“Collect is the new like.”

“Free to consume, valuable to own.”

“Onchain is the new online.”

I can’t help but cringe when I hear these and similar statements. 

Generally, when people talk about the impact crypto will have on media, the focus is onchain content, and more specifically, the act of collecting it.

In reality, collecting content is an interesting niche use case but by making that the center of the conversation, we’re missing out on the more interesting possibilities that crypto enables.

Why are people so excited about collectible content anyway?  

To be fair, a lot of people think minting an NFT of a blog post is fucking stupid. For the most part, I’m one of them. Feel free to collect this post by the way.

At the intersection of crypto and media, the act of collecting content has taken hold as the primary use case. You’ll almost certainly come across the following reasons why it’s a huge deal:

• Social signaling and status for holders

• New monetization models

• Fans can own the content and even profit from it

• Direct relationships between fans and creators 

• Composability with other media

• Portability to other platforms

I’m not even against collectible or onchain content. On a long time frame, I expect most content ends up onchain. Collectible content can actually be pretty cool and useful for a small subset of creators.

But, in my opinion, people need to take a step back and stop smelling their own farts. 

Social signaling and status for holders

"Readers want to showcase their support for writers by time-stamping their fandom, just like holding onto a ticket stub from a concert before the band became famous. By collecting writing NFTs, readers can say, "I've been a fan for ages; check this out!" 

You often see this argument for why collectible content can be a game changer. I don’t even deny that it can give someone bragging rights to their friends.

But, how many ticket stubs have you saved? For most, I'm guessing zero. 

Would any of your friends care that you discovered an artist early on? Maybe for a minute or two. 

I’m not saying there’s no value here. If you’ve constantly shown an ability to discover promising musicians before they blowup, of course, there’s merit in being able to prove it and potentially being seen as a tastemaker of sorts.

But, we need to acknowledge that’s an extremely niche use case. 

Another related argument is that it gives the holder status. Sure. That can be true.

I do think there’s a bit of a difference between collecting a content NFT and earning an NFT for completing tasks or actually doing something - with the latter having much more potential to give status to holders. 

After all, bots can (and do) collect a ton of content NFTs. 

New monetization models

Again. I’m going to start by saying that it’s awesome that collecting content is a new way for creators to monetize that wasn’t previously possible. This is obviously a good thing and opens up new opportunities.

However, it seems like people have lost all common sense about how businesses make money.

For the vast majority of creators, they’ll never earn anywhere near as much from people consuming their content and deciding to collect the NFT compared to if they had just used ads, sponsorships, or a subscription model.

It’s weird I even have to say that. 

If something is available for free, very few people are going give money after the fact to support you. Donations as a business model very rarely works.

I have no data to back this claim up, but have tried (and failed) to get donations on previous projects. There’s a reason why nearly every creator on Patreon offers their fans utility based on tiers.

I know, creators can also incentive users to collect NFTs by offering different perks. But, this puts even more burden onto the creator to figure out how to create utility. 

This can work well in some instances, but for most, there are much easier and more obvious ways to monetize content. 

Fans can own the content and even profit from it

“Think about Stephen King's early writing career when he published short stories in small magazines. If these works were collectible as NFTs, they would undoubtedly be worth a fortune today.” 

I’m not denying that this is true. Speculation can be good fun. Even if you remove the money aspect from the equation, it can be enjoyable to own things that you care about.

The problem is that so little content is worth owning. That's okay. It doesn't mean that it's trash or clickbait.

For most content, the value is in the consumption - you enjoy a song, laugh at a movie, or learn from an article. That's enough.

There’s no need to force a new behavior and monetization model when there are far better ways for the vast majority of creators to earn from their work.

Most content isn’t meant to be timeless or have such a strong emotional impact on someone to give them the desire to own it. That doesn’t mean it’s not valuable.

I recently listened to a podcast by OP Radio with the Pods founder. Pods, by the way, is putting podcasts onchain, making it possible to collect podcast episodes.

Despite how stupid I think collecting a podcast episode is, I enjoyed listening to the show. I found it interesting. I got value from it and it was worth my time. But I have absolutely zero interest in owning the episode.

Of course, some people can (and do) pay money to collect podcasts. But this is an extremely niche audience. 

How many people collect records vs listen to Spotify? Collect basketball cards vs watch the NBA?

