Is Today’s Digital Content Ecosystem Flawed?

It feels like forever that our daily digital lives have been controlled and shaped by just a few big centralized platforms. We watch video content primarily on YouTube and Netflix. We curate music playlists on Spotify and Pandora. We rekindle old friendships and start new ones via Facebook. Chatting, liking and sharing digitally are all relatively new phenomena.

The Internet was around long before these big central platforms existed. The big players emerged in the wake of the rapidly growing web and mobile industries. Today, the platforms are like a giant black box to content creators and consumers alike.

Inside this giant black box, tech giants buy traffic from various sources; they attract content creators and help curate their work; they build server farms and purchase bandwidth, so consumers can access multimedia servers; they sell ads to make money. They are so good at doing all of this that most of us would soon relinquish our ability to choose and let them monopolize our daily life online.

Is today’s world of digital content optimal?

Creators are exploited and struggle to profit from their work. Distribution channels absorb much of the creators’ revenue and the creators resort to paying the platforms to increase their chance of getting discovered.

Users aren’t rewarded for curating and spreading good content. We share our personal data with the platform, sit through long ads and often pay subscription fees. What do we get in return?

Creators and users deserve a better system. We have a chance to build it with Blockchain technology. It’s time to shape a new digital content ecosystem that values fairness. In this world, creators need not pay 30% of their revenue to the platform. Actively engaged users who share content will be free from ads. Everyone will access apps under one identity and a single account. Users own their personal data and won’t need to fear privacy leaks.

So, what are we waiting for? Let’s open the black box.