Author: EudemoniaCC@THUBA Research Core
Introduction
Media is an indispensable ecological support in the Web3.0 era. Expanding the definition of media ecology, in the present and future when everything is media, media does not belong to any track but is closely related to every track. Because of its ubiquity, few research reports analyze: where is the media in the transition from Web2.0 to Web3.0? If the media ecology is narrowed down and regarded as a subset of the content ecology, different forms of media are the atoms of content production. Is it possible for content native to the crypto world to break out of the Web2.0 rut and use "possessability" to detonate and settle users into the new world of Web3.0?
These issues are yet to be explored and imagined. This article focuses on the "media" mentioned by the research object, namely, on-chain media platforms, on-chain self-media, and media DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization) for the large-scale and continuous production of information and knowledge content.
According to the overall media market migration, the global media industry output value in 2022 is about 2.3 trillion US dollars, but this will not be completely migrated to the Web3.0 world. Web3.0 media will become an important extension and subset. If the proportion of Web3.0 information media is underestimated at 10%, the market size will be about 230 billion US dollars. In 2022, the scale of Chinese pan-media application users in online news will be about 788 million, and the Internet user usage rate will be 75% (Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, CNNIC data). The potential Chinese users of online information media migrating from Web2.0 to Web3.0 are considerable.
Media Definition in the Web3.0 Era
To facilitate understanding, I will define and distinguish the three types of media involved. The first is the on-chain media platform: a content production platform built on blockchain technology, which can confirm ownership and traceability, and incentivize content production through a token mechanism, such as Mirror of UGC, Civil and DNN (Decentralized News Network), a news production platform for PUGC, which emphasizes its characteristics as a platform for production and distribution display. On-chain self-media mainly refers to individuals or small organizations that rely on on-chain media platforms to produce content and confirm ownership on the chain, such as Mirror users who open columns on Mirror and conduct content crowdfunding. Media DAO is a relatively new experimental existence, which organizes individual content production but decentralizes it, and co-selects and builds content production communities without the need for editorial rights, such as PubDAO and some DAO media SubDAO, emphasizing its characteristics as a form of content production organization. In fact, the development of the three is intertwined, and there is no particularly strong separation. For example, Mirror is actually the DAO tool of Mirror DAO, and Mirror DAO will also publish content on Mirror.
Media under the change of media technology: cheaper or more expensive
In fact, from the pre-Internet era, from Web1.0 to 2.0, media is becoming more and more expensive in the form of price reduction or even free. The price reduction and free are the channels for the public to obtain information, while the increasingly expensive is the overall value of the information gap covered by the information. Such a transformation is possible because there is advertising, a value converter, which devours the value of information, and the media, which becomes a channel, acts as an intermediary to package and sell the public receiving information to advertising, and advertising is thus mixed with value information. For individuals who use media, they will not benefit from weakening the good experience of information acquisition in the process of receiving the value information of mixed advertisements. Instead, they have to pay for the advertising costs passed on when consuming, or they themselves become the commodities of advertisements sold by the media after attracting and classifying information. In the Web3.0 era, the token mechanism is used to incentivize the media to create and distribute content, replacing advertising intermediaries, which provides a possibility to break the above-mentioned "audience commodity theory" (Dallas Smythe, 1977).
At present, such possibilities are still under experimentation. Mirror is the most successful experiment so far, storing content on the chain instead of in a central database. This crypto-native product has nearly 80,000 followers on Twitter and nearly 20,000 deduplicated paying users. It is the most mainstream on-chain media platform in the Web3.0 world. Of course, compared with the media platforms of Web2.0, it is niche and not mainstream. It can be seen that the media development of Web3.0 is still in the very early seed stage, and it has not even formed a competitive landscape. Everyone is content with their own form.
What drives the development of on-chain media is the attraction of content rights confirmation and token incentives, as well as crypto-native identity. However, in reality, there is no reasonable application scenario after content rights are confirmed on the chain, and the incentive tokens obtained by media content production are of limited value. Large-scale users are still in the consumer concept discipline of "the Internet is free" with the intervention of advertisements, especially for news information, "news is cheap". The sense of identity of "crypto veterans" who use crypto-native products has become an important driving force for the fission of users at the current stage where incentives are insufficient. For example, when Mirror was first launched, $WRITE tokens were required for trial use, which attracted a large number of early crypto explorers to seek token acquisition channels to use Mirror, and then spontaneously promoted it on Twitter.
The current development of on-chain media is hindered, of course, not just because users have not developed paying habits. From a macro perspective, the total number of cryptocurrency users also limits the number of on-chain media users. The strong correlation between user identity and user-generated content causes on-chain media to generally focus on the production of encryption-related information content, forming a relatively stable production cycle. And it is difficult to enter the next stage. As for on-chain news media platforms such as Civil and DNN, the news information they produce is more timely and needs to highlight the value of large-scale communication. The obstacles at this stage are even more significant.
