We can't make much money from producing social media content, let alone consuming it. After onboarding billions of people, companies like Facebook, YouTube and Spotify partake in rent-seeking behaviors. They maximize ad revenues and time spent on their apps at our expense. We can't monetize well, because they do it. They profit from us.
We can't do anything about the status quo apart from voicing its problems: it's structural. These centralized companies are legacy social networks owned by private parties. Yet, this is where public content and discourse take place. A new social network should be publicly owned and operated by its users: welcome to the ownership economy.
And no one can help them. They own the world's largest social graphs, which is why regulators are after them, and rightly so: even with good intentions, having too much control is a liability. But that's only one problem.
The bigger problem is that only they can leverage their userbase. They can't let anyone on the internet improve their products. That kills innovation. "Sign in with Facebook" is just that, signing in. No creative developers from the middle of nowhere can start a new product with Facebook users. Very few people are building on top of social media and improving the overall experience, because no one can trust them. Worse, they could shut you(r composable app) down.
As you might have guessed, crypto technology is uniquely suited to create a new social platform, because you can monetize anything. When someone pitched a "decentralized social network", people would dismiss it as too early, and they were right. Until now.
**NFT have been surging in popularity** for the past 6 months**.** Marketplaces like Superrare, OpenSea, Rarible and others are getting significant traction in art, collectibles, open worlds and gaming. Unlike DeFi, it is the fastest growing consumer-facing crypto primitive, attracting the likes of digital influencer Lil Miquela and making previously unknown young creators famous. This graph only shows the art segment:
Credits to Richard Chen, cryptoart
Digital items newfound popularity can be explained because they are:
Those characteristics led to the peer-to-peer, transactional marketplaces for digital art and collectibles mentioned above. They unlock new financial capital for artists and creators alike.