tl;dr: The tools continue to evolve. Power flows quietly to the creators.

Back in September 2018, I wrote a series of posts about what I termed “Crypto-Native Martech.”

One of them was about publishing, and included protocols like Steem and LBRY.

I haven’t heard much from Steem recently (they were bought by Tron and had a protocol civil war resulting in a fork), and LBRY has been having some issues with the SEC.

But, like in any cycle of innovation, what matters isn’t the specific examples, rather the general trend.

And the trend here is that publishing leveraging smart contracts and blockchain as a way of empowering creators and disintermediating 3rd parties is continuing.

So, while Steem and LBRY may be under cloud, others have emerged into the sun.

Crypto-Publishing Solutions

One of them is Unlock Protocol.

Unlock provides publishers with the ability to directly sell a membership token via cryptocurrency or with a credit card. The membership rights are then maintained in a personal wallet, located in the browser. 

What Unlock then enables is the potential for any publisher to embed “Members Only” content within a standard web page, such as a WordPress blog. In this scenario, a verified member visits a webpage and sees all of the content.

At the same time, and on the exact same page, a non-member only sees a limited amount of content with the rest behind a window that says “Members Only.” 

Like this

In this respect, Unlock Protocol is like a paywall, but with the key difference that instead of an “all or nothing” scenario, a publisher can choose exactly which content to show members versus non-members. So, a publisher can choose to block a specific paragraph or multiple, or a chart, or a video or anything of her choice, allowing individual discretion as to the best way to deepen and moneitze relationships.

If you are a member, you get to read this:

But wait, as they say, there’s more. 

Because the Unlock token is secured by a smart contract on a blockchain (in this case, Ethereum), a publisher can extend the rights associated with membership for almost anything imaginable.

For example, one site owner could partner with another site owner to enable cross-site membership (and revenue sharing as well).  Furthermore, a site owner could automatically assign a discount from a Shopify store so that any site member buying merchandise would get a discount without having to apply any type of code.

In short, Unlock Protocol represents a new type of relationship opportunity between publishers, creators, and their consumers that can remove intermediaries, remove advertising and tracking technology, and offer greater revenue opportunities than existing options.

Another innovative publishing solution is Mirror.

When you publish on mirror, your blog post is hosted on a decentralized network.

What this means is that no one-no government, no company- can ever censor the information.  It is the ultimate in “freedom of the press,” guaranteed not by government but by a blockchain.

What makes Mirror interesting beyond a decentralized publishing platform is that it is  a community owned platform. The means that existing members of Mirror get to collectively decide who gets admitted to the network.  It’s like a modern form of Writer’s Guild.  There is a quality filter to get you in, but once you’re in, you’re in for life. 

There is a weekly competition from aspiring writers to join and the existing members cast their votes as to whom they’d like to admit, based on their belief that the new applicants will strengthen the overall value of the network and the use of the $WRITE token.

An interesting feature of the Mirror Protocol is something called “Splits.” 

With a “split,” an author can link back to another author’s Mirror post and credit that author with attribution and royalties.

So, for example, if you read my post on Mirror and tip me 0.2 Eth (or maybe you are subscribed through an Unlock type relationship), I can allocate a certain percentage of my tip, automatically and secured by a smart contract to the Ethereum wallet of other authors whose work inspired me in the first place.

In this way, the original creator of an idea is recognized by the person who built off her idea, and rewarded.

But, as Glick described in his post on Mirror,

“Isn’t there in this system an inherent ‘free rider’ problem? Why wouldn’t someone read all these essays without ever paying to support one? …The answer is that they could. Just as someone can ‘consume’ an NFT without owning one.

But doing so puts that person outside the community of ideas, and less able to fully participate in its benefits. Someone who never supports is unlikely to be supported. Someone who never attributes is unlikely to be attributed. All of these actions are recorded on the blockchain, transparent and permanent. He can be a free rider, but his track record will make that obvious, just as someone who is a steady conduit for value will be known and rewarded.”

As the number of creators on Mirror grows and the “splits” cascade from newer posts to older ideas, older content can become a source of ongoing, passive revenue.  This type of transaction was literally impossible until blockchain arrived.

Publishing is Dead…Long Live Publishing

What Mirror and Unlock both represent is the tip of the iceberg to reinvent publishing for the Web 3.0 era, an era where the rights of creators are protected and where they have a guaranteed, protected, and ongoing revenue stream for the novelty of their ideas.

I expect we’ll see a lot more innovation in this space and soon, before we know it, this will be the default way that people consume content. And we’ll wonder why it was any other way ever.