Again, it’s interesting and useful that we’re now able to collect and own digital content. However, we can also do far cooler stuff with this technology.

Something like Royal which makes it possible for NFT holders to earn revenue when a song is streamed is much more interesting and disruptive in my opinion. 

And while it’s nice that fans can potentially profit from content they collect, let’s also remember what the vibes are like when prices go down. 

Direct relationships between fans and creators

It’s insane that a YouTuber or musician on Spotify get practically zero information about their audience or means to reach out to them directly. That’s seriously fucked. 

Wallet-to-wallet messaging is getting good. And with onchain content, a creator could send a DM to their fans without intermediaries. They could even see what other communities they’re a part of and get more data that they could use to improve their business.

The potential for creators to connect with fans directly is clearly a massive improvement and a lot to be excited about.  

However, if we need fans to first collect an NFT, then we’re only going to capture such a small percentage of the audience that it won’t matter.

I’m hopeful that we’ll see new apps emerge that leverage existing user behaviors (Like/Follow/etc) to build this social graph, and enable creators to directly reach their fans.

Composability with other media

With DeFi, it’s easy to see how the different money legos can all fit together and lead to new and interesting protocols. With content, this still feels like an exciting possibility but without many practical examples.

I’m not saying composability and media won’t exist. Stems is a perfect example of the cool possibilities that can emerge. By separating parts of a song (vocals, synth, bass, etc) and using these as building blocks, other artists can remix and recombine these in countless ways.

StoryCo and Story Protocol are two other potentially interesting ways that media can be built to enable composability. 

But, when most people talk about collecting content, they’re typically talking about a full song, or a piece of writing, a podcast, or something of that nature. The content being collected isn’t designed in a way to enable composability.

Take this article as an example. With the possible exception of new distribution models, there isn’t much that can be done to make it composable with a broader ecosystem. Please enlighten me if I’m just lacking imagination though. 

Portability to other platforms

Portability, which enables the seamless transfer of content and social graphs across different applications, is incredibly disruptive. 

But… portability isn’t equally important for every type of content, at least not today. For social, it’s a huge unlock and why Lens and Farcaster are so exciting. For written content, it’s only a slight upgrade (if that) over a simple WordPress blog.

Having content be collectible doesn’t unlock much here either. Sure, you could build a personal curator website that includes all the Lens posts, music, articles, etc that you’ve collected. This has potential to be interesting. 

Imagine your favorite influencer has their own curator website so that you can see what they’re reading, watching and so on. Somebody like Pet of Sporting Crypto could include all the interesting stuff they come across that doesn’t make it into their newsletter. It could enable a completely new content distribution model, access to more information and closer relationships between fans and creators. 

But if we’re limited to only onchain content that can be collected, this wouldn’t be very useful. Much of the best content will continue to be published offchain for the foreseeable future.

The conversation needs to move beyond collecting content

I’m not sure why collecting content became such a big talking point for the value that crypto can provide to content creators. 

Maybe it was the NFT mania of the bull-run coinciding with content going onchain more easily via apps like Mirror or Sound, plus the promise of royalties.

I think it’s time to step back and really think about how crypto can provide value to content creators and fans. 

Is collectible content part of this? 

Absolutely. But it’s a small part. 

There are so many other and more interesting ways that this technology can disrupt legacy content systems. Those are far more interesting than minting this blog post as an NFT. 

How is 0xSplits being used today?

As the name suggests, It’s being used to split up money. Some examples of projects currently using it can be found here. 

But, let’s take a quick look at one of the most interesting examples to date - Camp Chaos by Songcamp.

Chaos was an 8-week experiment that brought together 77 contributors to create a headless band. The whole experiment is super interesting but I’ll skip most of the details and let you read on your own.

The TLDR is that a bunch of NFTs were sold and those funds needed to get split up among all the contributors. 

From the 0xSplits app, we can see a bit clearer how all of this works.

Over 450 ETH has been distributed to 78 addresses with split percentages ranging from 20.17% all the way down to 0.18% for the lowest earning contributor.

It’s worth taking a second and reflecting on how much of a pain in the ass it would be to do this using traditional payment rails. I don’t know how or if this would work using something like PayPal or Stripe but I suspect it would be an awful experience to attempt. 

You can also see all of the activity that has taken place on this split since it was deployed. 

Because this split is mutable, it’s possible for the Songcamp multisig to make updates to the split, which they’ve done a few times. But you’re also able to make an immutable split that can’t be updated later.

