Web2 Media Is Broken. The Future of Media Is Tokenized.
“ We need further reach. ”
“ This will get a lot of clicks. ”
We ’ve heard these narratives continuous since our media careers began further than 15 times agone
. They’re allowed
patterns that have been regularized in newsrooms and announcement agencies across the world.
And this is just the morning of the issues with the current state of media.
The verity is this Web2 media is broken.
The traditional models and ways of doing effects in media just do n’t work presently. This geste
didn’t come out of the blue. So how did we get then?
With the rise of social media, the business floodgates opened to media websites. Media companies saw an unknown explosion of reach due to these platforms and came addicted to this business, which helped fuel the rise of programmatic advertising. This is the technology that powers those annoying banner advertisements on your favorite media websites, from The New York Times to YouTube. The further people visit your website, the further prints the announcement gets, and the more the platform gets paid.
Funny enough, the veritably platforms that fueled this business model ended up changing their algorithms after seeing how important profit they were allowing to leave their ecosystem by encouraging druggies to click down from Facebook or Twitter onto a separate publisher website. So in 2015, Facebook’s notorious algorithm change devastated the business sources for hundreds of media companies to keep further of their business inside of Facebook. Due to declining profit, some media parcels indeed went out of business.
As Editor- In- Chief of SPIN, Matt saw firsthand how business doesn’t equate to profit when the publication was forced to suffer layoffs despite exceeding growth pretensions. As Director of Innovation and Culture at Elite Daily, Alejandro saw how the publication rode Facebook business to a trade to Daily Mail only for business to significantly decline after the algorithm change.
As media companies prioritized followership scale over quality and optimized for algorithmic platforms like Facebook and Google, there were a number of intimidating developments.
First, media platforms set up themselves locked in a clickbait race to the bottom. As algorithms awarded sensationalistic captions and quick detector fritters, the quality of content declined. The race to be first to a story also produced public disconcertments for major media brands who had to repudiate factually inaccurate reporting. As credibility eroded, public trust in media reached an each- time low.
Alternate, people came the product. In the eyes of publishers, there was no distinction made between the quality and the volume of an followership. Put simply, we were each lowered to a single metric business. By virtue of working at social media companies, the brightest minds in Silicon Valley ended up erecting an advertising optimization machine, the likes of which had noway been seen ahead. As a result, publishers began prioritizing their advertisers over their cult.
Third, as publishers and platforms optimized for advertising profit, they began to attack our sequestration. Platforms began to track druggies across the web without their unequivocal concurrence in order to vend further advertisements – though technically, druggies acceded by accepting the each- too vague and fairly circumlocutory “ terms and conditions. ”
The rise of tracking druggies using pixels and eyefuls invited sequestration violations across the web. Platforms could now track druggies ’ every move, click, and keystroke, indeed beyond their own website, to serve them “ better ” advertisements.
Technology has always pushed liar forward. The invention of the internet forced print publications to come digital. Web3 technology is of the same quality. And with it, we’ve the chance to make commodity better.
Centered on an ecosystem of technology products that are decentralized, unsure, permissionless, and interoperable, Web3 technologies have the power to produce fairer models that profit everyone. They return power to druggies, bypass the doorkeepers that control traditional media and social platforms, and allow generators and their communities to partake in the value they produce.
But significantly, this tokenized revolution won’t only change how stories are created and consumed, it also has the power to unnaturally review connections that have been cemented for centuries. This technology can actually help us foster the deeper and further meaningful mortal connections we want. This comes down to the difference between followership and community.
followership is apprehensive that you live. They may fete your brand and see you in their social feeds. They may indeed attend your events or buy your products. But eventually, there’s a limit to their participation, and they’re largely on the entering end of the content you produce. As content came more homogenous to exploit algorithms, media brands came exchangeable, similar that compendiums have little incitement to choose one over another. In web2, consumers came pious to the caption, not the brand.
In discrepancy, community wants to win together. And in web3, more frequently than not, they actually have a nonfictional stake in doing so. By aligning impulses and satisfying participation by decentralizing power and governance, communities are the high motorists of value creation.
In web3, digital power is frontal and center. For the first time since the origins of the internet, the blockchain allows for root power. Now media companies and generators can make community in a digital asset frugality as an end in itself and monetize directly by participating in the value that they produce.
We fantasize a future where digital publishers liberate themselves from the careless despotism of clicks, pageviews, and CPMs. druggies will no longer be the product being vended in antiquated and exploitative systems; they will be active mates and possessors in the content and gests being created.
Introducing the Now Network
Because of these gests , we wanted to do effects else from day one. If you visitnftnow.com, you ’ll notice there are no banner advertisements. We refused to apply programmatic advertising because of the misaligned impulses it creates to prioritize advertisers over druggies, minimize content, and violate druggies ’ sequestration. We believe that media companies should n’t serve you advertisements they should serve you openings.
We also refused to include any pixels and eyefuls to track our druggies. Principles like concurrence matter more to us. We believe sequestration is a abecedarian mortal right and should be admired across the internet.
The Now Network is our coming step in introducing a community- centric media model and erecting a creator-friendly future. You can learn further about the details and mechanics atnowpass.xyz.
Then’s how the Now Network will begin to partake the value being created with our class community.
serving community with exclusive content and access
From early access to information and perceptivity to curated private exchanges where you can connect with experts and other builders in your assiduity, the Now Network will offer you the tools you need to succeed alongside bigwig access to web3’s leading minds.
Now Pass holders will also be eligible for exclusive access to our accredited IRL and virtual events, including our tentpole events The Gateway, NFT100, and nft now presents, alongside our satellite events around Art Basel Miami, NFT NYC, Frieze LA, ETH Denver, Faena Rose Miami, Jackson Hole, and numerous further.
adding retention and satisfying participation
We believe media should be further than a one- way road. With the Now Pass, community members will be incentivized to engage with content and give feedback through our price mechanisms. By realigning impulses and reimagining how a publisher can produce and partake value in a web3 environment, we will encourage deeper, more authentic connections and a lesser sense of fidelity.
Decentralizing content creation and curation
We want our community to comeco-creators in the stories being told.We believe this will produce a further inclusive and transparent ecosystem to incubate ideas and hoist new voices. We ’ll be transitioning some of our most popular content series( partner, Next Up) to a community- curated Token Curated Registries( TCR) model with on- chain voting that empowers our community members to have a say-so in who and what gets covered.
This is only the morning
The Now Network will be erected over time, not overnight. We’re being purposeful and taking our time to produce commodity sustainable. This is a first step — a foundation for all of our enterprise in erecting the future of tokenized media. Experimentation is a critical part of introducing a new paradigm. But our commitment to this space is long- term, so we will make in public over the coming months, times, and decades. We invite you to join us in literacy, growing, andco-creating this future together.