NFTs
The Future of Blockchain Innovation in Social Media: Opinion
Disclosure: The views and opinions expressed here belong solely to the author and do not represent the views and opinions of the crypto.news editorial team.
The direct-to-consumer era has arrived in every aspect of gaming. The $250 billion creative economy is also not immune to this change.
For too long, traditional social media platforms have acted as gatekeepers to revenue streams, limiting the ways in which creators, their followers and unassuming advertisers interact with each other.
After seeing several iterations based on web2 fail to balance these three pillars, it seems the future is rightly leaning towards web3 to democratize social media.
Empowering creators, users and advertisers
According to a report According to Mordor Intelligence, the impact of blockchain on the media, advertising, and entertainment market is expected to skyrocket to $27.29 billion by 2029, at a CAGR of 78.49%. This transformation, which we are witnessing live, has been made possible by the emergence of defi integrations, which eliminate the middleman and lay the foundation for a new era of creativity, engagement, and trust.
From offering solutions to age-old problems like digital piracy, skewed royalty distributions, and user data monopoly, blockchain technology is now finding rampant use in redefining human interactions. It starts with empowering creators, without whom such platforms become just another community chat center.
By thinking beyond brand engagements, SocialFi platforms are helping to create a model where loyal, paying communities sustain creative livelihoods. While existing solutions focus solely on the creator, the other two legs of the system — users and advertisers — can no longer be ignored.
This is where a tokenized ecosystem comes into play. By enabling creators to earn directly through audience engagement and rewarding each user for their digital footprint, the next phase of SocialFi should create mutually rewarding processes for everyone involved. This approach not only democratizes earnings to ensure creators are compensated fairly, but it also increases user engagement by blending the interests of creators and their audiences.
Furthermore, advertisers that are part of this ecosystem have greater control over their spending, being able to better interact with the entire spectrum of users and, thus, projecting better returns on their investments.
NFTs for Digital Property
A few years ago, NFTs came out with a bang but quickly died down as the hype overshadowed their real-world applications in tokenizing digital assets. That said, the sector continues to see healthy funding as investors bet on their applications in sectors such as art, real estate, photography, music, and social content — in essence, a tie-in to RWA.
We’re increasingly seeing that simply making content decentralized isn’t enough. There needs to be a way to stamp your IP on it and monetize it forever. In this sense, NFTs allow creators to have real ownership with the added prospects of merchandising and recurring revenue.
Another point to consider is the emergence of short-form visual content as the most popular form of content on the internet today. Despite its popularity, copyright infringements and lack of creator credits disregard the efforts of digital participants. By offering genuine scope for visual content to be instantly converted into NFTs, SocialFi platforms can add a previously untapped layer of transparency and monetization.
Despite such inherent potential, integrating blockchain into the media industry is not without its challenges. Issues such as scalability and interoperability are not new, and much depends on emerging low-code solutions that enable developers to build scalable L2s more efficiently and at lower costs.
Several networks, such as Sui, for example, provide a robust on-chain development environment and equip platforms with high throughput — a crucial factor in media applications that require high transaction speeds for an optimal user experience.
Building on-chain also ensures that decentralized and traditional fintech tools can be connected to a common ecosystem. Not to mention the preservation of intellectual property and the thwarting of cyberattacks by governing such platforms on-chain. All of these factors are especially useful for real-time, seamless payments, including micropayments, which traditional fiat-based transfers cannot support due to high transaction costs.
The complexity of web3 interfaces may be their biggest impediment for now, but with new platforms incorporating the familiarity of web2 with the flexibility of defi, the opportunity to bridge two different worlds has never been more viable.
Anoir Houmou
Anoir Houmou Anoir is the Founder and CEO of RECRD, a pioneering video engagement platform backed by the Sui Foundation that leverages blockchain technology to transform content creation and monetization. With over 14 years in marketing and advertising, Anoir combines technology and creativity, leading RECRD to attract over 500,000 users prior to launch. Anoir has raised over $4 million from leading VCs and investors, including the co-founder of Netflix and major figures in entertainment and sports. Anoir’s vision for RECRD focuses on empowering content creators, driving interactive engagement, and ensuring secure transactions through AI and blockchain technology. With major launches in India and Africa, as well as an upcoming token launch, Anoir is poised to lead RECRD through transformative growth and global recognition.