I’m currently following a bunch of cryptocurrency startups hoping to disrupt the media business. I’ve already written about a few of them: Civil, Narrative and Po.et. There are also a number of social media products built on blockchain, such as Steemit (a crypto Reddit) and Peepeth (a crypto Twitter). Finally, there are as-yet unlaunched crypto media projects of various stripes that I’m looking forward to seeing soon: Julien Genestoux’s Unlock and Mike Dudas’ The Block are a couple of examples.
All these companies are trying different things in the media / “content” ecosystem, but here are five aspects I’m particularly tracking right now:
1. Micropayments
This is probably the thing I’m most excited about, for cryptocurrency projects tackling the media business. With Civil, for instance, the idea is that consumers will pay media companies directly. Ideally using cryptocurrency, including Civil’s own token, but any form of currency will be accepted.
The most prominent media initiative to build on Civil’s platform so far is The Colorado Sun, a kind of rebel news site founded by a group of ex-Denver Post editors and writers. It describes itself as “a community-supported, journalist-owned team focused on investigative, explanatory and narrative journalism.”
The Colorado Sun has a grant from Civil for this mission, but it’s also running a Kickstarter to raise additional funds. The new site has yet to launch, but it clearly has top quality journalists lined up to work for it. So I’m very keen to see what its payment system will look like from a user point of view, and whether it’ll be easy for people to support the site using cryptocurrencies like Ether or Bitcoin.
2. Intellectual Property
IP is another promising avenue for blockchain technology. As a writer myself, and someone who has experienced many aggregators using my writing to populate their websites (without compensating me) over the years, I think this is a field ripe for innovation.
Po.et is the most interesting project on this front. As I explained in my review back in February, Po.et will record your ownership of a piece of content and save it to the Bitcoin blockchain. The article itself isn’t saved to the blockchain, but a timestamped metadata entry is – and that asserts your ownership, transparently and for all time.
The idea is that whenever an aggregator (or some other website) uses your article, it can be traced back to you; and ideally you’ll get a micropayment.
As at time of writing, Po.et is operational on the Bitcoin testnet. It’s released a mobile app, an API, and a WordPress plugin (which I’ve downloaded and am testing on Blocksplain). It hopes to migrate to the Bitcoin mainnet soon.
3. Subscriptions
Unlock is one to watch here. I’ve spoken a couple of times to Julien, but I’m unsure how much I can say about it. Unlock is described as “an access control protocol built on a blockchain.” Basically, it will allow me to create a subscription system for my website without using a middleman.
So, using Blocksplain as an example, I could create a “lock” for my site. The lock is really just a smart contract, allowing me to specify who can view Blocksplain and how much they will pay.
Let’s say I create a lock that is valid for one year. I can sell that for, say, 0.1 ETH. The interesting aspect is that people will be able to on-sell that lock – in a sense it becomes like a digital collectible, because the lock is a unique access point to Blocksplain’s content. Which leads me to the next point…
4. Leasing access
In a recent episode of the podcast Invest Like the Best, Patrick O’Shaughnessy spoke to serial entrepreneur Niel Robertson about the future of media. When the topic of crypto came up, Niel pointed out that the ability to lease a digital collectible is a fascinating market opportunity. He was referring to CryptoKitties and gaming, but I also see this being relevant in the media market.
Going back to the Unlock example, let’s say someone wants to read Blocksplain but only for the articles about EOS. This person is all-in on EOS and just doesn’t want to know about the rest of the blockchains out there. Let’s say their friend has a 1-year subscription (a.k.a. lock) for Blocksplain. The friend could then lease the lock to the EOS fan for a few days, so they can read the few articles mentioning EOS.
Replace Blocksplain with The Wall St Journal in the above example, or another publication with years and years of great content in its archive, and you can perhaps see more value in this concept.
5. Rewarding users
The final point about crypto and media that I’ll mention in this post, is that crypto brings the ability to reward users / readers. Narrative is a good example. The company is building a content network, that among other things will include many different topic pages. Narrative calls these pages “niches” and the idea is that “each niche has an owner, who is rewarded based on the overall quality of content in the channel.”
So in Narrative’s system, users will get rewards for not only creating content – but curating it. There will also be rewards, in the form of tokens, for people who help manage the community as a whole.
These are just five ways that crypto is challenging the media ecosystem, and hopefully will change it for the better. All of the above examples are experimental, but they’re promising developments in an industry (media) struggling to stay viable in the online era.
Let me know your thoughts in the comments, especially if you have further examples to share.