Monetizing through Membership, rather than attention

Transcript

[Music] all right welcome everyone that's kind

of a fun hack that I just did first time I do that where I basically sharing my screen on my laptop with the presentation laptop so that it displays here so if it works all the way that's gonna be crazy but uh thanks for thanks for being here so I think this is one of the last call's of the of the conference let's make it chill feel free to ask questions even during the presentation interrupt me at any point it's the end of the the end of the conference we're all getting sick anyway so let's just chill cool all right my name is Julia journeys to I am French even though I live in New York I haven't been in Paris in three and a half years so it feels good to be here and I'm gonna tell you about a big change that I think needs to happen on

the web we need to move away from the idea of monetizing through attention and monetize through what I call membership and I think this is very good and healthy and I explain why and I think actually a theorem is the perfect last form to platform to make that change happen and that's what my company unlock has been doing for the last year and a half at this point cool all right let me start talking about the virus obviously because that's the test the team last week I found this tweet from the New York Post which I think some of you may know is a publication out of New York that is fairly populist on the right side of things and they wrote a story that basically says don't buy the China story the corona virus may have leaked from a lab obvious obvious clickbait that whole story if you read

it I actually went through that is all about what if maybe they did or what would happen if they did it's not a real story there is no journalism work behind it there is no actual investigation there is no knowledge about this the whole reason why this story exists is to get the likes and retweets by thousands of people in that world basically the New York Post which is a newspaper fairly old actually and which should have been kind of a venerable way to counterbalance states including China put me in a situation where as a user I actually don't know what the truth is did China leak the virus or did New York Post just respond to incentives which mean that the right story to get clickbait attention and not really facts or truth about this story I'm sure this has

happened to you a lot everything we read at this point on social networks is all about confusion very little about facts and truth because the old incentive for people creating content is to attract your attention that makes sense so I think that's actually a pretty bad situation that's visible across many different things obviously we can talk about this but if you think generally about information overload this thing that we've been talking about on the web for like 20 years or it's like oh there's just too much content the reason why there is too much content is because content creation is mostly free at this point and so the more content you create the more eyeballs you can capture and the more review that you'll make it's not about creating interesting or useful things just about creating more things that people will click on randomly maybe

oftentimes the economy is obviously the information you can't be sorry the attention economy is obviously bad and creates all of these challenges and we can talk about that information of a lot clickbait fake news awful UX like we've all been to a website that have millions of pop-ups going up and down and moving the content I'm actually gonna do a demo that involves that later on maybe more importantly in that's kind of the New York Post thing involves distrust like when we use to trust media or at least some organization to provide us with information that the states the governments would not give us now we're in a situation where she don't know who is telling Toofan and why the on YouTube people are reacting to that by adding ad blockers and that I was actually at the brave presentation a minute a couple minutes ago and I think

it's a fair response from users but at the same time that means that the very few creators are actually trying to make things right do not get paid anymore because that's how they get paid through ads generally and I think this is a big team here in France as well the gaff I Google Amazon Facebook Apple are everywhere and actually controlled the traffic and the distribution of content as well as the ad revenues in the case of Google and Facebook and that's obviously a big challenge then you don't see is the privacy laws here it's obviously happening as well in Europe and in the US GDP are makes it harder and harder for the legit creators or to collect information that they would need to monetize their content so basically that's attention economy that we've built over the last 20 years is putting us in big trouble one point that met

that been made a couple of minutes downstairs is also that we assumed that ads where the way to get free content like right I'm not paying for this because there's ads and ads are the thing that actually substrate subsidize the content the point that he makes which i think is very true is actually we pay for ads we pay for ads first in the form of bandwidth half almost half of the bandwidth in the US is spent by advertisers when you go to a large publisher site so we think about this the bandwidth you actually paid for this by your ISP it's something that cost you the battery usage is something that also costs you like that power you have to at some point plug your phone again the the increasing needs performance needs of your devices are also often times you to you the fact

that they're the websites are you more and more ads more and more tracking that end up consuming more and more CPU this all costs money to us so we pay to not pay content which is kind of crazy obviously another world is possible and that's the idea of what I call the membership economy over the last 15 years we've slowly seen kind of a move away from in some cases away from free content one of the most obvious example is obviously Spotify you can see here with the daily podcast back in 2009 Spotify tried to charge for starting to charge for music I don't remember these days I do but at the time all of my friends actually I was also doing this we're just piracy pirating

