Through the lens of the mainstream media, the crypto world has fallen spectacularly from grace. For the past year headlines chronicling macroeconomic instability, market forces, and scandal – which crescendoed when crypto exchange FTX collapsed last week – have driven a damning narrative and painted a picture of an industry suffering a crisis of confidence and credibility.
It is true that cryptocurrencies have taken a significant hit, with Forbes’ tracker seeing $176 billion wiped from the world’s 15 largest cryptocurrencies in the 72 hours following the FTX implosion. However, as Isaiah Douglass pertinently puts it in his recent opinion piece for Coindesk, “The financial media and legacy gurus miss that bitcoin’s price is one thing and that the adoption story and technology around the ecosystem is another.”
One need only take a deeper look into the web3 community to see that developers are still building, projects are still emerging and trust in the underlying technology remains. It is clearly also not only the evangelists and crypto proponents who believe this, considering that in the past couple of weeks oil giant Shell has announced it is entering the Bitcoin mining industry, and multinational investment bank, JPMorgan, has just successfully executed its first-ever cross-border transaction using decentralized finance (DeFi) on a public blockchain.
For all the media fear-mongering, one important part of the narrative has been missed. As an entrepreneur, David Marcus, said earlier this year: “It’s during crypto winters that the best entrepreneurs build the better companies. This is the time again to focus on solving real problems vs. pumping tokens.”
Behind the scenes entrepreneurs and projects are turning adversity into opportunity, but most people are not aware of all this activity, because these stories do not filter into the finance media echo chamber.
The web3 world is in desperate need of better marketing to help non-natives understand what is really happening in the web3 space, why it is here to stay and just how many solutions have already come to fruition. Projects also need help educating and onboarding people.
This is why a growing number of web3 marketing platforms are emerging to entice content creators and influencers to bring more education and better messaging to projects within the space. For influencers feeling the grip that centralized social media platforms have over their content and communities, these new platforms offer freedom and autonomy that make the migration to web3 marketing enticing.
Web3 Influencer Marketing: Financial Freedom, Content Autonomy
Over the past couple of years many creatives from across sectors have been displaced by the pandemic and turned to social content creation, particularly short-form video, for sources of revenue. As a result, the creator economy is now worth an estimated $100 billion, with more than 2 million people identifying as professional content creators, and 48 million more identifying as amateur creators.
As the cost of living continues to rise steeply across the world, creators need to monetize and centralized web2 platforms, such as Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram, have offered opportunities for revenue generation at the expense of data ownership.
Web2 marketing is essentially the capture of user data to drive demand generation and customer acquisition. In web3, however, (the catchall term for decentralized ownership structures including blockchain, cryptocurrencies, NFTs, the metaverse, and so forth) growth and marketing look very different since user data is stored in distributed networks that are not owned by anyone. Web2 marketers can essentially buy access to user data and gain insight into identities, even if actions, such as transactions and balances, supposedly remain private. In web3, however, the reverse is true: identities remain anonymous, while transactions are open and transparent.
Safary is a great example of a web3 marketing attribution platform that emerged this year to adapt to this changing privacy paradigm and rebuild the marketing stack. This app targets the DeFi and GameFi sectors, provides a tool for calculating channel ROI and understanding customer segments, in order to drive growth and mass adoption.
For web3 marketers understanding customers is essential in order to grow communities. This is because in the web3 world, where data is open source and decentralized, products alone are not a competitive advantage. Instead the goal is gaining and maintaining attention by building communities.
Web3 marketing is community growth marketing, which fits perfectly with the skillsets of influencers and content creators, who build loyal and active communities for a living. Web3 makes it easy for content creators to be rewarded for their actions and brand evangelism through digital goods and currencies such as crypto and NFTs. What’s more, since the data is stored on the blockchain and not owned by any one platform, intermediaries can no longer block brands, creators, and fans from building direct relationships. Instead, creators and influencers can find greater financial independence, direct access to their audiences and revenue opportunities, and more freedom to move around platforms and distribute their content. If a platform no longer fits with their values they can move and take their content and community with them.
Web3 platforms and projects have a great incentive to help influencers and content creators migrate over from Big Tech, because professional and amateur content creators alike share the innate storytelling abilities needed to educate and reshape the current media narrative.
Education is of course an extremely important need for web3 projects, which must make themselves accessible for non-crypto natives to gain mainstream adoption. Here yet more innovation is coming from web3 platforms, such as Rabbithole, which essentially enables people to “learn to earn”. Users connect their wallets and progress through skills, including L2, NFTs, and DAOs, in order to earn credentials and unlock rewards by interacting with well-known blockchain protocols.
One project specifically helping creators migrate to web3 is the WOM Protocol. WOM is building an ecosystem of products that provide the technology to grow communities, reward creators and run user-generated display marketing. These include the so-called “TikTok of Crypto” BULLZ App, which launched in 2021 to enable all creators and anyone else who wants to monetize their content, to earn rewards for web3-related word-of-mouth recommendations. The BULLZ app rewards creators daily from a rewards pool created and distributed by the WOM Protocol. Rewards are distributed based on the content engagement and a trusted peer review rating the content must pass before earning.
A network of verified web3 creators with over 30 million reach have already migrated to the app. Although users "create to earn" through the built-in WOM Protocol, the app has expanded its features so that other web3 projects can launch dedicated marketing campaigns with verified creators directly within the app. Brands, which include ROCKI, EuroReels, Ethermail, SingularityDAO, MixPay, Fidlecoin, Jigstack and Mad Metaverse, set up campaigns using the decentralized BULLZ Campaign Manager.
WOM is part of a fast-growing landscape of community growth tech products emerging in web3. These vary from tools designed to help establish communities, such as Safary, Jump and Myosin, through to those that help with messaging -- think Dispatch and Pearl -- all the way to those that offer incentives and rewards, such as ZeroDrop or Dappback.
For professional and amateur content creators getting started with NFTs, the metaverse, and reward tokens, these tools help them ease into the web3 space.
The Untold Crypto Story
The web3 space is very much alive with activity, purpose, and staying power, but the mainstream media is too focused on its negative narrative to draw attention to this. Now, more than ever, web3 projects need the help of content creators to spread awareness, education, and messaging. Web3 marketing platforms have a pivotal role to play showing creators and influencers that there are exciting possibilities for reinvention and revenue in the alternate world of web3.