Lately I’ve been hearing a lot (mostly from Vitalik Buterin) about the idea of retroactive public-goods funding. That post (written by some combination of Optimism and Vitalik) is worth reading, but the basic idea is to reward people after the fact for doing work on public goods that turned out to have been valuable (because identifying valuable projects/creators is much easier in hindsight than in foresight).

That post points out that the entire venture-capital ecosystem for startup companies exists because of the possibility of an exit: startups (which need money right now) can get funding from early investors (who are willing to risk money up-front in the hope of making a bunch of money later).

Social media content/creators seem to me like a great fit for this kind of monetization model. (Social media content is information, and information is non-rivalrous and not very excludable.) I suspect that a lot of content creators would be very happy to share the risk-and-reward of their content-creation work, with people who believe in them.

In the old web2 world, we have systems like Patreon and tip jars, so that content creators can receive donations. Web3 offers the new possibility of creating tokens representing shares of ownership of the content. e.g. Imagine that every social-media content item had its own token. A creator creates a really great post/video, and rather than simply hoping that it goes viral and earns him a ton of money in donations, he sets a price for the token for that post. (e.g. “This post has 100 tokens in total, and I’m willing to sell up to 50 of them for 3 USDC each.”) “Investors” (i.e. his early readers/viewers) might purchase some of that token, giving the content creator some up-front money as compensation for making the post, and entitling the purchaser to a share of the donations that that post receives. (And of course the purchaser could then use all the usual DeFi infrastructure to resell the tokens to someone else, etc. Money legos!)

I’d love to see this idea combined with the shared network effect idea. (That is, create social-media platforms where X% of the tokens for every post/creator/whatever are automatically given to the network, strengthening the network effect.)

I also have a thought about using token prices to help bring attention to creators who aren’t yet as well-known as they ought to be, but I haven’t written up that idea yet. (Edit: okay, I’ve written it up here.)

(Crossposted on /r/Web3SocialMedia; feel free to comment there.)