Home of the Web3 Creator Economy

Let’s start with the not-so-fun stuff: problems that exist today…

Ask a kid today in the U.S. what they want to be when they grow up. The top response is a “YouTuber “— an answer 3x more popular than Astronaut (my personal go-to back in the day). Yet 98% of YouTubers don’t earn enough to reach the U.S. poverty line.

Everyone wants to create but very few make a living.

Now get this… total hours watched on YouTube increased 96% during the first year of the pandemic, yet ad revenue for creators fell 33% in that same time. Why? The current creator monetization model is broken, based on big tech and corporate ad spend (companies cut marketing budget = creators earn less).

It’s not just YouTube, there are earnings concentration and corporate take-rate problems inherent to all Web2 media platforms. At Spotify 1% of artists receive 90% of all royalties, averaging just $7 per artist per month. For reference, Spotify itself generated $8bn in 2020 revenue…

Creator earnings should be aligned with the intrinsic value of content.

Lastly let’s consider the consumer perspective… there are almost 2 billion websites in existence yet >90% receive no traffic from Google, which has an average search session duration of only 76 seconds. Valuable content is lost in the mix and overlooked by Google’s page-rank algo, which has come to serve bite-size answers to brief questions, not as a medium to truly explore online.

Furthermore, 86% of internet users admit being duped by fake news while browsing and 95% of social media users are more likely to like/share content if it’s been more liked/shared before — in other words, people consume and engage with content based mainly on its prior social acceptance.

We must rethink content indexing, validation and engagement incentives.

Introducing Campground

Campground is the new home of the Web3 Creator Economy. It’s a place for people to curate, explore and effectively monetize an open internet — one built and owned completely by you, for you.

Key innovations we’re developing at Campground:

1. First-of-its-kind multi-media content creation/curation tool
2. Content-access NFT minting engine and marketplace
3. Light-weight curation DAO infrastructure (“Camps”)
4. EMOJI Protocol: an underlying Web3 content protocol with native social rewards token, emotion prediction market and quality validation network (we’ll cover this interoperable protocol layer in a future post)

Campground is full of Trails

Trails are interactive digital journeys that consist of steps, navigating viewers through a series of both curated and original content sources — live sites, static webpages, document uploads, images, videos, audio files and more — with custom creator commentaries, auto-scroll anchors and tooltip highlights included along the way.

Trails are a brand new form of immersive multi-media content with a wide variety of use cases — here are a few (of many) examples:

• Low-friction e-learning
• Interactive newsletters
• Guided product reviews
• Annotated bookmarking
• Comedic commentary
• Modern audio albums
• Immersive art tours
• anything at all you want to share with the world…

Next: the future of content monetization — Trails can be minted as NFTs

At Campground’s core is an open, permissionless blockchain-based marketplace that effectively aligns content’s value with its creator. Trails are unique, human-made online stories — hence they should be treated as such. Trails can be made either simple and free or optionally minted as content-backed NFTs (stored on-chain), then sold and traded as ‘digital tickets’ to access their corresponding content data and community features in the Campground DApp.

Here’s how it works:

1. Curate & Create — creators build Trails in any category, style and duration, ranging from long-form educational courses to actively updated interactive newsletters or short tours with hilarious commentary
2. Mint & Sell — creators mint Trails as NFT access tokens (redeemable in the Camprgound DApp), issued for sale to the public in “Initial Trail Offerings” (ITOs) with a preset total quantity and price… Trails have market caps
3. Continuously Earn — after successfully sold through our ITO launchpad, access NFTs trade freely in the Trail marketplace, while original creators earn royalty income each and every time their Trails trade… think OpenSea for intrinsically valuable content, not PFPs

Effectively inverse to Web2’s platform monetization system, our novel content-access NFT engine returns income to creators in direct correlation to their content’s market demand… value is now accrued to those who will it into existence, not the tech medium that facilitates the transaction. This is how it should work, and does work at Campground.

“But wait, there’s more…”

Campground is not only the next iteration of content creation/curation and the individual monetization standard, but also a place for consumers to participate by forming Camps — a new type of curation DAO infrastructure that distributes value outward to supporters and helps thicken the middle of marketplace power law. Plus, Campground’s DApp will be synergistically integrated with EMOJI Protocol and its native token $EMOJI: an economically balanced token system that incentivizes and rewards all parties that interact with content (creators, consumers, reviewers), with a grand mission to become THE underlying content protocol to power Web3. We’ll expand on these roadmap features a bit later… but for now:

Welcome to Campground! Your new home within Web3.

Join the waitlist at campground.co