We've let YouTube and Facebook cash in on our creativity and
data for too long. In the DeY era, not to be confused with the crypto clowns in
DeFi, creators will have more control-- and more of the earnings.
BY HOWARD TULLMAN, GENERAL MANAGING PARTNER, G2T3V AND CHICAGO HIGH TECH INVESTORS@TULLMAN
Owning and operating any well-positioned platform is a fabulous
idea and quite lucrative -; as long as you’re on the right side of it. Being
the “product” of a platform like Google, which takes your attention and
mindshare and then slices and sells it, obviously isn’t as much fun or as
financially beneficial. Being a Google user is a lot like being the patsy in
poker.
But, as remarkably astute and technically clever as the
developers of these huge aggregations of humanity like Facebook and Google have
been, their most critical and game-changing insight -; which basically turned
them into the gatekeepers of the world - has been figuring out just how lazy we
all are. How we readily trade our privacy, attention, and ownership of our
personal data for convenience, ease of access and to save time.
Instead of taking all of the five minutes required to sign up
for a new service or site on the web, hundreds of millions of us opted every
day (and still do) to click that simple blue button or link and subscribe using
our FB or Google account credentials instead. The process is so quick and easy
that we never even think twice. Who needs more accounts, permissions and
passwords? Let the platforms do the heavy lifting for us. Forget about how
insecure and foolish it would be to use the same password/account to sign up
for hundreds of different services.
In sum, this was a very bad deal, as we’re belatedly realizing,
and now’s the time to try to unwind it and to take back control of our own
destiny. We don’t have to operate under the thumb of someone’s else’s tech, but
we have to be careful and thoughtful about how we make the next migration so
that we don’t end up simply jumping from the frying pan into the fire.
Sadly, millions of people who jumped mindlessly into the crypto
currency craziness didn’t make the right choice. They bought into a bunch of
DeFi bullcoin about the virtues of being free of any kind of central platform.
That’s just one of the many things about crypto that doesn’t
make a lot of sense to me. The whole idea that there’s no central bank,
regulator, or middleman like a traditional bank and that, as a result, token
holders are “free” of the rules, monetary policies, and especially the
instability that those various restrictions can impose and represent. The utter
foolishness of this “free to be me” formulation has really come home to roost
in the last few months as the massive declines in the values of crypto
currencies have closely tracked the overall collapse in the Dow and NASDAQ
averages.
Turns out - as Janis Joplin should have said - that freedom’s just another word for suckers getting
screwed. And, as she goes on to sing, it’s also likely that millions of these
crypto investors will soon have “nothing left to lose.” Much to their chagrin,
the poor Covid-bound multitudes and aspiring freedom fighters who were sucked
into crypto and stablecoins without a clue as to what they were buying are now
learning some expensive lessons. In addition to the coins being unregulated,
insecure, and rife with fraud and manipulation, a few of the companies that are
holding their crypto aren’t in any hurry to give it back or readily convert it
into cash. They may not have a dime by the time the whole thing is unwound.
Things haven’t been smooth in the crypto world for quite some
time. Almost 500 accounts at Crypto.com were hacked for close to $30 million.
Some employee at OpenSea stole the company’s entire email list. Stablecoins are
just another set of oxymorons sold to actual morons as hyper-secure tokens tied
to the dollar. Which turned out not to be the case. In regard to some widely
held tokens such as UST and Luna, holders can most likely count on kissing
their money goodbye. Leading crypto finance companies such as Celsius Network,
Binance and Babel Finance have all frozen withdrawals and their executives have
made some truly scary comments about not ever giving their users access to
their “investments”.
It may be true that the gearheads and techies who are deep into
the whole blockchain environment and who “roll their own” aren’t dependent on
anyone other than themselves and their mining capacity. But for the vast
majority of the civilians who have put significant hunks of their money into
Bitcoin or Ethereum, there was basically no way to play the game without
Coinbase or one of the other transaction hubs which - dare I say it - operate
simply as fee-making intermediaries between the prospective buyer’s bank or
credit card and the unseen and anonymous seller.
If you want to buy either BTC or ETH, you need to open an
account at Coinbase, verify your identity, create and fund a wallet (on or
offline) by connecting it to a legitimate source of dollars like your bank
account, and then you could begin to buy or sell. If this sounds a lot like
opening a traditional bank account or applying for a credit card, you aren’t
wrong - you just haven’t drunk enough of the Kool-Aid quickly enough to fall
for the story that there’s something new, special, and valuable going on here.
The implosion of crypto currencies doesn’t diminish the eventual
value and utility of the blockchain in many kinds of commercial and legal
transactions. And it doesn’t mean that there aren’t new opportunities in the
world of platforms. I call this area DeY rather than DeFi, which is too narrow,
because the new movements will be all about decentralizing you.
In the DeY stage, we’re going to see new offerings that can
provide highly desirable, decentralized and personalized benefits to end users
without surrendering control or a material portion of the economics to those
platform “owners.” As long as YouTube continues to take 45% of every ad dollar
earned by a video playing on its platform, the hunt for better and far more
equitable deals will only accelerate.
This is why new DeY companies like bemyfriends are
so interesting because they represent the emancipation and empowerment of
individual makers and creators. In the past we all sold ourselves too cheaply
and surrendered control and ownership of our attention and efforts in a
regrettable trade with the major social media platforms. Now’s the time to
change things up.
The money going forward in the decentralized Web 3.0 economy is
going to be all about direct revenues controlled by the creators, where the
provider “monetizes” its relationship with the end user - tips, dues and
memberships, subscriptions-- rather than the indirect and frankly modest
portion of ad sales revenues provided to creators and influencers by social
media firms. Even more importantly, the emphasis can be on true value received,
quality content, and continual connection rather than maintaining a soulless
stream of prompts, taunts, ads and click bait distractions. The shift is
simple, sustainable, and far more authentic. The talent is no longer being used
to sell advertisers indirect access to fans - instead the talent is selling
fans direct access to the talent itself.
Bemyfriends’ b.stage product provides all the
connectivity, interactivity, community, commerce and other engagement tools in
a single, fully integrated, owner-built and operated platform. Any artist can
“take something they love making” and “make much more of it.” This is a strong
step toward rebalancing the commerce equation and returning control to the
creators who can now efficiently connect to, deliver value to, and monetize
their dedicated fan bases without paying a monstrous tariff to the big tech
guys. The new decentralized world is a much more equitable and balanced rev
share kind of economy.
The three basic components of these new platforms and
relationships aren’t limited to any single genre or type of creative. Everyone
in any business wants to turn their customers into lifelong fans and advocates,
and tools like b.stage make that dream a reality in three specific ways. First,
the creators have full control of their data and content. Second, creators can
more equitably and beneficially monetize their work by building long-term,
sustainable connections to their fans. Finally, all of their time, energies and
efforts are directed to, focused on, and housed in a single, fully integrated
home base which they own.
A business that depends on resources it doesn’t control isn’t
really a business; it’s a hostage to the whims and vagaries of others. No one
wants to deal with the monkey when the organ grinder is in the room. Control
your destiny, or someone else will.