What Would Happen if Google, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok Started Sharing Their Ad Revenue With Users?
TL;DR
With FB/IG/Google today, you find the audience, pay the platform, and hope that you can convert a few thousand of them into paying customers.
Web3's "direct-to-community" advertising flips that model on its head, cause you have the ideal, whittled down audience from the get go.
It’s early days, but if this model catches on it has huge potential.
Full Story
You know that brain hack - the one that goes like this:
We tell you something, like, for example: the most popular color for new cars sold is not black or white like you might expect, but actually green.
You all of a sudden see that statement confirmed in your day to day life, noticing green cars everywhere.
...but in reality - we made that factoid up. The only reason you started noticing green cars everywhere was because you were now actively looking for them.
Yeah, well this might be like that...or it could be the start of a much larger trend.
Either way, there's some super interesting potential beneath it all.
Physical Web3 products seem to be popping up everywhere:
The World Of Women NFT project now has its own Monopoly board.
Pudgy Penguins has plush toys at 2k+ Walmart & Hot Topic locations.
FWB held a 'Community-first E-Commerce space' that sold all sorts of clothing and homewares made by its community, for its community.
The 'super interesting potential' we're noticing is:
These Web3 communities are like a 'cheat code' for targeted commerce.
With Facebook/Instagram/Google ad targeting, you start with a list of billions of internet users, then whittle it down based on A/S/L demographics - cross matched with a Venn diagram of shared interests, until...
Bam! You have a list of (say) 1M users who might like your product.
You then pay to reach them via FB/IG/Google and hope that you can convert a few thousand of them into paying customers.
Web3's "direct-to-community" advertising flips that model on its head, cause you have the ideal, whittled down audience from the get go.
You know what they like. You know that they're willing to spend money on community related items (e.g. NFTs and DAO tokens).
Hell, you can even scan their wallet address to see how much money they have!
It's early days yet, and we may just be seeing green cars here, but if Web3-powered communities eventually become ubiquitous...
Something really cool could happen:
→ The communities we belong to will have commercial value
→ Which will (in part) be measured by the value of the community's NFTs/tokens
→ NFTs/tokens that we, as community members, will own...
→ Giving us a share in the communities and networks we help to build/support
(As opposed to Web2 networks, like FB, IG, TikTok, where the vast majority of monetary value accrues to a small group of shareholders outside of the network).
Wild!