Mumbai: The very genesis of the internet was to be decentralised, and that’s partly true even today. You can send an email from your Gmail to an Outlook address or you can have your own domain and server to send an email to anyone. The ability to host, ring-fence, and interact independently has always existed but along the way, large corporations came in to organise the internet and make it available to people in an easy scalable manner.

This was the beginning of what we now know as Web 2.0. Users thus explored these spaces and started building communities. Email and social media platforms made it easy to interact with people using a common space. Users can easily jump on to the bandwagon of Facebook, Gmail, Twitter, or Instagram, and more recently to Tik Tok and a plethora of newer short video platforms. And inevitably, people milling around a common space gave way to the proverbial soapboxes that we all love to like, share, comment on and become ardent followers of.

The Evolution of the Content World

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Meanwhile, in the content world, the internet moved from solely being a marketing tool to being the home of all content consumption. Content creation moved from being the job of actors, studios, production houses, and writers to casual commentators and regular people who explored their creative side. Today, we have platforms like TikTok, Instagram, Spotify, and Youtube that give professionals and amateur creators a path to reach their audiences.

In 2020 alone, Instagram recorded an estimated two billion users and $24 billion in revenue, while Tik Tok had an estimated one billion users and $1.9bn in revenue. The sheer number of users, signals that the momentum that we have built up around these companies has a life of its own. As things stand, the internet still needs centralised players to allow for discovery. We have spent the last two decades discovering and recognising different platforms to listen to music, watch a video, or share photos. And that is not about to change anytime soon.

Embracing Web 3.0

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If Web 3.0 is to bring about a wave of change, it is the application of blockchain technology in enabling transactions and in the actual value of the material. This development is especially interesting in the content space. It seems benign from the outside because we are already transacting at a price for content: whether via direct subscriptions or via ad-subsidized models that appear free to users.

Users and brands, however, pay centralised platforms for the content, not the original producer of the content. This is largely because it is the platforms that take on the trials of hosting, security, and content distribution, all of which are expensive propositions. These platforms do share a part of their earnings from ads and subscriptions with creators, but this share tends to be small and at predetermined prices where creators have little or no say.

When you look at how the content industry is progressing, we have legitimate jobs like “Instagram Influencers” and “Tik Tokkers” who have an enviable set of audiences that follow the original content they created day on day to entertain, inform and influence purchase.

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Predictably there is a huge spike in “Influencer Management” companies that offer brands access to collaborate with influencers. As per an online report, there were more than 240 Influencer companies that were set up in 2021, and the Influencer Marketing Industry is set to grow to approximately $13.8 billion in 2021, up from 9.7 billion last year.

The Future of Blockchain Technology

The growth of influencer marketing will soon make it impossible for even these companies to keep up in basic terms of running a business. Blockchain is a perfect solution to help ensure the right creators are paid and transparent validation of the value of the content created.

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For instance, TikTok is planning to introduce Ghost Kitchens to give users the ability to order a recipe that went viral (remember the Dalgona coffee phase?), fulfilled by Tik Tok and paid for by the user. Their intention is to share the proceeds of the orders for that dish with its Tik Tok creator. One way for TikTok to actually ensure that the right creator gets paid for the recipe is by using blockchain technology to trace the true (first) owner of the recipe on the platform. The value of that token can be gathered with how much it was shared (indexed) so it can influence the price of the recipe created to be produced.

In the same vein, video platforms can use blockchain technology to allow access to content in an almost peer-to-peer manner. Such platforms could payout tokens to users allowing other users to access their computing resources. And these tokens could be reused within the platform or exchanged for currency at a value determined by the market.

In this kind of world, content creators can get paid directly by their consumers, and discovery platforms can transition to new business models, relieved of some of the stress of security, hosting, and distribution. We are seeing small but significant moves towards using blockchain technology in content monetisation and the industry is sitting up and noticing it. The amount of capital flowing into web3.0 and blockchain-based companies is off the charts. However, there are several challenges to making this technology commercially viable, and the jury is out on how well it will scale.

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There is no doubt that these are interesting times for the media sector, and blockchain will certainly have its part to play. But it will take a while before it becomes completely mainstream, if ever.

(Kavita Shenoy is the founder and CEO of Voiro, a Bengaluru-based ad-tech start-up. The views expressed in this column are personal and Indiantelevision.com may not subscribe to them.”

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