“Collect is the new like.”
“Free to consume, valuable to own.”
“Onchain is the new online.”
I can’t help but cringe when I hear these and similar statements.
Generally, when people talk about the impact crypto will have on media, the focus is onchain content, and more specifically, the act of collecting it.
In reality, collecting content is an interesting niche use case but by making that the center of the conversation, we’re missing out on the more interesting possibilities that crypto enables.
Why are people so excited about collectible content anyway?
To be fair, a lot of people think minting an NFT of a blog post is fucking stupid. For the most part, I’m one of them. Feel free to collect this post by the way.
At the intersection of crypto and media, the act of collecting content has taken hold as the primary use case. You’ll almost certainly come across the following reasons why it’s a huge deal:
Social signaling and status for holders
New monetization models
Fans can own the content and even profit from it
Direct relationships between fans and creators
Composability with other media
Portability to other platforms
I’m not even against collectible or onchain content. On a long time frame, I expect most content ends up onchain. Collectible content can actually be pretty cool and useful for a small subset of creators.
But, in my opinion, people need to take a step back and stop smelling their own farts.
Social signaling and status for holders
"Readers want to showcase their support for writers by time-stamping their fandom, just like holding onto a ticket stub from a concert before the band became famous. By collecting writing NFTs, readers can say, "I've been a fan for ages; check this out!"
You often see this argument for why collectible content can be a game changer. I don’t even deny that it can give someone bragging rights to their friends.
But, how many ticket stubs have you saved? For most, I'm guessing zero.
Would any of your friends care that you discovered an artist early on? Maybe for a minute or two.
I’m not saying there’s no value here. If you’ve constantly shown an ability to discover promising musicians before they blowup, of course, there’s merit in being able to prove it and potentially being seen as a tastemaker of sorts.
But, we need to acknowledge that’s an extremely niche use case.
Another related argument is that it gives the holder status. Sure. That can be true.
I do think there’s a bit of a difference between collecting a content NFT and earning an NFT for completing tasks or actually doing something - with the latter having much more potential to give status to holders.
After all, bots can (and do) collect a ton of content NFTs.
New monetization models
Again. I’m going to start by saying that it’s awesome that collecting content is a new way for creators to monetize that wasn’t previously possible. This is obviously a good thing and opens up new opportunities.
However, it seems like people have lost all common sense about how businesses make money.
For the vast majority of creators, they’ll never earn anywhere near as much from people consuming their content and deciding to collect the NFT compared to if they had just used ads, sponsorships, or a subscription model.
It’s weird I even have to say that.
If something is available for free, very few people are going give money after the fact to support you. Donations as a business model very rarely works.
I have no data to back this claim up, but have tried (and failed) to get donations on previous projects. There’s a reason why nearly every creator on Patreon offers their fans utility based on tiers.
I know, creators can also incentive users to collect NFTs by offering different perks. But, this puts even more burden onto the creator to figure out how to create utility.
This can work well in some instances, but for most, there are much easier and more obvious ways to monetize content.
Fans can own the content and even profit from it
“Think about Stephen King's early writing career when he published short stories in small magazines. If these works were collectible as NFTs, they would undoubtedly be worth a fortune today.”
I’m not denying that this is true. Speculation can be good fun. Even if you remove the money aspect from the equation, it can be enjoyable to own things that you care about.
The problem is that so little content is worth owning. That's okay. It doesn't mean that it's trash or clickbait.
For most content, the value is in the consumption - you enjoy a song, laugh at a movie, or learn from an article. That's enough.
There’s no need to force a new behavior and monetization model when there are far better ways for the vast majority of creators to earn from their work.
Most content isn’t meant to be timeless or have such a strong emotional impact on someone to give them the desire to own it. That doesn’t mean it’s not valuable.
I recently listened to a podcast by OP Radio with the Pods founder. Pods, by the way, is putting podcasts onchain, making it possible to collect podcast episodes.
Despite how stupid I think collecting a podcast episode is, I enjoyed listening to the show. I found it interesting. I got value from it and it was worth my time. But I have absolutely zero interest in owning the episode.
Of course, some people can (and do) pay money to collect podcasts. But this is an extremely niche audience.
How many people collect records vs listen to Spotify? Collect basketball cards vs watch the NBA?
Again, it’s interesting and useful that we’re now able to collect and own digital content. However, we can also do far cooler stuff with this technology.
Something like Royal which makes it possible for NFT holders to earn revenue when a song is streamed is much more interesting and disruptive in my opinion.
And while it’s nice that fans can potentially profit from content they collect, let’s also remember what the vibes are like when prices go down.
Direct relationships between fans and creators
It’s insane that a YouTuber or musician on Spotify get practically zero information about their audience or means to reach out to them directly. That’s seriously fucked.
Wallet-to-wallet messaging is getting good. And with onchain content, a creator could send a DM to their fans without intermediaries. They could even see what other communities they’re a part of and get more data that they could use to improve their business.
The potential for creators to connect with fans directly is clearly a massive improvement and a lot to be excited about.
However, if we need fans to first collect an NFT, then we’re only going to capture such a small percentage of the audience that it won’t matter.
I’m hopeful that we’ll see new apps emerge that leverage existing user behaviors (Like/Follow/etc) to build this social graph, and enable creators to directly reach their fans.
Composability with other media
With DeFi, it’s easy to see how the different money legos can all fit together and lead to new and interesting protocols. With content, this still feels like an exciting possibility but without many practical examples.
I’m not saying composability and media won’t exist. Stems is a perfect example of the cool possibilities that can emerge. By separating parts of a song (vocals, synth, bass, etc) and using these as building blocks, other artists can remix and recombine these in countless ways.
StoryCo and Story Protocol are two other potentially interesting ways that media can be built to enable composability.
But, when most people talk about collecting content, they’re typically talking about a full song, or a piece of writing, a podcast, or something of that nature. The content being collected isn’t designed in a way to enable composability.
Take this article as an example. With the possible exception of new distribution models, there isn’t much that can be done to make it composable with a broader ecosystem. Please enlighten me if I’m just lacking imagination though.
Portability to other platforms
Portability, which enables the seamless transfer of content and social graphs across different applications, is incredibly disruptive.
But… portability isn’t equally important for every type of content, at least not today. For social, it’s a huge unlock and why Lens and Farcaster are so exciting. For written content, it’s only a slight upgrade (if that) over a simple WordPress blog.
Having content be collectible doesn’t unlock much here either. Sure, you could build a personal curator website that includes all the Lens posts, music, articles, etc that you’ve collected. This has potential to be interesting.
Imagine your favorite influencer has their own curator website so that you can see what they’re reading, watching and so on. Somebody like Pet of Sporting Crypto could include all the interesting stuff they come across that doesn’t make it into their newsletter. It could enable a completely new content distribution model, access to more information and closer relationships between fans and creators.
But if we’re limited to only onchain content that can be collected, this wouldn’t be very useful. Much of the best content will continue to be published offchain for the foreseeable future.
The conversation needs to move beyond collecting content
I’m not sure why collecting content became such a big talking point for the value that crypto can provide to content creators.
Maybe it was the NFT mania of the bull-run coinciding with content going onchain more easily via apps like Mirror or Sound, plus the promise of royalties.
I think it’s time to step back and really think about how crypto can provide value to content creators and fans.
Is collectible content part of this?
Absolutely. But it’s a small part.
There are so many other and more interesting ways that this technology can disrupt legacy content systems. Those are far more interesting than minting this blog post as an NFT.
