11min chapter

"Media Empires" | The Business of Newsletters, Podcasts, Creators, and Data Acquisition  cover image

The Future of the Creator Economy and the Digitally Native Generation with Rex Woodbury

"Media Empires" | The Business of Newsletters, Podcasts, Creators, and Data Acquisition

CHAPTER

The Future of NFTs and the Creator Economy

This chapter explores the evolving landscape of NFTs and their economic implications, highlighting the initial excitement around blockchain technology. It discusses how creators are navigating monetization challenges in a bear market and the rise of new digitally native work platforms. The chapter also examines the transformation of social media, particularly for Gen Z, emphasizing a shift towards immersive video experiences and the importance of innovative funding models for niche businesses.

00:00
Speaker 2
Yeah, that's well said. We've touched on it, but I want to hear more in detail of your thoughts on NFTs and what will be their kind of overriding impact. I know people ascribe a lot of things to NFTs, but where do you see it going? Yeah, I mean, I think the problem with
Speaker 1
blockchain and crypto is sort of in the hype cycle over the last few years it got ahead of its skis in terms of the froth. And unfortunately, that obfuscated the fact that I think there are really interesting use cases for the technology. We talked about this ability to, whether it's like a token that shows you are an early fan or this traceability, I think is interesting. The problem is that, one, the technology is not quite there. Two, of course, it was used for different use cases. So I think there's something interesting there. I think NFTs are still interesting down the road. My view has always been that a lot of the crypto elements won't be visible to actually the end users. And so it'll be much more kind of underneath the surface. Maybe it lives on blockchain, but on application, people don't actually know that. And so I think that probably is still a few years away and it's not going to be the JPEGs of apes and things like that. I think it'll be much more tied to utility. Yeah. It is interesting. There was this version
Speaker 2
of the world that one could imagine taking place where we were just going to be speculating on everything, where it's not just companies, but it's people's social media accounts. You tie everything to a stock market almost somehow. And do you think that is way overblown? Where do you think that's... There are some people that experimented with personal tokens that would rise based on sentiment. How do you see that behavior evolving? I
Speaker 1
do think that I've thought a lot about this trend of what you're saying, the financialization of everything. And I do think that's true. I think it also has flavors in what we've talked about around people thinking of themselves as their own business or their owners or entrepreneurs and being much more self-directed and autonomous and wanting to capture their own economic upside. I do think that in a bear market, it's a harder trend because not everything's up into the right. There's this viral TikTok that went around a week or two ago, which was this resurface, this couple from about a year ago talking about how they weren't working. They were just making a living, day trading. And the guy was like, oh, my philosophy is that, you know, when I see a stock going up, I buy it, and then I hold as it continues to go up and then I sell, and we made $40,000 this month doing this. And, you know, a lot of people were making fun of this as sort of the emblem of the zero interest rate phenomenon. And, you know, I feel bad for, I don't know how those people have done now, but it can't have done well with the market going down. And I think that a lot of people did get used to this world where everything was up and to the right. And that was true with crypto and Dogecoin and board apes and all of these crazy phenomena from the last few years. But I think the underlying trends of people wanting to dictate their own economic fortunes because skeptical of institutions and skeptical of capitalism in general, those are not going away, but the way that they've manifested the last few years, that was a bit of a bubble. I agree with everything you said. I'd also add that gambling is
Speaker 2
pretty addicting and people enjoy gambling. And so if they're gambling, speculating, if there are more opportunities to speculate, you know, people are probably going to do that.
Speaker 1
Yep. I think that's exactly right. I mean, I think a lot of gamified technology products have always played on that. Putting your venture hats on, you know, the last time we spoke on the podcast, it was 2021.
Speaker 2
You know, the creator economy was kind of having a renaissance in the venture world, you know, then Legion had the passion economy. And is it fair to say, I'm curious for us to reflect on that. Is it fair to say that most of the gains have come have been accrued by the platforms and maybe the creators themselves? Or how do we sort of take stock of the creator economy sort of, you know, phase in the last few years? I
Speaker 1
think, again, I try not to use that term as much because I do think that it makes people think of a more narrower business model or use case. And so I think more broadly around like what does it actually mean at its core? It's like people earning a living based on their own specialized knowledge or interests or creativity or art. It's a broader trend and I think it certainly was easier when, you know, in a bull market where people were earning a lot of income and companies were flush with cash to, you know, experiment on these creator funds, whether it's TikTok or Snap or Facebook or all these kind of ways of people trying out new ways to win the war of talent online. That's certainly gone away a bit. I think the platforms have always monopolized a lot of the value for themselves. Very few of them have actually been very friendly to the people building on them. I think YouTube is certainly the exception in that it is really the one place to monetize if you're a real traditional, quote unquote, creator. That said, I mean, just over the last five or 10 years, we've had dozens of platforms come up that I would call