Over the past twenty years, internet-native entertainment companies across social media and gaming have been able to create large networks of engaged users without having to pay for content creation. They relied on user-generated content (e.g., social media) to attract and retain an audience, and that innovation has captivated billions of people across the globe and created immense economic value and societal and cultural impact.
It may seem that these entertainment behemoths have assumed an impregnable market position, but technological pressures and discontent amongst creators are combining to create an opportunity for tomorrow’s thriving networks to emerge at the edge of this large and important market. Two things will drive this change: first, AI will lower the barriers for people to create high-quality content in new and existing formats; and second, new business models will emerge to better compensate content creators and grow the pie for all network participants.
With the advent of AI-powered creator tools, the amount of content will drastically increase, but so will the raw amount of high-quality content. The barriers to content creation are dropping, and more people are expressing themselves in new ways. This content will take the form of the things people already love, like video, storytelling, art and images, anime and manga, audio and music, gaming, and education. We will also see creation tools that lead to new media form factors, permutations, and combinations. These novel types of content will be weird. We will have a hard time defining them because AI, as part of the creation process, expands the canvas of possibility. That’s a good thing - the inability to describe something and fit it neatly into a box is an important feature of new categories. It is around these new creation tools and content types that our collective curiosity is sparked, and tomorrow’s entertainment networks will emerge.
Quality content is the first spin of the flywheel for a new and thriving curiosity network. It is often widely shared because it is human nature to take pride in our work, and we want recognition for it (we are vain, after all). To date, this has been enough for networks to emerge and endure. But there is growing unrest amongst creators who are beholden to the whims and incentives of platforms to economically extract, and we believe better business models are emerging that transparently and continuously compensate creators for their contributions to the growth of networks. These new models will create preference and loyalty amongst content creators and will fuel the fire. This is where web3 and the ideals behind web3 primitives and economic incentives come into play. Here are two examples:
Imagine a fanfiction platform that enabled anyone to use AI to help create characters and stories, and all of those characters and stories could be accessible in a public library (e.g. marketplace) to be used by anyone. People could take a character or story, “fork it,” and modify it however they like to make it their own. Perhaps they have to pay to use or fork the character or story. If these pieces of content were NFTs or behaved as NFTs, the original creator of the piece of content and all subsequent would be compensated and receive royalties. Forever.
Let’s apply this concept to a new type of game where a creator can generate worlds, environments within those worlds, characters, and other items with the help of AI tools. All of these pieces of content would exist in a library. They could be given away for free or sold, and all of these pieces of content could then be forked and modified. The same economic mechanisms of rewarding every creator in that piece of content’s history could occur. And perhaps if certain pieces of content contribute to the growth of the network in an outsized way, those creators could even be rewarded with ownership of the network.
These economic ideas are baked into web3, but they can be utilized by anyone and they should be - user experiences can now abstract away most of the complexity of onchain rails while delivering the economic superpowers they provide. These new business models will help grow the pie, enabling more and more people to make a living exploring their creativity and sharing it with the world.
The combination of making it easy to create quality content in new formats and the economics of forking, forever attribution, and NFT-like royalty compensation is extremely powerful. It will ultimately create preference amongst creators to invest in a network because not only will it have the best creation tools, but it will also have the best compensation mechanisms. Audiences will naturally flow to the pockets of high-quality content that are easy to consume and engage with. We are at a very unique point in time where AI and the economic ideals of web3 are going to intersect and create opportunities for new networks to win, and we are here to support the entrepreneurs building them.
