Content Creation in the Metaverse, what is the difference?
- 7 minutes read - 1360 words
Table of Contents
From a particular perspective, the Metaverse is unavoidable. Since personal computers became available, each computer generation became more powerful and connected. The Internet reinforced that together with gaming. Since 2009 there is also an approach to managing digital ownership called Bitcoin.
Blockchain technologies evolved and allowed the management of ownership and transactions to be decentralized and secure.
NFTs to manage ownership
NFTs became more prevalent in 2021, a breakthrough because the idea of using a blockchain to manage digital content and ownership dates back to at least 2015. At least until 2014, the concept of decentralization. Bitcoin has been around for 14 years, but it still seems new.
Non-fungible tokens are about who owns what. In general, content creators keep the rights to their work. But to sell their work, creators do need agents and intermediaries. Even before NFTs, there were ways to do this, like using T-Shirt printing services and other similar services.
NFTs, on the other hand, make it possible to sell content directly to buyers. Also, it’s not just about selling art or range; you can also trade it.
NFTs make it clear who owns what. Yes, there are jokes about “crypto strategists“ being surprised that JPGs can be moved around over HTTP since 1988; without NFTs, the image was just a free-floating digital blob that no one owned.
The creator economy and web3
To understand how web3 will affect the creator economy, it’s best to first look at how it came to be and why it will keep growing. At its heart, the creator economy is just what it sounds like: an economy built by people who make content.
People stopped letting their work determine how valuable they were. Instead, they started trusting in their work’s assets and personal brand. The content is made and uploaded to platforms that are good for creators like TikTok or YouTube and can be turned into money depending on how the creators want their audience to interact with it.
Social media platforms and influencers make it easier to share content with people all over the world.
Getting rid of the middle man
The goal of web3 and NFTs is to cut out the intermediaries or bring content creators and consumers closer together. Getting rid of the intermediaries is a common theme on the Internet. eCommerce eliminated the intermediaries in retail, making shopping easier and more accessible by putting together a database of products, a shopping option, and some logistics.
Social media (Web 2.0) can also be seen as an attempt to cut out the intermediaries, in this case, the search engines (which did not work).
It also explains why so much risk capital goes into Web3-related startups: from their point of view, it’s a huge opportunity.
Decentralization
Web3 is about removing the intermediaries, which is another way of reducing the power of platforms like Google. There are reasons to be skeptical because new platforms like OpenSea are becoming more popular.
One of the most important reasons is that building an NFT marketplace is technically complex and means operational costs, both of which require upfront investments and risk-taking. You might also need some technical knowledge, which is a monopoly in and of itself.
But web3 seems to be here to stay, even if the goals of the web3 revolution don’t come true. It hit a nerve. People who make things have always been able to sell them online, primarily through merchandise or less popular platforms.
When someone buys something from Amazon, the company is in charge of processing the order and ensuring it gets to the buyer in an estimated time.
The user has little or no say over the order details during this centralized process. This example shows one of the main ideas behind the creator economy and why it got a lot of attention in 2021. It can all be said in one word: “decentralization.” Unless they contract with a third party, the creator completely controls what content gets made, edited, and shared.
Social Media
Social media is the best way for creators to get their work out there and connect directly with their followers, but it doesn’t do anything to manage ownership. Reading Twitter’s Terms and Conditions, for example, makes it clear that Twitter owns all of the content posted on its platform. Since these sites are open to everyone, anyone can post on them. Also, sites like Instagram and TikTok try to “sell influencer partnerships.”
Social media platforms are working to build ecosystems that are good for creators. The goal is to make the user and the platform work well together. In other words, they want to act as go-betweens for you. Because of this, most creators still work primarily in a centralized digital ecosystem.
Content over-supply
It is getting easier and easier to make digital art. With GPT-3, for example, you can use just a few keywords to create content powered by AI. Even if you don’t have AI, making content is easy if you have some ideas. It started with PhotoShop, but now it has some serious competition from iOS-based tools that let you use algorithms to make movies.
It automatically matches the music to the video, which used to be something that could only be done with professional software. This is also not a huge change; it happens when CPU/GPU power gets cheaper, and software improves.
Because of this, the creator economy has grown significantly in the past few years. Fans and creators can talk to each other and interact in impossible ways before social media. “Content is King” is an unwritten rule that almost everyone follows, from creators to followers to brands and gatekeepers. In the creator economy, this rule is essential for success and longevity.
Oversupply also means that there is competition, which leads to prices going down. Even huge price differences can be easily seen on platforms like OpenSea. Many people buy and pay a lot of money for trendy collections. It also brings in copycats and bad people.
Recently, the prices went down, which is often called a correction. It is also clear that many people who buy NFTs care more about making deals than art.
Web3 and video gaming
Several projects are using web3 technologies to build MMORPGs based on NFT. The idea is that you should be able to trade digital items between different gaming platforms. When you buy virtual goods on one platform, you can use them on another platform. That is beyond NFT, which is primarily about trading fancy images.
This is a new idea. Rare virtual items have been traded at least since 2005 in World of Warcraft, Diablo, or Second Life. Not to mention Fortnite, where it seems like the only reason to play is to buy virtual clothes.
But you could never use virtual items from one platform to another. The metaverse includes that. The metaverse (a virtual space), also called XR, is limited by the technology of wearables. As a result, the graphics look like they did in the mid-1990s.
Content in the Metaverse
The combination of managing ownership reliably (NFT), using a standard protocol (web3), and having wearables that can show complex virtual worlds could change how games work and digital services are used.
Amazon didn’t make many changes to become the most popular eCommerce platform. Instead, it makes its product database easier and lets people write about their experiences. It doesn’t look like much, and existing retailers didn’t realize how this small change would affect them.
Before Amazon, people who bought books and other items couldn’t leave comments about how they liked shopping for a sure thing. Amazon got millions of people to look at its database of products and turned the retail business on its head.
From this point of view, letting people trade digital assets and content without an intermediary could significantly affect businesses already in place.