An ode to a new media monetization model and the birth of the modern Victorian Age.
Or fuck advertising.
Today marks the first step to realizing my life's work.
I fundamentally believe that our past and current monetization model is built for an old world.
I am talking about advertising.
This model is a tragedy because it devalues the most precious resource a human has, time.
What do I mean by that?
Take three core examples:
The Creator - The role of the creator is to create valuable content for themselves and their audience. If you follow the money, the incentives are not aligned for this outcome. To steal an analogy from Upton Sinclair, the creator has become the pimp, and they whore out their audience to the highest bidder.
If this weren't bad enough, it hurts the ability of the creator to create because it uses up their most valuable resource, focused time, on reading ads and making content. The nature of this business model is for the content to become nothing more than a vehicle for the ads.
The Consumer - What if I told you that even in the absolute highest cases, where creators have audiences with the highest household income, advertisers value minutes of your life at around $.02. You are selling your most valuable resource for less than a penny a minute.
The Modern Ad Tech Developer - we have taken the best and brightest of this generation and paid them exorbitant sums of money to optimize for ad revenue. Web2.0 has taken the most significant transformational opportunity in the known history of mankind, and they have swindled it to sell t-shirts, pharmaceuticals, and insecurity.
This devaluing of time and specifically creative time has inhibited, what could have been a victorian era level of creation, but no more.
With the explosion of Bitcoin and the popularization of Web3, we now can creatively build business models that can shift how we monetize media.
The project that I am launching today is a tiny but essential step on the path to realizing a future where creators are paid to create, consumers are rewarded for consuming.
What an NFT does is allow consumers, to purchase content from creators, that has the opportunity to increase in value over time as the community and popularity of the project grows. This is a small step in creating a synergistic relationship between creator and consumer.
I am launching Sky King's Mental Playground's first episode today with Bruno Skvorc. The entire 1.5-hour podcast is available as an NFT on RMRK.APP. There are also 10 clips with unique art that captures the essence of the clip from the podcast. Each of these is available for ownership on the platform.
If you want to join the community, check out the art, or literally just listen to the podcast on the RMRK platform, you can do so here.
This is how we will launch each episode of the podcast. Over time, we will continue to grow the community and offer exclusive opportunities to NFT holders. Opportunities that will include governance on charity donations that 5% of all revenue from this project will go to, voting on the annual 20% of income to help fund creators build different media monetization models.
If you want to live in a world where you are not the product but the consumer. In a world where your favorite creators have more energy to create unique content and a world where the most innovative people are spending their life energy to build world-changing tools, please share this thread with someone who also wants to live in a better world.
A huge thank you to Bruno Skvorc for joining me on this podcast, Dan Reecer, Graham Dern for editing the audio, Stephanie McBride for designing the album art, and the entire Modern Stoa team: Trey Harnden, David Desmond, Caroline McKinney, Ben Spotswood, Tanner Carver, Johnathan Northrup without y’all’s support this wouldn’t exist.