargon, blockchains, and security practices. Just the beginning stage of choosing a centralized exchange, connecting a bank account to buy the correct gas and currency, and transferring to the proper chain is enough to confuse anyone. So now creators are trying to teach the audience to use a new technology when they should be making the art, music, films, and writing that they set out to create in the first place. NFTs are a great financial and programmatic unlock for digital assets, long-term community, and building project history, but creators still have to rely upon traditional social media and marketing avenues. Links that ask users to click away from an app are discouraged on most platforms, so getting attention for NFTs is still gated behind the will of the ever-changing algorithms and the ability to use them to your advantage. It still means making content for exposure to sell art. Where NFTs meet social media is where things get interesting. Lens protocol is a decentralized social graph that was created by the Decentralized Finance protocol Aave. A user’s profile is an NFT that grants access to various social media dapps (decentralized applications). Lens has an open API (application programming interface) allowing any developers to build on it. Several early dapps function like traditional web 2 counterparts such as Lenstube and Lenster. The big difference is that all of the posts and activities become NFTs which have granular permissions for how that content is allowed to be collected and owned by the audience. A profile can be set to private but can also set a fee for people to follow the account. Each post can be set with or without a fee to collect; setting currency, time available, and the number of editions. A post can be set to be uncollectible and more features are being developed across multiple dapps. All of these features allow a creator’s audience to connect with them directly. They can collect artwork as it is released with trustless, peer-to-peer transactions landing directly in a browser wallet and soon directly in an Aave account. They can comment and connect under the art itself which leads to a greater understanding of what the artist and audience provide each other. The greatest feature may be the referral. When creating a post, it can be set with a referral fee based on percentage. When someone mirrors (shares) the post and someone else collects from that mirror, the person who shared it receives a percentage of the transaction. This incentivizes curation and sharing of your favorite works. Being right about your favorite underground artist has never been more beneficial than it is in this new world of decentralized social media, and it is only just beginning. This doesn’t mean that creators stop pursuing other avenues rather that they have better ways of understanding and contacting the audience before making big financial decisions on a project. Character design, sketches, plot points, teasers, trailers, photos, and everything people already use to gauge interest in a larger project is now wrapped up with incentivized audience participation, fundraising, price discovery, and always being able to see who the early and most sustained supporters are. There will also be new forms of media that grow out of these tools as they evolve into the next wave of ways to interact with an audience, and change how artists work with each other to form new types of collaboration. The platforms being developed are built with the idea of personal control and privacy of user data, with transparency around what is being agreed to, and trustless, seamless access between audience support and ownership of artists’ creations. The barrier to entry was lowered by the digital and social tools built yesterday. But the tools of today and tomorrow allow even the smallest artist to connect with their closest supporters, helping their growth in a sustainable ecosystem of mutually beneficial social interactions while also retaining ownership of their digital intellectual property.**

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