Deep Dive: Creator Tools on Solana
Hola Creators! Today, we will deep dive into how creators can monetize different creatives like art, audio, music, streams on the Solana Network!
In the early 2000s, we saw the first evolution of the Tech Creator Economy 1.0, powered by the likes of Facebook launching in 2004, MySpace in 2003, Twitter in 2006 which potentially made every internet user into a creator. Soon, few internet users/creators built large audiences and transformed into “Influencers” and they started monetizing by brands deals & Ads. This rise of influencers led to Creator Economy 2.0 which has been pioneered by Youtube, as they allowed channels to run ads and earn money.
Fast forward to today, creators have become much powerful, transforming themselves from influencers to independent businesses. In the Creator Economy 3.0, creators are adding direct monetization avenues like subscriptions, tipping, courses to get more independence from social media platforms. But it’s not enough.
So, What’s next? Ownership!
The Creator Economy 4.0 powered by Web3 is here — NFTs, Social Tokens, and many more. In Creator Economy 4.0, the lines between fans and creators blur into community ownership. Sounds complex?
In this piece, let’s deep-dive into how creators can monetize their content in Solana, gain independence from traditional social media giants like Youtube, Instagram and develop complete ownership of their own along with monetization. Let’s go 🚀🚀
What’s the Need?
The traditional Web2 platforms like Youtube, Facebook, Instagram have created 50 Million+ new creators by enabling the avenues to create content, build an audience, and also monetize to some extent but don’t enable creators to have independence and ownership of their content. Not only that, these platforms have made some of these creators’ live miserable as they need to produce content continuously to stay relevant on algorithms. The creator has become more like a product constantly selling and selling to earn money, affecting their creative processes. This constant pressure not only degrades the quality of content but also results in the burnout of creators.
So, What’s the solution?
Enter Web3: The Solana Ecosystem
The Web3 will not only enable creators to enable monetization through digital scarcity but also enable transformative new ways for creators to monetize & engage their audiences. Web3 turns users and creators into owners and stakeholders, which means you are the only one owning your content and will drive the future of that network. They also provide infrastructure for creators and artists of all kinds to connect directly with their fans and avoid abusive networks, management firms, and centralized social media platforms.
While there are many blockchains enabling these, Solana is leading efforts in this direction by launching a $5 Million fund in July 2021, exclusively for Creators and big partnerships with firms like Reddit. For beginners, just like Ethereum, Solana is a Layer 1 Blockchain and many applications are built on top of it. Above all, Solana is incredibly fast and it can handle up to ~65,000 TPS (Transaction per second) as compared to ~30 TPS on Ethereum and it only costs ~$0.0001 to do a transaction on Solana as compared to ~$8–40 on Ethereum. With its speed, low transaction fees, and vibrant ecosystem, Solana is well suited to empower this next evolution of the Creator Economy.
NFTs: Driver of the Web3 Creator Economy
If we look at monthly volumes at just one platform (Opensea — Largest NFT Marketplace) — it’s very huge with $3.4 Billion sales in just August. And we are very early!
To put things into perspective, let’s look into some figures: Youtube has 3.3 Billion Monthly Active Users, while Instagram has 1.4 Billion Monthly Active Users and OpenSea has mere 0.3 Million Monthly Active Users which is just 1/10000th size of Youtube! Imagine, when NFT sees mass adoption, the NFT volume will simply be huge.
While many might know NFT as a “shiny jpeg, sold in millions”, but it’s more than that. In fact, the current state of NFT has been benefitting graphic artists who can create illustrative arts, but in the recent few months, many projects have come up in Solana which will practically allow any artist’s written content or music to turn into NFT. Just like Web2 has tools like Youtube, Substack, Linktree, Patreon for enabling content creation and monetization. Web3 has many tools built on Solana which are already seeing huge adoption and can potentially disrupt the creator space.
Let’s deep-dive into the few categories one by one:
- Digital Art
- Music Artists
- Social Media
- Gaming
- Community Building
Graphic Designers & Digital Art:
Digital Artists have been struggling a big time to monetize their content, and NFTs have been completely been a game-changer for them. Let’s look at some of the exciting projects on the Solana which enables Digital Artists to transform their artwork to millions!
Metaplex
One of the biggest NFT projects on Solana, Metaplex enables artists and brands to build direct relationships with their audiences by launching their own NFT storefronts. Metaplex aims to do for NFTs what Shopify did for commerce but takes it one step further by not acting as the middleman. With great partnerships and an active community, they have been able to process the weekly transaction volume of ~$32 Million!
Similar NFT Art projects:
- Tiexo: NFT Marketplace and free generative design tool for creators
- Metablocks: NFT content builder
- BlockAsset: A Celebrity NFT ecosystem connecting fans to athletes by leveraging strategic relationships with athletes, agencies, and clubs. It has a proprietary NFT marketplace, rare collectibles blockchain NFT ticketing, and blockchain NFT gaming as its product offerings.
There are numerous NFT projects in this space and it’s not possible to list them all here. Just follow this link for the entire list.
Music Artists:
Despite Music being an integral part of our lives, music artists today face a number of problems like complicated and opaque rights, tons of middlemen and significant delays in payments to artists, irregular income, and many more. In fact, in 2017, the music industry generated $43 billion in revenue but only 12% of that made its way to artists. Web3 Music is here to change that and give artists back what they deserve.
Here are the major players in the industry:
Audius
One of the largest Solana projects, Audius is a digital high-quality streaming service that connects fans directly with artists and exclusive new music by being fully decentralized. Audius is owned and run by the community, which makes it very special.
