0/ The single most important question in NFT land is
How do you enable the long tail of creators - think 25M+ around the world - to generate say $50-100k / year in income, so they can self sustain
A thread
1/ Today, I would argue we don't really have PMF for creator monetization
Sure, Beeple and 3LAU and Pak have sold stuff for millions per piece
And stuff on SuperRare clears for 6 figures regularly
But this is by definition not long tail
2/ It's awesome to see OpenSea trading mega volumes of Punks and Axies
But again, this is not monetization for long tail creators
3/ When a new business model emerges - in this case selling an NFT and/or a social token - it usually also changes the core product as well
4/ What this theory would imply is that selling art JPGs is not enough. It's a fine form of monetization for people who are already well known, but unlikely to work for someone with 50K IG followers
5/ As I think through more nuanced questions of creator monetization, the thing I keep coming back to is...
Scarcity per unit of time
6/ Sure all NFTs are in some sense 1/1 (even if they're part of a set)
But I think there is an upper bound on how many sets and/or 1/1 a given creator can sell per unit of time
7/ Scarcity can exist across many dimensions, but I think time is probably under discussed
Some examples to consider
8/ There are millions of moments on NBA top shot. I think they're just from one season
In 3 more years, there are going to be 10M+ moments
Players play 82 games / year before play offs
That's a lot of blocks/dunks/fast breaks/3s per year
9/ Now, if it's a dunk in game 7 of the finals with 3 seconds left, that's pretty scarce. The *max* frequency in which that can occur is once per year (and in practice much lower than that since few finals make it to game 7)
10/ Sports cards work reasonably well in this framework, since the cards are done per player, per year (I think)
Pretty scarce per unit of time, compared to a player who has 250 awesome moments over the course of a season
11/ Let's consider another example
TikTokers who make videos everyday
Every
Single
Day
Sometimes multiple
12/ There is a *massive* design space for creator monetization here, and fan engagement. I think this is going to be the most fascinating arena for experimentation over the next 24 months
13/ For example, a creator could auction off an NFT. whoever has the NFT gets to be in a video in an instrumental way with the creator
Turn that video into an NFT, and repeat
Create a nice chain of NFTs
14/ It's pretty easy to see this being done for some thematic purpose with say 5 videos
But can the creator really do 100+ of these per year? (ignore logistics)
Will the audience feel "i like this guy but he just creates so many?"
15/ I think these questions are solve-able
But it's going to take a fair bit of iteration
And the interplay between social tokens and NFTs will be just awesome. It really opens up the design space significantly
16/ We have made a few investments along the ideas in this thread, some of which are public, and some of which are not yet public
One question I've recently asked those founders is
Can you go full stack with your own creators?
17/ The most important variable to optimize for is iterations
It's impossible to know the answers to these questions
You just have to run a lot of experiments, with a lot of creators, and normalize learnings across things like vertical, medium, etc
18/ Many creators are going to be unable or unwilling to engage in a hyper-tight feedback loop as you try to explore the design space for creator monetization
So why not bring a few in house?
19/ It feels pretty weird at first, and in some instances may not be possible (eg how can Audius get a DJ to do this)
But, I think if teams who are building for creator monetization can do this, it's a massive strategic advantage
20/ Last thing I'll say is
NFTs are *really* confusing
They are a super general purpose technology, being applied to all kinds of different problems:
creator monetization
fan engagement
online avatars
gaming and play to earn
And many more
21/ As you think about investing, it's important to be very clear which problems you're trying to solve, and not think in terms of NFTs as a general concept (there's a reason why no one talks about FTs)
22/ Anyways, rant over.
As always, feedback welcome!
{fin}
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(Before getting into crypto, I started a company that built software for Google Glass (GG)in healthcare... I’ve been thinking about this stuff for a while!)
Only tangentially relevant to crypto
1/ What are FB’s long term goals?
Pretty obvious actually: build the metaverse
They have been investing in VR (Oculus) and AR for many years, with powering the Metaverse being the overarching goal
2/ FB stated that this will be the first of a series of products
The primary purpose of this launch is to get real world feedback
How do people use it?
What do they like / not like?
How do social norms evolve when someone wears camera glasses?
Sushi just turned 1. I think Sushi is little bit lost, and doesn’t know what it wants to be when it grows up
Multicoin owns some SUSHI
1/ Super apps used to be a mostly an Eastern phenomenon. The canonical example is WeChat
Fintech in the US has traditionally been siloed
Bank at Wells Fargo
Buy stocks on Robinhood
CC from Chase
Crypto from Coinbase
Etc
2/ Over the last 10 years, as all of the big fintech unicorns - Revolut, Robinhood, Chime, SoFi, etc - have started to reach saturation points for the markets they started serving
They all started naturally expanding into other financial services