As you can see, 0xSplits automatically distributes funds to everyone listed on the split. 

In this distribution, .339 ETH was distributed amongst 78 wallets on ETH L1, which sounds like a gas nightmare. But it actually wasn’t bad at all. 

Granted, users still need to withdraw these funds, costing more gas, but withdrawals actually seem extremely gas efficient. Plus, users can always let funds accumulate for a while before making a bigger withdrawal.

And, this is on ETH L1, so it’s safe to assume that in the future we’ll see more usage on cheaper L2s.

So there you have it, a headless band distributing funds in a cheap and automated way to 77 participants.

It doesn’t take a ton of imagination to think of other ways that 0xSplits could be used to make payments cheaper and more efficient or lead to business models that couldn’t exist otherwise. 

0xSplits does more than just splitting up funds

You can use 0xSplits to build a lot of custom disbursement types. They’ve got several core contracts that devs could stack together for their unique use cases. But most will likely want to use their pre-built templates as that simplifies things and solves the most common needs.

The three templates currently available are Liquid Split, Recoup, and Diversifier. 

Liquid Split

Liquid Splits are just like the Songcamp example used earlier. The difference is that they use NFTs to make ownership transferable. So, any member receiving their revenue stream from a split could now go ahead and transfer that to another address. That opens up opportunities like being able to sell a revenue stream or even potentially getting a loan based on past earnings. 

Recoup

The recoup template is quite cool as it gives the option to first send funds to a Recoup Tier prior to distributing funds to the Profit Share Tier.

You can also add multiple addresses into the Recoup tier where each one doesn’t begin getting paid out until the previous addresses is paid completely.

As an example, you could set $10,000 USDC as the amount and token to recoup. Then allow 60% to go to the first address, 30% to the second, and 10% to the third. Then all remaining funds after the $10,000 USDC has been paid out will be distributed in the profit share tier according to the specified split.

This could be useful if one group of people financed a project and need to be paid back before profits get distributed to others. 

Diversifier

The diversifier template combines a few core contracts to automatically swap an income stream into multiple tokens, according the the weight you’ve assigned them. 

The most obvious use case for this is to automatically set aside a portion of income to be withheld for taxes. But you can obviously use it anytime you want an income stream to be split into various tokens. 

How to use 0xSplits?

Using the pre-built templates on their app and withdrawing funds is extremely straightforward.

Russ Matthews, who was involved with the Songcamp example used earlier has created some great videos on 0xSplits on their YouTube channel. They’re quick and easy to follow.

You can also find some more tutorials here. 

0xSplits is an example of why crypto is inevitable

Crypto can sometimes feel a bit too philosophical or abstract for most people to get excited about.

But, even the biggest Bitcoin skeptic should be able to look at something like 0xSplits and appreciate what this new technology is enabling. It’s fucking cool. 

I suspect eventually that most people that use 0xSplits will have no clue that they interacted with the protocol. It’s perfect as an invisible hyperstructure. 

A not very creative use case that I’ve had in the back of my mind involves trying to tie together various protocols.

So, you can imagine a website that uses Lens or Farcaster to allow users to create content. Then use something like Slise to monetize via ads. Afterward, you could use 0xSplits to automatically distribute the funds to the most value-creating members of your community based on whichever social metrics are preferred. 

Granted, that’s a pretty basic and lazily thought out example, but these types of platforms are only going to get better and easier to incorporate. You could also do things with subscriptions, bounties, NFTs, etc and then distribute that income in a much fairer, efficient and transparent way than what’s currently possible in Web2.

So much friction has gotten removed from this tech in the last couple of years, it’ll be really exciting to see how all these elements can get lego’d onto each other and create awesome experiences for users. And 0xSplits is an amazing protocol to have running in the background. 

What Matters to Me (And What Doesn’t)

UX/UI

This is easily the most important aspect of choosing a platform for me. I can handle some friction on the backend, like with the editor or other things. But for readers, signing up needs to feel as natural and intuitive as Substack. Any added friction is a major problem in my eyes. 

SEO

Although I suspect we’re in the last days of Google Search being the dominant way content is surfaced, AI bots will still need to be able to crawl content and understand it. And if SEO dies slower than it should, I want to be able to benefit from it.