digitally native work platforms, creator platforms, whatever you want to call them. I mean, I think there are really interesting ones where you can work for Overwolf, which is a gaming company in Israel that lets you build in-game apps and mods. That can be a living. You can work for... Leeland is a new startup that lets you be a coach. So if you are a career coach or have some sort of expertise to share, Nourish is a company I think is really interesting, which is a seed stage company that lets you be, as a consumer, connect to a dietician. And as a dietician, you can actually be employed to do these digital consults with people who are curious to learn about their health and wellness. Similar company in the therapy spaces had way. And so these are more kind of not what you would consider creator jobs, but they're new forms of work that didn't exist five years ago. I mean, if I was a therapist, I would probably have to go through a lot of legal red tape and ropes to get insured and get started. And I didn't have this turnkey solution to join Headway and be able to have online consultations. Same with as a dietician, which is a quite well-paying job that a lot of young people are very interested in. There weren't these solutions that let me just have that as my way to earn a living like there are now, let alone a lot of other companies we've talked about like WAP, where I can actually just build a software, bought it, earn passive income by managing my business there. So, you know, I am very bullish on this long trend of these platforms that allow you to connect with people in new ways to have new openings and avenues for monetization, and this kind of digital economy that's still pretty new. And AI might blow that open and have even more ways to monetize or supercharge your own powers. But that's kind of the arc that excites me more so than a lot of the like, you know, Snap Spotlight or TikTok or YouTube headlines of the last years. It's more the up
Speaker 2
and coming platforms that let you dictate your own fortunes in a new way. Yeah. Well, to that end, it said that every generation has its new social media platform because they want to separate themselves. Is TikTok that of Gen Z or is TikTok more entertainment and less social media platforms? How do you think about consumer social going forward? If there's any, anything that sites?
Speaker 1
Yeah, I think about consumer social and commerce in similar ways, actually, to use the consumer social example. I think about this march from less rich media formats to more rich. So if you think of blogs and Twitter as the early examples of really just text 140 characters and then 280 characters. So that was that. And then Instagram came along and photos were the next thing. And now we're in a video era where certainly TikTok has popularized that with short form, but everyone else is really throwing all their resources into video, including Instagram and Meta writ large. So that has been the path. I think it will continue. What is the next iteration of that? Probably more immersive formats like 3D Worlds. That could be a Minecraft or Roblox or Fortnite-like experience. It could be there are a few companies building MMOs in the browser, which I think is very interesting because it's more accessible to people and easier to build and create things. And that's a way to socialize with friends. Ultimately, I'm very bullish on VR and AR. I think that it is a matter of when, not if. I think we'll look back and laugh at how long it took and that it took us a lot longer than we expected and we were wrong on timing, but we weren't wrong on actually how powerful those technologies would be. I always liked the Tim Sweeney quote, I've never met a skeptic or VR who's tried it. And it really is an incredible technology, but it probably needs a better device and the headsets aren't there yet and probably need some killer apps as well. But ultimately my view is that the next big social platform will look more like a game. It'll look more like a Roblox or Minecraft than it does an Instagram or TikTok. And similarly, you know, in commerce, I think we'll move to more immersive forms of shopping, whether it's, you know, whatnot in live stream or new kind of creative things like that. It seems that a trend that we've been talking about in this podcast is that the internet is
Speaker 2
fragmenting a bit so that more people can find people just like them. And what maybe that means reading between the lines is that a lot of these platforms that exist to serve these kind of increasingly, you know, smaller niches that maybe they're not venture scale. Like maybe there needs to be different funding models to take into account this niche-ification of the internet. Would you dispute that premise? And if not, what do you think needs to happen? I wouldn't dispute it. I think that it
Speaker 1
is not a good thing that venture is often thought of as the single way to build a company. I don't think it's the right way to build a company for most entrepreneurs. I think that incentives are misaligned. It's a power law business. It works for a certain type of entrepreneur, a certain type of product, a certain type of market. But the back of America has always been small business creation. I think what's interesting now with this sort of online economy is a lot of these companies we've talked about undergird other forms of business creation. So an example would be from the last decade, my partner has worked at Fair for five or six years or something like that, but from early days and he works in product there. And Fair is not a consumer facing company, but it's B2B2C in that it arms the small businesses, these retailers around the country and now around the world to have their business have it thrive, connect with artisans and brands. And that's a very powerful model. And I think we're going to see new kind of online versions of that as well. So the biggest companies are often not necessarily the ones are the small businesses themselves, to your point. Those probably shouldn't be venture funded, but they're the ones that are the platforms upon which business creation happens. One thing you're really attuned to is demographic
Speaker 2
changes.

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