Decoding "Creator Economy Plus" Within the Web3 Media Protocol Framework
Written in the first half of 2023, in the thick of the hard stretch after our second funding round ran into trouble in the bear market—an interim recap and outlook from the founder of ThePrimedia...
This is not the best of times. The road of building the crypto world is overgrown with thorns. The early explorers traveling through the crypto economy toward digital civilization are like that first troop of little monkeys that dropped out of the jungle onto the grassland: a world full of novelty, yet one that leaves them battered and scrambling at every turn—wave after wave pressing forward, reborn through fire and death.
Yet this is also the best of times. Just as those pioneers kept drawing raw intellectual energy out of a perilous and unforgiving environment—without the strength of claws and fangs, without powerful limbs, yet ultimately forging a dominance and destructive power that sat at the very top of Earth’s biological chain and transcended mere survival—today’s Web3 Builders and crypto-world explorers, on this journey through the crypto economy into the age of digital civilization, are destined to forge a form of civilization more masterly than that of AI, DID, and their like in the survival contest of the digital-era jungle.
That is why ThePrimediaDAO has been struggling forward in the bear market—even falling back to its content research business—yet we still believe, much as humanity’s earliest ancestors gazed at the starry sky and asked where life comes from and where it goes, in mapping out the role, standing, and function of the crypto economy as humanity moves toward the future age of digital civilization. And that is why, even while running a survival-driven research business, we keep pitching value upward, working alongside the Web3 world’s early explorers to forge new rules of order and new ecosystem paradigms that rise above the survival laws of the crypto world.
To make all of this happen, we must complete the iteration of media itself—evolving into a Web3 media protocol and, through it, fusing with the crypto ecosystem into a symbiosis. Building on the Web3 Fundamentals white paper, we revised our thinking in light of practice and distilled the following charter of operational strategy across four iterative eras.
To better match the title and the grand narrative of this opening, we proceed in reverse order.
4.0 The Dreamland: Symbiosis of the Virtual and the Real
In roughly a decade or so, we will enter the metaverse—perhaps under a different name. Our current concept of the metaverse traces an outline close to what we understand as humanity entering a digital civilization of virtual-real symbiosis; as for what the following century will look like, we can consult the imagination of film and television creators.
What form media will take in that era, and what function it will serve, will exceed the creativity—and the destructiveness—we watched when Web2 media displaced print media. The paradigm of commercial media serving commercial ecosystems showcased the internet-era media’s ability to connect business; at the same time, however, the attention and fan economies built on “the medium is the message” scoured away the social-value function that news media held in the print era, and content creation degenerated into busking for a living.
We hope that the content-based media forms of the digital-civilization era can play a more valuable social role. To get there, they must break through the product positioning—centered on connecting B-side ecosystems—of the three earlier stages described below, and expand into a confluence of content media with digital-era DID identity, information, value, reputation, and even social relationships.
Along that road, we have the chance to revive the narrative of news media as the “Fourth Estate” of Western civilization in the physical world; the chance, as Web3 iterates on Web2 media, to complete the narrative of content media evolving from information carrier into value-bearing subject; and then, as the corresponding DID identities and social-relationship graphs gradually fill out—possibly integrating with or even binding to AI, DID, and related elements—to finally arrive at the picture and the design of media’s form and function in the age of digital civilization.
This is the path we expect to unfold gradually over the coming decade and more, as Web3 media practice, crypto-economy exploration, metaverse construction, and digital-civilization elements such as AI and DID develop and mature.
3.0 The Ecosystem Tree: Media Protocol
Unlike the dreamland vision of media described above, the Web3 media protocol stage comes with a concrete product form: the crypto ecosystem tree.
While running its content research business, ThePrimediaDAO kept meeting Web3 projects still groping, through trial and adjustment, toward new project forms. Perspective favors the onlooker! It suddenly dawned on me that our earlier thinking about “Web3 media transforming Web2 media”—the very cause we intended to devote ourselves to—had not been deep enough.
That forced us to stop and rethink. Since releasing the Web3 Fundamentals white paper in October of last year, we had spent the past months correcting course, searching for a way forward, and setting a new rhythm. In the process, I tried to return to the original intention I held when I first entered the blockchain industry, and from there to think through whether this project needs to exist, whether it can succeed, and whether it is practicable.
The story begins with a piece of financial news from 2017, so let me insert a chapter from my blockchain career here. In 2017, the “9/4” regulation came into my view. At the time I was still in the aftershocks of internet media disrupting traditional print, sighing that “the old journalistic ideals were in decline.” A modest background in economics helped me understand that blockchain could transform relations of production, and carrying the ambition of using blockchain to transform the news media industry, I resolutely joined the blockchain industry.
In that clamorous era of the coin world, I maneuvered hard in search of a place to set down my aspirations, but every step was a struggle. After many twists and turns, at the end of 2020—by which time blockchain had evolved into the era of DeFi protocols—I got to know Wang Feng of MarsBit (Mars Finance) and incubated a content research project, Mars Research, under the MarsBit umbrella.