Think of it as being “Web3 Spotify”, where new tracks, remixes, and live sets are uploaded directly by artists and not controlled by any labels or corporations. Audius is now one of the most popular music platforms on earth with nearly 5 Million monthly active users. It has also announced a partnership with TikTok that will allow its artists to upload their songs for use in TikTok videos and drive traffic back to Audius.
The platform is fueled by its own token, $AUDIO which unlocks premium features for curated engagement, from ‘gated content’ to ‘artist tokens’ and ‘remix contests’. Audius is aiming to give fans the exclusivity they deserve and artists the ownership & monetization, they deserve!
Similar Music projects are:
- BlockBeats — Web3 Music platform (Launching soon)
- CirclePod — Web3 Podcasting platform
- MIM — A swarm for building virtual artists, launching NFTs, and releasing music. Users can use the MIM token to buy NFT’s released by artists, services in the marketplace, or access unique content.
- Nina — Web3 infrastructure for artists to control distribution, publication, and revenue streams for their work using decentralized file distribution, tokenized ownership, and transparent royalty payments. (Coming soon)
- Solati — Audible NFT platform connecting NFT collectors and Artists.
- ReLeap — Music NFT platform (Coming soon)
Social Media:
We all know, today’s social media are facing major problems like Fake Accounts, Privacy issues, lack of monetization, and more. Some of the awesome projects on Solana, which are completely reimagining Social Media, putting creators first are:
Chingari:
With a staggering Monthly Active User of 32.8 Million+, Chingari (India’s TikTok) is one of the biggest Web2 companies to turn into Web3. It has achieved this by launching its own Token to be integrated into its existing social network. While most of the projects initially struggle for initial traction, Chingari has a huge advantage over other projects due to its massive user base.
Each creator will earn the same amount of $GARI tokens for making content, irrespective of their popularity to incentivize every content creator. More popular creators can earn directly from their fans through tips, unlock exclusive access (eg. video call), and token gated content. Each video becomes an NFT which can be traded in their in-app marketplace ~ with 90% of the sale going to the creator and it also gives an option for fans to back early creators by investing their tokens and later earning from them.
Twetch:
The decentralized social network where the users own their data and earn money for their content. Twetch is trying to solve a major problem of privacy — all the chats are encrypted and can only be shared with permission. Further, it also supports Peer-to-Peer payments, group chats, penalizing haters, and every time a user receives an interaction, they get paid.
Wumbo:
Wumbo — is a platform that brings personal &customizable Creator Coins directly to the networks (Twitter, Twitch, Reddit. etc) where creators interact with their fans.
SoCool:
Another exciting and unique project, SoCool is a DeFi (Decentralised Finance) platform for creators, which means it enables any creator to launch their own tokens and trade them on the platform.
For creators, it gives them the ability to:
- Link your existing social media accounts
- Create membership tiers & custom rewards and receive donations
- Create, mint, sell and distribute exclusive content such as NFTs and other incentives.
- Raise funds for upcoming projects and promote them through voting and crowdfunding
- Reward most loyal fans with access to exclusive content
For Fans and Followers:
- Support favorite creators and get access to exclusive content and interactions
- Engage, earn and collect unique rewards, valuable tokens, and rare NFTs
- Gain blockchain-based passive income with staking & yield farming
- Help shape the future of entertainment by voting on and crowdfunding the upcoming projects.
Some of the other exciting & upcoming projects in Social Media are:
- Vision: Social Token creation platform for creators.
- Grapes: Community management & rewarding
- Eno: Content publishing protocol that enables creators to monetize each consumption and turns content into an asset.
- Muse: Free and open publishing platform for Animations, Comic Books, and Graphic novels, with monetization paths for creators.
Gaming:
The combination of cloud, social, and mobile has turned gaming from a niche hobby into a massive $173 Billion industry, but monetization has been a big hurdle for professional gamers. Some projects changing the face of gaming are:
Bitspawn:
Bitspawn is building a decentralized digital infrastructure on Solana for games to monetize their gaming community outside the traditional areas of streaming and content. It’s driven by the $SPWN token, which provides utility in establishing a marketplace of competitive events and community rewards.
Another interesting upcoming project on similar lines is:
Bublhost — A Decentralised event hosting and ticketing platform.
Community Building:
Community is an essential way for today’s creators to engage and retain their audience. In fact, it has also opened new avenues for them to earn revenue streams from their fans. Some of the Solana projects in this space are:
Tipping:
SolanaTip:
SolanaTip enables twitter content creators to monetize their tweets by accepting $SOL. The users can reward their favorite tweet creators with $SOL with just a few clicks. Using Solana’s Twitter-specific Name Service, SolanaTip checks if the user to receive the tip has an associated wallet and proceed to make the transaction using the Phantom or Sollet wallet.
SolStar:
Solstar enables any creators to create and organize token-powered communities, powered by Solana. It allows anyone to tip a username on discord with customized GIFs and manage their tips.
Some of the other exciting projects on Tipping are:
- SolTip AI (Social Media Tipping — coming soon)
- Moonlana (on-chain discord Tipbot)
- Buy me crypto (Web3 version of ‘Buy me coffee’)
Kekwcoin:
Kekwcoin is enabling content creators, meme creators, artists, gamers, developers to engage with their audiences and earn money using its own token, $KEKW — acting as a governance tool and economic incentives for creators.
Conclusion: Creator Economy to the Moon🚀
Phew! It has been certainly a long list of tools, but if you are reading it as a creator, then just go make a Solana Wallet (Eg. Phantom, Sollet) and then choose the right tool as per your fit. It’s still very early days for Solana Creator Economy, and there might not be much network effect right now but it’s also a perfect time to take a lead. The risks are none, and the benefits are huge to monetize the fan base.
Here’s a quick summary infographic of the Solana Tools:
