The Creator Dilemma

Many companies have tried to leverage the power of web3 to build better creator tools:

• Mirror.xyz has built a web3 blogging platform where posts can be minted as NFTs, which act as micro-donations to the creators.

• Bitclout, Friendstech and Hey.xyz are fully fledged social networks where people can buy social tokens to support their favorite creators.

• P00ls enable any creators to build communities around their social tokens.

• Farcaster, Lens protocol and DeSo are building tools for developers to build web3 social apps, around ownership of users' social graph.

These Web3 native projects provide clever mechanics for creators to retain more of the revenue they generate: ownership over their data, content tokenization or social tokens.

But web3 native SocialFi projects have a fundamental flaw: they require creators to build their audience from scratch on their platform.

As a result, web3 native projects suffer from low reach (economics over scale). Without reach, the incentive for creators to move to a new network is limited. As of April 2024, the market capitalization of SocialFi projects is under $1B.

On the other hand, traditional web2 networks such as Facebook, X, Instagram or TikTok provide creators with huge scale and billions of users, but they retain most of the value created for their own benefits (scale over economics). The reach creates a lock in effect for creators who need to stay on the platform to keep their audience.

This is the ‘Creator dilemma’: there are no networks currently providing great scale and great economics. We do not believe Creators should have to choose between one or the other.

Creators Matter. Choose Matera.