On The Other Side ep 63 - Content worth collecting w/ Adam Levy
Primer: Why would someone collect a creator’s work? What makes the content worth collecting? Adam Levy shares his perspective as a creator and builder in this episode of On The Other Side.
Background
Got into crypto in 2017
Have been a musician since he was 5. Realized that blockchain tech could help musicians distribute payments
Started conducting whiteboard sessions teaching people about crypto
Worked at VC fund for 1.5 years
Started a show called Blockchain & Booze during the pandemic
Started Mint, a podcast documenting the creator economy, and Bello, an analytics tool for Web3 creators
What Is A Creator?
Someone who uses their creative endeavours to build an audience and monetize it
Podcast NFTs
Why?
Have been experimenting with podcasts and NFTs for 8 months
“I'm literally experimenting, and throwing shit at the fan and trying to see what sticks.”
- Adam Levy
Compared to music, digital art, and video, podcasts are an unexplored and huge market
Wonders whether would Podcast content be content that is worth collecting
What Makes Something Worth Collecting?
When he curates guests for his podcast, he does it because he wants to know more about a given topic
No real definition as to what it means to create content worth collecting
His goal for 2023 is to create more content that's worth collecting because he feels fatigue by the social media algorithms
Wants to find a group of people who appreciates his content and support him
In Web2, the ideal candidate is MrBeast, who creates content that’s worth collecting
Seasonal NFTs
It’s the same way he does NFTs for Mint
Since season 1 episode 1, he allows listeners to collect a non-transferable NFT/a pin
His episodes are tokenized and his content is recorded on-chain
Who Collects Those Episodes?
Has experienced anxiety tokenizing something and having no one collect it
Has learned to be strategic with how he publishes and communicates things:
Have to have drop events around a podcast
Have to promote it, create animations that captures people’s attention
The value in Web3 comes from being able to own your community and capture more of the value you create
Using the data, he would be able to know a lot of things about his collectors:
What other communities they are a part of
Their purchasing behaviours
A lot of his community is native to Zora. Hence, he has to incorporate Zora to some extent
The Future Of Content Collection
It’s similar to the action of liking something on TikTok and it ends up in your favourites folder
What’s currently missing is the distribution/algorithm that circulates content to people that like what they are collecting or want to see
We are currently super early
Why Do People Collect?
There’s 3 reasons:
Patronage
Identity building
Curation — People buying what other people buy
Excited to see how the curation landscape evolves
Web2 has abandoned curators
The earliest Web2 curators were music blogs. They had to monetize through ads
On Creators
Making Money On Their Content
Royalties are under threat, but creators are still able to own the primary sale
Biggest revenue drivers for creators are brand collaborations and brand sponsorships
Finding partners to affiliate with is easier as creators know the preferences of their community
Might end up discovering new models for monetization
On Pleasing Your Collectors
Instead of pleasing platforms and middlemen, creators can now please their collectors
It’s up to the creator whether they want to financialize everything they do
“You can use the tool to financialize everything. You can use a tool to do free, non-transferable everything. It really comes down to the person.”
- Adam Levy
Exhaustion From Creating
The platform’s mechanics are designed to fatigue creators to consistently deliver through the platform
The creator has to set the expectations from the get go to prevent fatigue (e.g. subscribers expecting 1 post per month vs 10 posts a day)
Bello
A no-code blockchain analytics tool that allows creators to understand who their collectors are
It’s difficult for creators to surface the insights from the blockchain if they do not know how to code
As a creator, this was a problem he faced as well
Started Bello at the ETHGlobal Devcon hackathon in 2022. They were one of the winners
Have been working on it since then. Their private beta was launched on 5 August
Surprising Insights He Did Not Expect
His collectors are active on Zora
The majority of music collectors tend to be a part of FWB, Forefront, and Krause House
On DAO Sponsorships
Using data, creators can identify which communities their collectors belong to
Creators could seek collaboration opportunities with those communities
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