Throughout that period, the wild ambition of “blockchain transforming news media” stayed on my mind. It was while talking in the office with the young teammates about my fumbling coin-world career and hopes for the future that Mirror appeared, DAOs appeared, NFTs appeared—and suddenly the thing seemed to have a path worth following.
But after the tempering of that 2021 stretch at Mars Research, I narrowed my focus to transforming media with blockchain within the crypto-economy ecosystem, with the core of the business centered on content research. In the first half of 2022 we raised a small seed round, built the Web2 media website theprimedia, set our sights on pure-application markets overseas, and positioned the project as a content-research media outlet. To settle on the right track and project, my researchers and I wrote research reports on DID, NFT, Desocial, Web3, and public chains; concluding that the practice of Web3 infrastructure and the progress of public chains/Layer2 could already sustain a Web3 media project, we resolutely decided to push into Web3, positioning the project as Web3 Fundamentals.
I will not elaborate on the contents of the Web3 Fundamentals white paper here, but in this round of reflection we sharpened our value judgment: what is the media industry’s biggest problem in the Web2 era, and why do we need Web3 media? That is precisely the thesis the title lays out—first we must think through the transformative force Web3 brings to content creation today, and then pitch upward the role and function of media within the crypto ecosystem in the context of the Web3 media protocol.
Much like ThePrimediaDAO’s content-creation economy in the division-of-labor, co-research, and co-creation stages, many content-creation DAOs are already doing effective work against the Web2-era platforms’ “unfriendliness, and even exploitation, of creators”—returning data rights and value entitlements to creators, and empowering them with DID reputation and credit.
But within the Web3 media protocol framework, the creator economy should unleash, to a far greater degree, the energy of content creators as Builders of the Web3 ecosystem. In “A Builder-Economy Reading of the Iteration Logic and Value Opportunities of Web3 Applications,” we explored the broad sense of the Builder economy: practices such as Bitcoin mining, DeFi liquidity mining, and Play2Earn are all expressions of rights-based returns flowing back to Builder-users from the assetization of their contributions and data. The Builders of the whole Web3 ecosystem—miners, developers, creators, operators, and everyone else who puts in valuable labor to build the Web3 ecosystem—can thus earn the corresponding entitlement returns.
Seen within this broader Builder-economy context, the creator economy in the Web3 media protocol framework works like this: creators take part in the Web3 media protocol through content creation, align that participation with the protocol’s function within the crypto ecosystem, and thereby earn corresponding Builder contributions.
2.0 ThePrimediaDAO: Co-Research, Co-Creation, and Ecosystem Co-Building
This was the main body of last year’s white-paper plan, so a brief summary will do. Web3 Fundamentals took on the task of showing how media built on a decentralized web3 media protocol can use smart contracts and token mechanisms for ecosystem co-building within the crypto ecosystem. We hoped for a native web3 media project that grows together with the crypto ecosystem’s Builders, one where our services merge deeply with the ecosystem’s needs—hence ThePrimediaDAO’s operational focus: a crypto ecosystem tree formed by the core Builder community rooted in industries being transformed by Web3 technology. And the path to it is precisely ThePrimediaDAO’s division of labor, co-research, co-creation, and ecosystem co-building.
1.0 Incubation: Content Strategy and Content Research
Over the past few months (late 2022 into early 2023), we ran content-research collaborations with SafeTreasury and DeFund, and content-strategy work with TigerVCDAO, NonceGeekDAO, CrossSpace and Type V DAO, Assure_pro and Assure Wallet, as well as with @PeterG2100 @MetaJames8 @satoshi_song @lvxuan147 @ChangyongLiu @dysonisme @Abdulla31280434. These practices are the foundation on which we formed the four-stage strategic plan and organized the thinking in this piece.
After closing our first seed round in the first half of last year, we launched operations for the Chinese going-global market and the English-speaking markets of Europe and North America in parallel, and quickly set out from the Web2 website platform toward the Web3 media protocol. The difficulty of launching our second, angel round in October’s bear market pushed us to keep correcting our path and to subtract—returning to what we do best: content-research business development with content strategy at its core.
Of course, we firmly believe the Web3 era’s survival paradigm will bring more opportunities and more challenges alike—that is the faith behind the grand scene-setting of our opening. Only this: survive first, and only then is there a future. May these words stand as mutual encouragement with every Builder forging ahead in the crypto ecosystem. May we meet at a higher place.
This piece uses ThePrimediaDAO as a sample to parse the path that runs through the crypto economy toward the age of digital civilization. For an industry-wide, panoramic analysis, see “The Value Logic of Reading ‘Bear-Market Bottoms’ Through ‘A Civilization That Knows Where to Stop’.”
The articles are collected in the column:
ForesightNews · ThePrimedia article series.