Crypto Superpowers

This isn’t something that I feel a strong need for immediately, but would like to have optionality for later. So, things like being able to split revenue with contributors or composability with social applications are things I’m paying attention to.

Collectible Posts

If I’m being honest, I feel like collecting a blog post is an extremely ‘meh’ idea, especially as a means to monetize content. Granted, I still need to look into it more, but for me, it feels like digital hoarding. That said, seeing the potential for content curators is interesting.

NFTs

Obviously, NFTs are a lot more than jpegs. But even the current iterations of the more useful versions, such as a subscription pass, just feel like a more friction-heavy version of what’s already available with Web2 tools.

So, I don’t have any immediate plans for using NFTs in content, but I do suspect there will be interesting possibilities soon (or more likely, they already exist and I don’t know about them yet). Basically, I want the optionality of using NFTs in the future, but don’t have an immediate use case for them now. 

Content Stored Onchain Forever

I’m not a particularly talented writer and I doubt anything I create needs to live forever. At the same time, having an escape hatch to avoid being trapped in one provider is essential. 

My First Impressions of Each Platform as a Reader

Mirror

I remember their $WRITE Race being very interesting during the bull market. Although I didn’t closely follow the developments of Mirror, I’ve read a lot of content from people publishing on the platform.

Pro-Tip: Mirror’s Discover page has a ton of interesting content. 

To me, Mirror feels like the OG in the space. Unfortunately, the line between OG and Boomer is getting pretty thin these days. (How old are the Wu-Tang anyway?)

Paragraph

I only recently read my first blog post that was published on Paragraph. Two things immediately stood out to me - the option of highlighting part of the text to mint as an NFT and their integration with Farcaster.

But most importantly, it seems fine, just like any other blog and that’s the most important.

They also have a Discover feed with the option of filtering by topic which is a nice improvement. I don’t find as much interesting content here compared to Mirror, but it’s a newer platform so that’s to be expected. 

Paragraph Takes a More Pragmatic Approach

I’ll save my decentralization maximalism for DeFi.  For a blog, I just need something that works smoothly. That’s why I prefer the approach Paragraph takes on most things. 

Monetizing Content

Although I don’t have any immediate plans to monetize content, this is one of those essential must-have pieces.

Paid subscriptions are the most obvious way (along with ads) that blogs and newsletters make money, but that’s not possible with Mirror. With Mirror, your only option to monetize is from readers paying to collect posts.

In an interview with Web3 Academy, Colin Armstrong of Paragraph mentioned how he doesn’t see collectible content as a sustainable monetization strategy for most creators - something I strongly agree with.

For collectible content to really make sense as a primary monetization model, you kind of need some combination of a big or diehard audience, utility for owning the NFTs, strong selling skills, speculation, or something else.

It feels like trying to force a new behavior when a simple subscription is the most obvious and makes the most sense. Readers are willing to pay money to read content - no need to overcomplicate things. 

Paragraph uses Stripe to allow recurring memberships (and crypto soon, I think). They also let you associate an NFT with each membership and that will stay active for as long as the subscription is valid. This allows you to still do things like token-gate content or a Discord channel.

Publishing to Arweave

I’m far more likely to write something embarrassingly wrong that I’d like to delete and pretend never happened than to publish something that will stand the test of time.

With Mirror, all posts are stored on Arweave, meaning they’ll always be available.

Paragraph also lets you save posts to Arweave, but also includes other options such as sending it out as an email newsletter, publishing online, or sending it to wallet subscribers via XMTP.

For me, having the option to exit the system is enough. I don’t need my content to live forever. 

Building a Business

This should probably be the first thing on the list as this is something that seems insignificant but actually would be a dealbreaker for me.

With Mirror, your content is tied to your wallet address and can’t be transferred. If your wallet gets compromised, or you need to move to another wallet for whatever reason, you’re out of luck.

Before getting into crypto, I had a WordPress blog that I sold. If I had started that site by publishing content to Mirror, it would have been impossible or extremely complicated to sell. After all, the content can’t be transferred and I’d still hold the private keys forever.

Fortunately, Paragraph has a workaround that would allow you to transfer the account to another address. 

SEO

I hope SEO is on its deathbed, but still, it’s the main way people find content now and AI bots will still need to be able to understand what content is about.

