Go Off: Creator Economy Will Be Bigger Than Big Tech Itself

Web3 adoption is leveling the playing field for content Creators.

In 2020, Calaxy Co-Founders, Spencer Dinwiddie, and Solo Ceesay set out on a mission: to destabilize stagnant Web2 social media framework and redirect value back into the hands of those powering its economy — the Creators. Over the last two years, data on the colossal revenue cuts from legacy social platforms has come to light. Most recently, the State of Crypto Report 2022 published by Silicon Valley giant Andreeseen Horowitz (a16z), reiterated these failings. Summarizing its analysis of blockchain industry trends, a16z declared that, “web3 is much, much better for creators than web2.”

🗣️ SAY IT LOUDER FOR THE PEOPLE IN THE BACK

Web3 is championed for its community-driven, decentralized democracy. While certain social media oligarchs are still claiming eye-watering valuations, Web3 is the opportunity the Creator community has been waiting for…a chance to level the playing field and dictate a more equitable split in the profits generated by the content *they’re* creating.

Despite Web2 HODLing a larger community of users than Web3, the previous iteration of the World Wide Web lacks the right framework to adequately reward its content Creators. A16z calculated that based on per capita NFT sales, Web3 pays on average $174,000 per Creator. It is easy to see why content creators are pursuing digital assets as the new way to monetize directly with their fans when compared with the meager $2.37 paid by YouTube per channel, $636 per Spotify artist, or just $0.10 by Meta per account.

Contributing to this drastic misalignment of income is the revenue cut taken from Creators by these legacy companies, which was recently put into perspective by U.S. Congressman Ritchie Torres who said, “You know something is profoundly wrong with our economy when Big Tech has a higher take rate than the mafia.”

For example, YouTube takes a whopping 45 percent fee from its Creators, while the Apple App Store rakes in an eye watering 30 percent. In comparison, OpenSea — Web3’s largest NFT marketplace — has a modest 2.5 percent fee per sale of NFT. It quickly becomes clear that the decentralized foundations of Web3 secure autonomy for Creators over their revenue streams, allowing them to directly benefit from the support of their fans without exorbitant third-party fees.

Having witnessed these injustices at a grassroots level, we built Calaxy to give Creators the agency to monetize their brands on their terms, and the byproduct is a cycle that fosters a more satisfied user community. Calaxy users have an opportunity to unlock more valuable and exciting content from their favorite celebrities and be rewarded for their loyalty. Our revenue model is simple and our approach ensures that Creators and fans can engage in more meaningful and personalized experiences in our ecosystem. (If you wanna see what’s under the hood, you can read more about the mechanics of how we do this in The Creator’s Galaxy whitepaper.)

The State of Crypto Report predicts that Web3 is on the right trajectory to disperse decentralized, open-source autonomy across the Internet, but such revolutionary disruptions take time to take hold. If you compare Web3’s evolution to the timeline of Web 2, we’re not much further along than the Internet was when Katie Couric, Bryant Gumbel and Elizabeth Vargas were trying to figure out what the hell it was.

As more people learn about the empowering benefits of Web3, we expect a flock of content Creators will migrate to decentralized platforms to the tune of an estimated one billion users by 2031. That’s one billion people who can enact autonomy over Creator-fan relations, over monetization, and ultimately, over their careers.

Calaxy is coming, and it’s bringing the Creator Economy with it.