In addition, in the Chinese area, entering the encrypted world requires climbing over the firewall, linking to a digital wallet, and recharging. For on-chain media platforms, the threshold for use is too high and the conversion rate is low. From a micro perspective, the product functions need to be improved. As an on-chain media platform, Mirror does not display the number of readings, recommends display, or even aggregate information retrieval channels. To follow other users, you can only use plug-ins to generate feeds or integrate plug-ins into newsletters and send them to email. For users who have used products from major Web2.0 manufacturers, the experience is close to atavism. In terms of product functions, Mirror, a leading player, seems to be still diligently pioneering in the wilderness.
Media reclamation in the wild: the intersection of individuals, platforms and organizations
People are the smallest unit of any social activity. The decentralization of Web3.0 gives every individual who produces media content the greatest right to participate autonomously and ensures that the labor of individual content production benefits. Not only the top media people, but also the middle and long-tail content producers need and can benefit from it. The realization of this vision requires an interactive system formed by the combination of people. The platform is an important collection product throughout the Internet era, and the decentralized autonomous organization is a new organizational form in the Web3.0 era that uses smart contracts to achieve non-central supervision to determine rules.
The Mirror mentioned earlier, the MVP version was born in January 2021 and became open for use in October of the same year. In fact, as a content production tool, it is positioned as one of the community infrastructures of DAO. This may be the reason why it does not embed functions such as content recommendation and social sharing within the product, but instead launches functions such as co-funding and NFT release: it is hoped that members of MirrorDAO or the entire community composed of people interested in Mirror will develop new products based on the existing Mirror products, that is, co-creation development. For this reason, Mirror’s main data is also stored on Arweave and is completely open, which is convenient for developers to use and link. Mirror’s search, subscription, curation recommendation, tracking of the latest articles, crowdfunding and other functional plug-ins are all born and used in the form of community co-creation, but for users, the dispersion of functions is indeed not so convenient.
How can a media platform without advertising make money? Mirror's profit actually comes from the 2.5% profit share of the platform for auxiliary functions such as crowdfunding and NFT auctions. In April 2022, Mirror had nearly one million US dollars in revenue entering the treasury. However, due to the advent of the bear market, the price of ETH has fallen by more than 70%, and the activity has declined. The Mirror Treasury has decreased in terms of ETH and has shrunk significantly in terms of U. The Mirror Treasury will also incentivize and support DAO contributors to claim project bounty tasks. The amount of the bounty and DAO salary will be decided by DAO voting. The additional rewards for DAO contributors will also be converted by mutual evaluation of members. Treasury expenditures are mainly USDT rather than highly volatile ETH or governance tokens $WRITE.
There are a large number of active crypto users on Mirror, some of whom have a certain number of fans and influence on platforms such as Twitter. However, Web2.0 social media such as Twitter have limited space for posting, which is not suitable for long, in-depth, and high-value content. Such content is just suitable for on-chain confirmation of ownership, so it is natural to migrate to Mirror. They are also happy to use Web3.0 crypto-native media products such as Mirror to precipitate output, deepen crypto identities, and build personal brands, thus becoming on-chain self-media. At present, on-chain self-media are generally strongly related to cryptocurrencies. Content on topics such as market analysis, project research reports, daily information, investment growth, and crypto science popularization are what on-chain self-media are keen to output. High-quality content will be rewarded, auctioned, and there is also a chance to get Mirror's governance token rewards. For example, Shawn, a strong fan and participant of DAO, became a member of Mirror DAO by recording his thoughts and experiences on participating in various DAOs on Mirror.
Civil and DNN, which are similar to Mirror but focus on news production, are actually earlier on-chain media platforms than Mirror and have attempted to produce news on the chain. Civil began operations in 2016, aiming to create a decentralized and trustworthy news media that is owned and operated entirely by the public. In 2018, it officially issued CVL, a functional token based on the Ethereum chain, to incentivize news producers (newsmakers, including producers and verifiers), and citizens purchase news through CVL. News organizations such as the BBC, the Associated Press, and the Guardian need to be reviewed by the Civil Council to join Civil, and then register as a newsroom after spending a certain amount of CVL and signing the Civil Constitution at the platform registry to publish news topics and content.
Citizen readers or professional journalists can claim fact-checking tasks to receive rewards. If there is false news or low-quality news, it will be publicly reviewed and handled by the committee after being identified by a referendum. The CVL of the bad studio will be awarded to the verifier and voter. Users' news publishing, reading, voting and other behaviors on Civil are all time-stamped on the chain, which is open and transparent. Good behaviors will be rewarded with tokens, but the mechanism for consuming tokens is not perfect, and there are not a large number of readers who consume CVL to pay for reading news. In the end, Civil failed in 2020 due to its unsustainable economic operation.
The decentralized large-scale news production chain media platform experiment failed. In 2022, a small-scale news DAO, JournoDAO, emerged, which is determined to produce news through a decentralized autonomous organization. It has not been able to break through the cold start barrier since April, with insufficient participants and even no news produced within half a year. Its subsequent development remains to be seen. Clinamenic, one of the founders of JournoDAO, is also a core contributor to PubDAO, a media DAO currently focusing on media content production.
