For decades, in various forms, advocates have touted the enabling of a creator economy that allows individuals to monetize their work. Much of that attention has been bandied about since the time we began talking about user-generated content and social media, which is to say decades.
source: The Business Model Analyst
A newer variation on that theme is the sharing economy, where latent assets are monetized by turning consumers into producers. That might include ride sharing services, lodging services, or even e-commerce sites such as eBay.
Some might say there also are analogies to e-commerce retailers such as Amazon, which connects buyers and sellers.
The latest argument is Web3, which supposedly will enable content creators or asset owners to monetize their own assets and work securely and easily.
All that sounds fine, but scale matters in any business. The themes of radical decentralization and participation have been part of the internet ethos since the beginning. But commercial activities supported by, or enabled by the internet, require scale.
Sometimes platforms win even as individuals win. But few individuals will ever attain mass influence or business scale. On social networks, for example, everyone has the right to speak. But what matters more is who gets an audience. Really-big influencers are few and far between.
One might therefore argue that even if some Web3 tools and platforms succeed, none of those tools will change the economics of attention very much. Having the ability to publish might be ubiquitous. Garnering an audience is really the issue. And that is much harder.
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