I’ve really been wanting ot provide more content around the use and adoption of Web 3. The idea is to NOT discuss crypto price, or to cater to the hype of NFTs and DAOs, but to show the functionality.

As I create and publicize this content, I’ve been looking into some more Web 3 native tools for blogs, newsletters, community, video, and audio. This serves a few purposes.

First, I get to practice what I preach, dogfood, or whatever other analogy you prefer. I also get ot use and test the new projects and provide feedback.

Last, I can try to determein how I might use these tools to create value.

Web 2 brought us the ability to not only create content, but to monetize in ways we had previously not encountered. I’m not even sure if monetize was a word before Web 2. Oddly, Web 2 wasn’t a phrase before Web 3.

Monetization has come from advertisements and sponsorships for social media and YouTube content, and from subscriptions to gated content and newsletters.

This is essentially stating an equiation in which my thoughts, or ability to engage an audience can produce a certain income stream. Web 2 took us from needing to have a job with a salary and a platform to get our voices heard, to the ability to display our knowledge or skills, and earn. It started us down the road of disintermediation.

Web 3 has been hyped with similar promises to take that ethos steps further. Based on conversations with Web 3 creators and platform developers, as well as the articles and posts I’ve read, I feel like we’re still trying to figure out how this increase or change in vluae will work.

I want to be careful to not just reproduce Web 2 monetization, but with wallets and tokens. We also can’t just issue tokens for everything and hope they end up with value to third parties. We can’t just have Web 3 versions of newsletter systems like Substack, where we have subscribers pay via crypto.

We should learn how we can create value by going beyond thinking only in terms of monetization via those Web 2 methods. I think the ideas of advertizing, sponsorship, and subscription are still important, and will play vital roles in the value crated through Web 3 rails. I also think we need more experimentation to find out how we use our new tools.

I’m not even sure where this experiment will take us, since we have a tough time picturing the use cases.

Wallets, tokens, NFTs, decentralization, will allow us new forms of engagement, value exchange, and content ownership.

Now, time for an example. I can publish this post on a Web 3 blog or newsletter app like Mirror or Paragraph. You might like it, and subscribe to read more, and do so via your wallet.

Now, I don’t necessairly have any information about you, other than your wallet address. What can I do?

I can start requesting small subscription payments via crypto, possibly using Superfluid or other payment streams.

I can send you and NFT so you’re a member of my community, and giving you better access to me, my content, or others in my community.

I can issue an ERC-20 token and provide liquidity.

I can mine the data by looking at your asset and transaction history, and determine how to offer even more value to my subscribers, or use that data to get more targeted sponsors. My subscribers are frequent DeFi users, so I’ll get protocols or wallets to sponsor, for example.

I can partner with other content creators to allow my subscribers to view their content.

I can token-gate some content, while making other content free.

I can offer royalty tokens, so when I take all my content and make a book from it, you receive a part of the roylaties.

So many options to think through, but most still go back to very Web 2 way of thinking.

I think it will take more of us to create and deliver content via Web 3, get more consumers of that content, and then determine the best ways to provide value. We can’t see all the use cases, revenue models, or value creation now, just as we didn’t see monetization of a spare bedroom coming when eBay launched.

Time to experiment and see where we go.