PubDAO was founded in October 2021, incubated by Web3.0 media Decrypt and other DAO contributors (such as FWB DAO, etc.), and brought together more than 100 early contributors working at the intersection of "Web3.0+impact+media" to write special articles. Members can claim article writing tasks in the DAO and receive US dollar rewards. Article tasks may come from other project parties, such as an article project that explores the concept of viral transmission of memes in conjunction with Meme.Market, with a reward of 150U for 300-500 words.
However, at present, Pub DAO is still not very active, especially after entering the bear market. It accepts submissions but the output is relatively limited, with about 2-3 articles updated per month, which is regarded as "flash in the pan"; the output is also relatively scattered, which can be more intuitively reflected in the links of the articles published on its Twitter on different platforms.
Why does wasteland become wasteland, and how can the first flower bloom?
Overall, the media in the current Web3.0 era can be described in one word: “immature”.
First of all, from the perspective of audiences and producers, the threshold for entering Web3.0 is too high, the user scale reaching on-chain media is insufficient, and there are also insufficient media content producers. At the same time, users' awareness of payment is not strong, so the development of on-chain media platforms has been hindered, and media DAOs are also short of staff.
In terms of content, content producers and readers of this scale cannot support the continuous production of highly timely news. For highly professional media content related to the crypto market, there is a small-scale reading market due to the coupling of audience and user interests.
From the perspective of channels, the existence of professional Web2.0 media such as Coin Desk and CoinTelegraph in the English area, Foresight News, Odaily, and Panews in the Chinese area has largely divided the channel market for encrypted news information to reach users, while Web3.0 media content production does not have a highly integrated platform product, and the channels to reach users are scattered, resulting in the situation where the on-chain self-media still seems to rely on Web2.0 products to precipitate personal brands in the Web3.0 era. In addition, the current products are relatively early, and there is no integrated co-creation function that does not conform to user usage habits, or it does not solve the core pain points of users such as weak profit incentives and low production efficiency.
In addition to the above three aspects, the macro cycle of the market's bear-bull transition has also, to a certain extent, stifled the possibility of supporting the experimental development of the media within a small time window. Although the bear market is Build, are there really so many people who stay in the bear market and maintain their enthusiasm? And can anyone really invest or consume in the media against the trend? The 22-year bear market is undoubtedly a double whammy for the media development in the Web3.0 era.
In the wild land, the more barren it is, the more possibilities it has. After all, the climate cannot be changed by brute force alone, nor can it be changed overnight. Whether it is Mirror's attempt to build a content ecosystem, Civil's attempt to build a news content chain production model, or PubDAO's attempt to organize media content production, these experiments have allowed us to outline the intertwined appearance of the media ecosystem in the Web3.0 era to a certain extent. Even if we encounter obstacles or failures, we are brave and successful.
It should be made clear that the media in the Web3.0 era is the supporting facilities of the Web3.0 ecosystem, not the infrastructure. It is indeed difficult to walk alone on the road of reclamation. In the world of consensus, people are always valuable. When the Infra ecosystem is incomplete and the entry threshold of Web3.0 is still high and it is difficult to break through the circle and gain large-scale users, there is still no water and no fertilizer here. Looking at the ground, Mirror's co-construction ecosystem can also give us inspiration. Decentralized development of functional modules and assembly may also be a way to plant flowers, waiting for the influx of people and funds in the next cycle to assemble complete products and optimize user experience.
In addition, it is necessary to expand the circle of non-encrypted content. For example, Mirror's co-funding of film shooting has absorbed the long tail of the film industry into the Web3.0 era. On-chain media can have more connections with the real economy. It is necessary to find suitable scenarios to enter and demonstrate the advantages of on-chain property rights and data personal identity.
I believe that when the first flower blooms on the wasteland, it won’t be long before flowers bloom all over the land.
references
[1] Lin Danjing, He Yangming. The development of citizen journalism driven by blockchain technology: a case study based on Civil [J]. Young Journalists,
2022(04):36-38.DOI:10.15997/j.cnki.qnjz.2022.04.052.
[2] Tan Xiaohe. Journalism based on blockchain: Model, influence and constraints - a study centered on Civil [J]. Contemporary Communication, 2018(04):91-96.
[3] Shi Anbin, Yang Chenxi. International communication and public diplomacy in the Web 3.0 era: trends and visions [J]. Young Journalists,
2022(15):93-97.DOI:10.15997/j.cnki.qnjz.2022.15.030.
[4] Hang Min, Qi Xue. 2021 Global Media Industry Development Report[J]. Media, 2022(16):16-21.
[5] Hong Jun. How far away is the real Web3 from us? Starting from the creator ecosystem of Mirror [EB/OL]. https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/iRymlN7f_sd3eYCrsJQYxA
[6] CTR Insight. Content innovation and business breakthrough: China's media market trends in 2022 | Grain in Ear Report [EB/OL]. https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/GLgr7hkSRVQwjfl8fkRlow,
[7] Liu Zhongbo. How far is the scale of the blockchain news platform? | German Foreign Recommended Reading [EB/OL].
https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/T_iF43jPMGlT8IE2D_CB0g
[8] Shawn. Mirror Analysis Series [EB/OL].
https://shawn.mirror.xyz/slyqZ4T7fkcsVY5QR0vKeAc1R-y3i7J6iMnjMVvFEOk
