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The Future of Blockchain Innovation in Social Media: Opinion
Disclosure: The views and opinions expressed here are solely those of the author and do not represent the views and opinions of the crypto.news editorial team.
The era of direct-to-consumer is here in all aspects of the game. The $250 billion creative economy is not immune to this change.
For a long time, traditional social media platforms have served as gatekeepers to revenue streams, limiting the ways in which creators, their followers, and unsuspecting advertisers interact with each other.
After seeing numerous web2-based iterations fail to balance these three pillars, it would seem that the future rightly leans toward web3 to democratize social media.
Empowering creators, users and advertisers
According to a relationship According to Mordor Intelligence, the impact of blockchain in the media, advertising and entertainment market is expected to rise to $27.29 billion by 2029, with a CAGR of 78.49%. This transformation, which we are witnessing live, has been enabled 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 monopolization, blockchain technology is now finding widespread use in redefining human interactions. It starts with the empowerment of creators, without whom such platforms become just another community chat hub.
Thinking beyond brand engagement, SocialFi platforms are helping to create a model where loyal, paying communities support creative livelihoods. While existing solutions focus only 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 in. By allowing creators to earn directly from audience engagement and rewarding each user for their digital footprint, the next phase of SocialFi should create mutually rewarding processes for all involved. This approach not only democratizes earnings to ensure creators are compensated fairly, but also increases user engagement by merging the interests of creators and their audiences.
Additionally, advertisers who are part of this ecosystem have greater control over their spending, allowing them to better engage the entire spectrum of users and therefore expect a better return on their investment.
NFT for Digital Property
NFTs came out with a bang a few years ago, but quickly died down as the hype overshadowed their real-world applications in tokenizing digital assets. That said, the space continues to see healthy funding as investors bet on its applications in industries like art, real estate, photography, music, and social content—essentially, a tie-in with RWA.
We are increasingly seeing that simply making content decentralized is not enough. There needs to be a way to brand it with your IP and monetize it forever. In this regard, NFTs allow creators to have true 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 infringement and lack of creator credits ignore the efforts of digital participants. By providing a genuine space for visual content to be instantly converted into NFTs, SocialFi platforms can add a previously untapped level of transparency and monetization.
Despite this 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 effectively and at lower costs.
Several networks, such as Sui, provide a robust on-chain development environment and equip platforms with high throughput, a crucial factor in multimedia applications that require high transaction speeds for optimal user experience.
Building on-chain also ensures that decentralized and mainstream fintech tools can be brought into a common ecosystem. Not to mention the preservation of intellectual property and prevention of cyberattacks by running such platforms on-chain. All of these factors are particularly useful for seamless real-time payments, including micropayments, which traditional fiat-based transfers cannot handle due to high transaction costs.
For now, the complexity of web3 interfaces may be its biggest obstacle, but with new platforms integrating the familiarity of web2 with the flexibility of defi, the opportunity to merge two different worlds has never been more real.
Anoir Houmou
Anoir Houmou is the founder and CEO of RECRD, a pioneering video engagement platform backed by the Sui Foundation, that uses blockchain technology to transform content creation and monetization. With over 14 years of experience in marketing and advertising, Anoir brings technology and creativity together, leading RECRD to attract over 500,000 users prior to launch. Anoir has raised over $4 million from leading VCs and investors, including the executive co-founder of Netflix and leading personalities 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 to transformative growth and global recognition.