You really don’t need to be an expert to understand that URLs that look like this aren’t great for SEO…

https://mirror.xyz/ohotties.eth/YKyRnpCP1azVkrzEhZT6KEFcJOZxgEwfMudpeSuZUEc
https://sound.mirror.xyz/lc_I7gc4jWO6FmrXC6B5frEPeeqDSMc0Ddy1XHeN5CU

With Paragraph though, the slug is editable, so it’s easy to publish a post with a URL that looks like this…

https://m3dia.xyz/mirror-vs-paragraph

It feels a lot like Mirror was created with no consideration for SEO whereas Paragraph put some thought into this. 

NFTs

Both platforms allow you to mint an article as an NFT or embed NFTs into your content, and set the network, available supply, and price.

Mirror might take things a little further, for example, making it possible for people to read a collected post in the NFT itself, so you can read it from within a wallet. But this isn’t something I care about.

Paragraph allows you to save any part of an article as an NFT, so you can mint a quote that you want to remember. This feels somewhat cool but I can’t help but feel like it isn’t all that useful. Maybe I’m wrong and not being imaginative enough. Perhaps if there was something like a Web3 Readwise where you could mint content from any publication, that might be more interesting to me.

In general, happy to see NFT options for both platforms even though I don’t have any immediate plans to utilize them. 

Crypto Superpowers

Crowdfunds and Splits: 

Mirror did a couple of things that really stood out to me as, “Oh shit, that’s pretty cool.” that would be hard if not impossible to do in Web2.

With crowdfunds, an investigative reporter could raise money to research and publish a story on a topic that readers are interested in. This could open up opportunities to cover topics that might have been ignored normally and make it so a writer wouldn’t have to take on the risk of researching a story that nobody cares about.

Splits allow an article to have multiple contributors with each contributor earning a percentage of revenue, and that revenue automatically getting distributed.

These are both really cool. Unfortunately, they’re currently paused on Mirror and Paragraph doesn’t seem to have any equivalent. 

Composability:

We’ve seen the power of composability in DeFi so now thinking of what can happen in content, especially as decentralized social platforms get more traction, is going to be fun to watch.

We can see early instances of this with Farcaster and Paragraph.

If there’s a discussion on Farcaster about an article published on Paragraph (and the URL is linked), those comments will automatically get added to the comments section of the article on Paragraph.

You also have other options like using Superfluid for streaming payments or creating a referral program with Sharemint.

I haven’t seen much composability with Mirror articles, but it’s very possible they exist and I’m just not aware of them (share them with me!). 

Some Random Things Before Finishing

Fees:

It’s free to publish on both Paragraph and Mirror.

Paragraph charges a 5% fee on recurring subscriptions and when an NFT is collected. For comparison, Substack charges 10% on subscriptions. Paragraph also charges $50 to connect a domain.

On Mirror, there are a few different types of fees but none for publishers. I think the main one is the 0.00069 ETH fee that collectors are charged for minting a Writing NFT.

Editors:

This is the first post that I’ll be publishing so I can’t comment much on either of their built-in editors. I played around with them both briefly and they seem standard enough.

Paragraph does have ChatGPT built into their editor as well. 

Themes:

Paragraph has some basic themes you can use. Although, calling them themes is probably overselling it as it’s just changing the colors and fonts. But still, better than nothing. 

Importing Subscribers and Content:

Paragraph lets you import subscribers by wallet address or email which makes switching from another platform much less of a burden.

Mirror lets you import an article from any linkable source (ie, Medium or a personal blog) by pasting a URL. That works nicely if you want to also publish something on Mirror that you publish elsewhere. 

Communities and Categories:

Paragraph lets you subdivide your content into communities. This lets you charge separate subscriptions or token gate each community separately. They also let you tag posts with different categories which makes organizing content easier. 

Paragraph Fits My Needs Better

Paragraph feels like a much better tool for my needs and it's not particularly close. I initially planned on publishing my first several articles on both Mirror and Paragraph to get a better feel for which I prefer, but I’m going to just go ahead with Paragraph.

The lack of monetization options for Mirror, as well as the inability to transfer an account to a new wallet, are dealbreakers. I would almost certainly choose something like Substack or Beehiv before Mirror.

The advantages that Mirror has aren’t in the areas that are important for me. But again, everybody is different, and some people will prefer Mirror.

Let me know what I’ve gotten wrong or overlooked. Give me a subscribe and share too. I’m going to be spending a ton of time looking at the intersection of crypto and media and writing about what I learn.