TL;DR:
Onchain publishing allows creators to own and control their audience relationships.
Web3 enables creators to move from creating on platforms to creating as platforms.
Publishing across multiple platforms becomes easier without losing audience connections.
Leveraging Web2 platforms can help funnel audiences to onchain destinations.
The onchain economy embeds value and monetization opportunities directly into relationships.
As online content creators move onchain, they’ll experience an important unlock: from creating on platforms to creating as platforms. This is a wildly liberating transition—one that will drive more content, more experimentation, and better operating conditions for creators.
Chris Dixon's model of the internet eras is simple and effective:
Web1: Read
Web2: Write
Web3: Own
The Web2 era blurred the lines between creating and consuming, enabling zero marginal cost distribution for anyone. But it came with a trade-off.
Publishing platforms like Facebook, Twitter (now X), and Blogger took away the pain and complexity of setting up servers, domains, and websites. They gave users access to publishing and distribution for "free." Of course, we now know that this wasn't free. Instead, it defined one of the most potent business models of our time: acquiring user-generated content for free, using it to aggregate consumer attention, and monetizing that attention through ad units.
It's free to publish for creators, but it's difficult to monetize. In fact, only about 3% of YouTube creators earn enough ad revenue to reach the poverty line in the U.S., highlighting how difficult it is for creators to make a living on traditional platforms.. Building an audience on a legacy publishing platform also locks creators in. It’s difficult—sometimes impossible—to transport your audience from one platform to another. Starting from scratch on a new platform is challenging and time-consuming, which is why most creators stay loyal to the platform where they achieve some form of escape velocity.
This dynamic is favorable for platforms, but unfavorable for creators.
Web3 publishing changes the scope. At the core of the Web3 ethos is self-sovereign identity. When the social graph that connects a creator to their audience is moved one level down—from the platform to the protocol—multiple platforms can tap into the same social graph. Ultimately, it’s a graph tied to a wallet or identity that the creator owns and controls.
This is powerful because it enables creators to publish across different platforms and experiment with content formats and monetization strategies without sacrificing their core asset—the social graph.
Here's an example from my own workflow:
I use Farcaster to engage with people in the web3/onchain space. I publish my essays on Paragraph (a Web3 publishing platform). Followers on Farcaster can find me on Paragraph because they follow me on the former. A few months ago, I started publishing some shorter screenshot essays and some of the models and illustrations from my essays on Zora. I’ve done nothing to grow on Zora beyond putting out content. The account grows organically, and I see that many of my followers are the same across Farcaster, Paragraph, and Zora. It's all connected.
This will become even more powerful as onchain social graphs and protocol-level feed/content curation matures. In this respect, I’m super bullish on Daylight. Initially started as an airdrop hunter tool, I believe Daylight will evolve to become a strong contender for "onchain curated feed as a service" across the onchain internet.
The onchain economy is still small compared to the rest of the economy. The same is true for onchain social and end-user distribution in general. An attractive strategy for content creators right now is this: leverage Web2 platforms to build audiences for your content as a top-of-funnel, then funnel people to onchain content and destinations where you can own the relationship.
This is similar to established best practices for online creators, where the out-of-platform destination is email. Email is great (though I believe it’s dying, more on that in a later post), but it’s just an information channel. What makes the onchain relationship so attractive is that value and monetization opportunities are embedded once the relationship is established.
If you, like me, believe the onchain economy will continue to grow organically over the next decade, it will provide a powerful tailwind for this strategy. Most traditional content creators are still oblivious to this opportunity, which means it's a great time for you to get ahead—whether your content cup of tea is writing, music, visual art, or something else.
The time to get ahead is now.
As always, reach out to me on X or Farcaster if you have feedback or are working on something cool you want to discuss.
