Blokhaus Founder on Why Influencers Should Look Beyond TikTok
In an op-ed published in Cointelegraph, Mark Soares makes a case for why influencers should embrace Web3.
400 words, 2 minute read
Illustration: Cointelegraph
Among social media platforms, TikTok is a behemoth. Downloaded more than 3 billion times, TikTok has become the app of choice for everyone from Gen Z to baby boomers, drawn to its apparently endless stream of content. TikTok is a major commercial platform too, with companies paying big money to influencers to promote their products.
Despite its massive success, TikTok, which is owned by Chinese company ByteDance, is coming under increasing pressure from legislature around the world, including in the US. With increasing attention being paid to privacy concerns, and following a recent proposal by a member of the United States Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to ban TikTok, influencers are at risk of losing their fanbases and revenue streams.
In an op-ed published last week in Cointelegraph, Mark Soares, founder of Blokhaus (full disclosure - Spotlight is operated by Blokhaus Inc), in which he makes a case for influencers to embrace decentralization and Web3 as a way of avoiding this kind of censorship:
Blockchains are decentralized by design, which means the data isn’t sitting on a server somewhere controlled by a big tech company; instead, a large network of nodes around the world maintains the accuracy of the network, making it transparent and virtually impossible to hack or corrupt.
[…]And if you’re a digital content creator, there’s no need to wait. Web3 makes it possible, right now, to broaden your options for monetization and audience engagement through NFTs and other mechanisms. - Mark Soares
To illustrate the resilience of Web3, Soares uses the example of popular NFT platform Hic et Nunc (HEN), which was resurrected by its community of users after being abruptly shut down by its original creator. The hundreds of thousands of NFTs which had been on HEN were replatformed in just a few weeks on what is now called Teia.art.
Web3 might still be in its infancy, but the current debate around TikTok highlights two of the major vulnerabilities with Web 2.0 platforms for both creators and fans - the danger of user data being controlled and potentially misused by a centralized entity, and the risk of censorship or even outright banning by third-parties. As Soares points out, ‘Although a direct Web3 equivalent of TikTok doesn’t exist yet, it’s only a matter of time’.
So what better time for influencers to start looking into Web3?