Hello world and welcome back!

The creator economy is here to stay.

In a recent issue, I wrote about the Unbundling Effect and its breaking down of traditionally monolithic, centralized services across news and media. This separation has created space for specialized platforms to emerge, serving targeted niches through a modified structure and personalized content. The power and the flexibility of the platform allows creators to experiment with content and track user engagement

The last decade has shown the value of creators to both their audience as well as the platform on which they reside. The individuality of each brand is a feature that adds to the collective value, while still maintaining their distinction. This has effectively created a re-bundling of the unbundled, consolidating the diverse creator content into one offering portfolio.

The trend has taken hold across industries and services that I’ve mentioned in the past: newsletters like Substack and Revue, gaming platforms like Twitch, virtual classes like Juni, and social networks like Tik Tok.

The trend is not siloed nor short-lived. The creator economy is at its core a decentralized counterpart to the traditionally centralized authority determining content. The value is driven by competition and market dynamics, where the best rise and garner engagement, while others must find their place. Yet decentralization is not limited to social content - decentralization inherently creates a reliable infrastructure in which users’ motivations align with the greater community goal. Cryptocurrency is a prime example, as the lack of a central authority allows for seamless flow of assets through a verifiable underlying blockchain. All parties hold a vested interest in the success and security of the chain, where each transaction is publicly available. Most established industries rely on authorities to dictate protocols and methods for execution. In the digital world, this is simply a bottleneck for speed and scale. There are tradeoffs and design considerations in building a scalable blockchain and currency, but the decisions lie in those who are in the network, not some arbitrary external party.

I strongly encourage you to look a bit more into decentralization and its core tenants - it is still emerging though I see it to stand as a fundamental baseline for many applications going forward.