The Format #038
Wordpress Wars, Playbook Pillaging, Stripe Stablecoins and Professional Fandom?
Happy Friday!! 👋
This week we’ll be looking at:
The open source piggybacking problem 🐷
What the anime movement can teach us about making money
An economy with more thriving creators and full-time fans???
And how Stripe just did web3 a big favour (thanks Stripe!)
Anyway, let’s dive in…
Fixing the economics of being a creator
There’s a lot of talk about how we’re in the golden age of the ‘creator economy’, but it feels much more like the age of the ‘Big Tech economy’… powered by creators.
This article by a16z dives into the idea that this power and control imbalance is routed in ownership. Ownership of the platform, the content algorithms and the content itself, all of which currently sit in the (greedy) hands of the corporates, and they charge extortionate take rates for their gatekeeping privileges.
This is exactly what we have been talking about for the past two years… an open format for the creator economy!
It’s time to fix open source
There is a big problem with open source. Huge companies piggyback off what has been created, which is fine, that’s what it’s there for. But then they do not contribute at all to the maintenance of these open source projects, either financially or through developer contributions.
An example of this exact issue has been playing out over the past few weeks. Essentially the co-founder of WordPress, Matt Mullenweg, has a company called Automattic, they own the WordPress trademark. Another company called WP Engine has made a lot of money through WordPress hosting, but they don’t contribute to WordPress itself, an open source project. This annoyed Matt and a whole series of drama and legal threats have ensued…
One solution to this open source problem, explained in this video is the Open Source Pledge, where companies can donate $2000 per developer to go towards maintaining these open source projects, this is a noble effort, but $2000 per dev is just too much most companies especially in countries outside the US.
The problem needs a more sustainable and long term solution.
The Fandom as a Service Thesis
The value of ‘superfans’, a core group of highly engaged and committed fans, has been discussed for many years, with the 1000 and 100 ‘true fan’ theories being very popular among creators.
This Fandom as a service ‘thesis’ takes that a step further, and instead of just looking at how to deepen the direct value exchange between creator and fan (a very powerful thing in itself), it dives into how the fans contributions and the User Generated Content (UGC) they create can become an integral part of the creators IP.
By leveraging blockchain to transparently put these fan contributions on-chain, it allows the fan to capture some of the value they create through their remixing and sharing, and the profits from the IP can be automatically split and streamed to fans accordingly.
739,000 US Stripe Merchants Can Accept Stablecoins
In order for all the awesome functionality of web3 to actually mean something to anyone outside the relatively small group of ‘web3 adopters’, the ‘everyday person’ needs a very easy way to interact with tokens.
Fortunately 56% of active websites using Stripe are in the US, so can now accept USDC payments. Thats 739,000 merchants who are now able to integrate web3 in a much simpler way. Nice!
Anime Is Eating The World
Anime culture is having a huge impact across the world, there’s also a lot that can be learned from this trend. Here are the two key themes that stuck out from this article by a16z:
→ When facilitated in the right way, UGC can be immensely powerful (just look at the Anime category on Roblox), especially when AI tools are created to help speed up the creation process.
→ The monetisation techniques used by many of these Free-to-play (F2P) anime mobile games has led to them being some of the highest average revenue per user games on the market. That being said this ‘Gacha monetisation’ can be misused and implemented in a very unethical way. 😠
Other articles we’ve found interesting this week…
Burn the Playbooks → Reverse engineering and trying to replicate other’s success is diluting our human genius and turning us into cheap AI’s.
1-9-90 Community and Brand Building → For most web3 communities, 1% are builders, 9% are writers/researchers/funds and 90% are speculative token holders. They all matter. And need/want different things.
I Joined an Onchain Writing Club → $25pm to join, but publish weekly and earn $5 back, plus get entered into a monthly raffle. Loss aversion at its finest…
a16z-backed onchain messaging platform Towns officially launches → Founder of Houseparty is launching an end-to-end encrypted (E2EE) ‘decentralised Discord’ protocol.
Helping people find and understand smart contracts → An MVP for an LLM that lets you ask questions about any smart contract.
That’s all for this week.
Have a great weekend, Dan and the OPENFORMAT team 👋🏽
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Image generated by Dall-E 2 using the prompt: “An anime-style town with two sides battling to decide who really owns Wordpress. On the left side, a group of business people in suits, focused on profit and commerce, wielding office tools like laptops and calculators as weapons. On the right side, an eccentric male CEO, with wild hair and glasses, leading a group of devoted superfans. The CEO holds futuristic gadgets and has a charismatic pose. The superfans are dressed in creative and casual attire, some holding tech devices, cheering passionately. The town has colorful anime buildings with a 'VS' text in the center of the image. The battle is dramatic, with energy clashing in the air, creating a dynamic and intense scene.”