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Li Jin Profile picture
@ljin18
Oct 1, 2020 • 8 tweets • 2 min read • Read on X
People often say that IG feels aspirational, polished, and often leads to feelings of inadequacy, while TikTok is authentic, fun, and uplifting.

Why? Creator monetization is a huge, underrated factor (in addition to content format & interest vs. social graph).

Thread👇
Instagram doesn’t pay creators directly; creators monetize by finding sponsors for their content or via affiliate links.

This means the most successful IG creators induce a desire among viewers to buy something--i.e. making them feel that what they already have is insufficient.
In contrast, on TikTok, most creators make money through live streaming & getting viewer donations, or by participating in the Creator Fund, which distributes based on # of views.

This monetization model incentivizes creators to make content that many people watch and enjoy.
TikTok's Creator Fund functions like a centralized economy--the monetization model coordinates the entire community around the goal of engagement.

IG is the free market version: creators earn on their own, by driving purchases or amassing an affluent (monetizable) demographic.
The content that's on both platforms thus diverges: one is defined by curated, polished, aspirational content that makes viewers feel the need to buy things, whereas the other has content that's intended to bring joy and entertain.
Other examples of how creator monetization influences the content itself are YouTube and podcasts: creators are incentivized to go for broad reach and length, rather than constraining their TAM by going to deep into one subject.
Founders: pick your monetization model carefully because it has huge implications. How creators can earn money on a platform directly impacts the content that's created & the product's vibe and stickiness.
Thread inspired by a convo with @hankgreen 🧠

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More from @ljin18

Li Jin Profile picture
May 15
I've been spending a lot of time at the intersection of AI and crypto. We believe the coupling of the two is critical to making AI more equitable and user-owned.

Sharing quick thoughts about what we’re seeing:
Projects at the intersection of AI x crypto fall into two broad categories:

1) Applying crypto to solve AI problems
2) Applying AI to solve crypto problems
Because the market for AI overall is larger today than the world of crypto, most companies are focused on (1) applying crypto to AI.

That said, applying AI to crypto (2) can help expand the pie by making crypto easier to use and interact with.
Read 10 tweets
Li Jin Profile picture
Sep 26, 2023
A metric that I like to ground convos about crypto in is that Ethereum just crossed 245m cumulative unique addresses. Meanwhile, the internet had 248m users in December 1999.

We're at December 1999 levels in terms of onchain activity
December '99 was just months before the dot-com bubble burst, and many well-funded, hyped businesses failed and shut down

Many of those businesses actually had great ideas, but were just too early: drkoop -> WebMD; Webvan -> Instacart; -> ChewyPets.com
1999 was also years before we got the major companies of the web2 era -- FB in 2004, MySpace in 2003, YT in 2005 -- that gave users lots of reasons to spend time online
Read 4 tweets
Li Jin Profile picture
Apr 4, 2023
Psychological ownership -- or making users feel like owners -- is the missing ingredient to unlock retention and sustainability for web3 projects.

My new piece is out with @HarvardBiz

li.substack.com/p/building-psy…
Psychological ownership is the feeling of possession or "mineness" over a product/service. It’s distinct from legal ownership: you can *feel* like an owner without actually owning something (my sports team, my social media profile), and vice versa.
Psychological ownership is important for product builders because it changes behavior. It can increase loyalty, word-of-mouth growth, and willingness to pay. In digital communities, feeling ownership leads to increases in satisfaction, self-esteem, and contribution quality.
Read 20 tweets
Li Jin Profile picture
Mar 27, 2023
Lots of thoughts about the TikTok hearing last week:

- it's horrifying to see the level of knowledge that lawmakers have about the internet/tech ("Does TikTok access users' home wifi networks?" was a real q that was asked)
- a ban of TikTok will leave 150m users orphaned, as well as 5m SMBs that use it to grow organically

- less competition among social media companies -> worse for creators & users. e.g. TikTok pioneered the Creator Fund and sparked a slew of competitors (Reels, Snap, Pinterest)
- users spend on average 95 mins/day on TT. that's a huge vacuum of time. lots of opportunity for new social media entrants

- TikTok's algo provided "universal basic distribution," or the chance for any video to be discovered, which was much harder on legacy social media
Read 4 tweets
Li Jin Profile picture
Mar 24, 2023
NEWS!

We’re excited to announce the inaugural Variant Founder Fellowship: a three-month cohort-based program for web3 founders at the earliest stages of their journey:

variant.fund/variant-founde…
Variant is proud to support some of the top projects in the ecosystem, which are part of our Variant Network, a peer learning community comprised of the founders and leaders across our portfolio.
We’ve found that a network-based learning model is the most effective way to elucidate emerging playbooks and best practices for building in web3.

The Variant Founder Fellowship invites a cohort of emerging founders to build & learn alongside Variant’s portfolio founders.
Read 7 tweets
Li Jin Profile picture
Feb 21, 2023
In just 5 months, Blur has become the top NFT aggregator with >40% market share leading up to the airdrop last week.

That growth required not just UX improvements but also sophisticated incentives.

@variantfund's new blog unpacks Blur's airdrop lessons:

variant.fund/articles/what-…
Disclosure: We're not investors in Blur. But given our thesis on user ownership, we think the Blur case study holds interesting lessons for all crypto projects seeking to turn users into owners.
Blur’s airdrop design was novel in many ways, differing from both the one-time retroactive airdrops and straightforward liquidity mining programs that have been prevalent in the space:
Read 13 tweets

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