More than 50 million people worldwide consider themselves to be creators of some kind of content. The content creator economy is a fast-evolving market niche that is experiencing exponential growth. Its current size is estimated to be a little over $100 billion, showing an 8-fold increase year-on-year. This new economic sector requires new approaches and instruments, as large corporate platforms exercise great power over the creators’ content, and personal websites and blogs have limited reach.
The problem with Web 2.0
In the current state of the Internet, known as Web 2.0, content is stored on a particular server or computer and accessed via a web address known as a URL, or Uniform Resource Locator, that specifies its location on a computer network and a mechanism for retrieving it. This means that the owner of the computer or the server where content is stored has complete control over whether and how it can be accessed and can limit access or even delete content at any time.
At present, if the creators of video content, photographs, or blogs want to get their material out into the world, they have little choice but to post it on major social network platforms like Alphabet’s YouTube, Meta’s Facebook and Instagram, TikTok, Pinterest, Tumblr, Snapchat, and the like. While this provides access to huge audiences, this benefit comes with major drawbacks.
This is because all content is stored and hosted on these Big Tech companies’ central servers, which these corporate behemoths have complete control of, and creators must give up a great deal of power over their content to put it there. At any time and at their own discretion, these social media giants can block any content they dislike or deprive creators of the ability to earn money from it. The platform has no legal obligations to the creators, so creators have no right to claim damages. All revenue generated by the creators’ content is collected and distributed by the network, and creators have no say as to what share they will receive. This disparity in terms of power and revenue puts content creators at a great disadvantage.
Could Web 3.0 be the answer?
The answer to this conundrum may be the third iteration of the internet: Web 3.0
Web 3.0 represents a whole new stage of development for the internet, in which working with web content will be organized in a completely different way. It is based on decentralizing content by storing data not on just one central server, but distributing it among many computers, or nodes, in a P2P (peer-to-peer) network with the help of blockchain technology. In this way, content is no longer held hostage in large corporate data centers, and big corporations and government authorities lose their ability to dictate if or how it can be used.
Web 3.0 technologically eliminates the monopoly of Web 2.0 platforms and returns ownership of content to the creators themselves. This will fundamentally change the way creators produce and manage their content while providing them with better opportunities to profit from their work.
Moving into the future
While Web 2.0 platforms have demonstrated their commercial value, their drawbacks are becoming increasingly apparent. Delivering content through Web 3.0-based platforms can be the ideal answer to the problems creators currently face when dealing with faceless corporations. This is particularly true for creators of video content, whose work may be arbitrarily censored, restricted, or demonetized.
One such solution is a new application called FavorTube, which is a Web 3.0 media-streaming platform offering real-time, consumer-grade HD video playback and full lifecycle services for content creation. It connects content creators, consumers, and fans in one decentralized platform that is transparent, fair, and anti-censorship, where all users benefit.
With FavorTube, content creators produce and upload videos and earn revenue when consumers subscribe to their channels or content. Revenue from consumer views of ads on the platform is automatically distributed among creators, the platform, and viewers via smart contracts. Multiple forms of NFTs (permanent membership, crowdfunding) can be issued with one click, and revenue from channels or content is automatically distributed to NTF holders. Access to content is authorized on the P2P network, which protects the rights and interests of commercial videos. Randomly assigned DAO (decentralized autonomous organization) auditors from the FavorTube community monitor content and can ban material deemed to be inappropriate.
FavorTube uses its own protocol stack, dubbed FavorX, as decentralized storage and content distribution underlayer. While some projects have already carried out theoretical exploration and technological R&D in this area, FavorTube is the first media-streaming platform to implement complete decentralization for file storage, content distribution, data retrieval, and purchase transactions. Its out-of-the-box desktop and mobile applications are directly connected to the blockchain on mobile terminals via P2P networks whose performance increases as the scale of the network expands. FavorTube is also the first fully decentralized application project to support the use of mobile terminals directly connected without gateways on an anti-censorship and globally accessible streaming platform.
FavorTube takes the underlying concepts of similar Web 2.0 platforms but discards the monopolistic practices they use to generate excess profits, thus creating a new business model for content creation and revenue distribution by harnessing the decentralized financial characteristics of blockchain. Its decentralized storage and content distribution capabilities turn the power relationship between content creators, consumers, and content display platforms on its head to implement the fundamental idea behind Web 3.0 – that data is owned by users
This represents a multi-dimensional leap over existing Web 2.0 content creation platforms, from the technical foundation to the business model, and provides content creators and consumers with an anti-censorship, high-yield, and autonomously growing application platform, which will be the first blockchain application project to exploit the commercial value of Web 3.0.
As Web 3.0 develops, there is no doubt that other projects will emerge and follow in the footsteps of this ground-breaking project, as content creators increasingly seek out new platforms where they can display and profit from their work freely and fairly, without the ever-present oversight of Big Brother corporations.