Blockchain and the economy of online information by Guo Liu | Devcon SEA

[Music] hi everyone thanks for coming um so today we're going to talk about um the incentive mechanism for online content so we all know that the incentive mechanism is very important right because it determine what kind of content do we see online and blockchain has the potential of becoming the incentive mechanism of our internet so it's really important for us to understand how does content actually the economic of content how does it actually works in on the internet we can roughly classify um the monetization method as direct monetization and indirect monetization the direct ones are like substack patr the ones I see on the left the indirect ones are the ones you see on the on the right and interestingly most of the Web stre projects the nft projects are for under the the direct monetization part whether it's Community token nft Marketplace membership things like that they are the ones that the consumer directly donate subscribe to the content creator uh whether it's public content or exclusive content but the indirect monetization such as ads and referral and live streaming there are still majority of them or actually all of them are still controlled by the web two companies and if we take a look at the revenue or the amount of um of transaction on those two different type of monetization we can see that the indirect or the so-called attention economy is much more bigger than the direct monetization um and it's it's actually the indirect monetization that kind of make up the the internet that we would typically call internet the user uh generated content ones the ones are heavily on the direct monetization are things like Netflix apples um or or or like the Amazon um movies so it's a very interesting contrast right if we have the majority of the internet on the attention economy why haven't we tried to do anything with it in the web three World well I guess one reason is that attention economy has a lot of problems we know that it's kind of uh problematic it's kind of captured in this quote that if you're not paying for the product you are the product right so we try as much as we can to avoid it and it's attention economy is actually turning into something bigger right because we have the capability of tracking people to to predict how people behave it also become something bigger called the surveillance capitalism and it's becoming more reasons for people to avoid it but the interesting thing that we have realized in the past few years is that information has this very interesting property which is captured in this quote by St brand that information wants to be free but information also wants to be expensive because the cost of replicating information on the Internet is so low that we were always in most cases get used to receiving and sending information in a free way so that makes the fact that attention economy will always be the majority of the internet it doesn't matter what kind of underlying technology we use it's almost a property of human nature and how information Works in general so instead of avoiding attention economy we start thinking about the problem that can we actually turn its head around and make it work for us for the content creators for the readers can we make it into a protocol right because blockchain is the mother of protocols so can we actually standardize attention economy and get rid of the problem that it has and make it actually work for us so the attention economy we see today are something on the left it's active it tracks our Behavior it sells our impression directly but we have another kind of advertisement which is passive and the on I see on the right we see that every day on the street it's not problematic at all sometimes it's actually interesting right it's very colorful the big difference is that the one on the left does not have a boundary to see where our privacy is but the one on the right is actually passive so some of the experiment we start doing is that we're basically just minting online B board into nfts and we trade those nfts under Harbor attx so it's exactly the same way as The botard Works in real life for example the one on the right over there is just actually nft and whoever bought that nft can put on their content as advertisement and that Revenue string then go back to the content creators so I think this is just only the beginning because the attention economy on the Internet is such a big industry that there's a lot of opportunities in that and we're only starting to scratch the surface so thank you for your time and let me know any questions thank you I always enjoy your sharing okay attention economy anyone with any question any audience we have roughly time to take two to three questions any questions hi so you're auctioning off nfts that represent ad space and the revenue from that goes to the content creators on your platform and does any of that money go to the platform as reinvestment to improve the platform yes in our particular case uh 80% goes to the content creator and 20% goes to the to the platform or the application Builder but I think it really depends on the application itself uh whoever build the billbo has that choice how manying of that should go to the application how many of that should go to the content creator we expect that because the competition is quite severe um it will be the percentage that goes to content creator should be higher than for example what Google AdSense does has that been enough to sustain you um if so for this particular case the traffic is actually too low now but uh if the traffic grow by around three to five times it will be enough to sustain any other questions I'm also personally curious what is your strategy for the uh for the traffic to grow three to five times yeah that's another uh topic but that's basically the grill strategy well I think the fundamental part is like how do we make the application to allow people to have deeper real connections and that's I think that's fundamentally why people will stay on the application B continuing what you're doing right now yeah okay we get we have time for one last question anyone okay one over to here it's a tricky one this is the only room where we throw the microphone is it like some something like in mify what is planing to do mify sorry on he mify positive mag magnify no yeah I guess you don't mify I guess they are trying to do the same thing uh can you hold it closer to you yes yeah they are trying to do the same thing like uh you can actually uh have the Revenue model based on like uh What uh um like you can post you can be the promoter of the things rather than uh we actually giving the money to the uh companies to promote your so the more you promote on the social media social media the L protocol the the content the part of it goes to the cont so I guess it a bit different but seem to like what your indirect way of I I didn't totally understand the description but I guess I can front of you later thank you and that's it for our questions feel free to reach out to go after the after the event he'll be around he's always around thank you again let's give uh him another round of applause