music and at some point which music was free like nobody would pay for any kind of music anymore but slowly we try to see the switch from like hey you know if we provide a good interface we provide an easy way to pay for music then people will start to pay for music and that's gonna make things easier like that okay so if you make it easy to pay people will pay for things that also happen in the movie industry the state of TV 7 10 years ago in the u.s. at least was abysmal nobody was watching TV anymore because the meaning of ads and then something like Netflix starts you're started to arrive and people pay a subscription to Netflix 7 8 9 10 12 bucks it's actually increasing a lot a

month and now they get good content that is produced directly by Netflix and the people tend to enjoy and they're not interrupted every 15 minutes by a new ad a new commercial through through the stream so this move the word paid content is obviously happening it's also visible to things that are maybe less abuse but things like patreon I'm sure you guys know of battle as they call it here in French a patreon is a platform where creators can go to and kind of create their own membership for their fans and sell access to their work so like I'm a painter I would sell my paintings to my closest friend and say hey you come to my patreon you support me and then you can access my work or my music or my pictures any of these things or developers actually tend to use that

more and more other platforms like sub stack in email world which is actually very using crypto if you I mean I'm sure some of you are subscribed to a few newsletters by some of the most preeminent crypto advocates I'd say or maximalists in some words we can say are using sub stack and sub stack is just a kind of membership where as a user I decide to be part of the group that is going to get an email from that from that user it's coming everywhere it's also maybe more obviously coming from on the paywall front of the front side of things if you go to any newspaper in the u.s. at this point mostly in France and pretty everywhere in the world they're moving toward this payroll model where people need to pay to read more than one two three five ten articles a month

sometimes actually exclusive content only Wall Street Journal is an example of this where you actually have no content that is not behind the paywall other newspapers go for a kind of a mixed in approach where some content is 100% free forever and some other content is 100% paid for ever Business Insider is an example of that so that model of being part of the group supporting the group being part of embracing the mission in some way is something that's emerging and it we're seeing everywhere the challenge though is that each of these membership or siloed on the platform on which they happen and they're not interpreted in any way it's almost like you would have to create an different app for every single website here you have to create a different membership for every single website as a user that means I have to sign up

everywhere put my password everywhere different password hopefully everywhere or use the password manager then put my credit card number on every single website and shoot anything happen to my card then I would have to change it everywhere I have to do the same thing on my on my mobile phone because again I have to signing on every single website and do that over and over again that friction is outrageous like you think about this it's just never going to be able to work for more than one or two different websites in the world make sense so far so quick realization this is hard for consumers this is hard for publishers unlock makes it easy for people well building a proto just a simple way for any person to deploy a lock which is a membership and then put that on their website let's do a quick demo back in a back in December

we we launched on a website called forbes.com which is actually a very ugly website don't tell them I said this with a million of ads so that view is actually the mobile view but see that that's an ad that's crazy right like all of the screen and if you got on your phone that's an ad and I keep scrolling and that's a giant ad and it's kind of the worst experience but I'm reading this is like oh I'm just I'm gonna be lost all the way so what the introduced is a membership to unlock and add free experience and if I can find the button again because these ads keep moving I'll be able to show you so what they did is I did a little bit of JavaScript to their page that basically says hey if the visitor is a member to Forbes they

should not see ads for a week or a month and I'm gonna do that right in front of you hopefully that's gonna work demo effect ug full force but let's right click on that button now for say hey you've got two options one of the option is to purchase that membership with 0.0 50 to eath which is roughly $1 20 kind of a mistake that they made here but we'll talk about this later and the other option is to purchase for a month for four times that price I'm gonna go for the week here because I'm cheap so clicking here my meta mask is gonna pop up because I'm using meta bask in that browser but if I was using say opera on my mobile device same experience it Forbes doesn't know anything about me I don't happen Forbes account I don't have anything special

here meta mask is popping up saying hey you want to give them oh wow gas prices are high today you wanna give them like one dollar twenty plus thirty five cents to the eighth year miners so that you get the extras I'm going to say yes but please be careful watch this closely the ads will go away immediately as I do that click confirm and there my effect the ads didn't go away but they will I guess uh Wow double fail let's refresh this is not an ad so technically that actually worked what's kind of under disappointing but you would have seen a little YouTube banner at the top the banner in the bottom and you see no more ads in their content I'm not sure why we

didn't see that in real time but that actually worked the way that what I did here is like purchase an ad free experience and immediately they're providing me with the ad free experience because I did purchase it so we do what we call optimistic so that transaction has not well it has been mine now had not been mined at the time we just basically look at how likely the transaction is to be mine if it's likely enough we'll just provide the ad free experience in that context so we'll just say tell for was like hey that user has paid just give them access to to the ad free experience cool any question about that go ahead we exactly so we actually look at this like how much gas you spend and how long it's likely to take if it's

gonna take too much time well not do well not do optimistic in that case same if you try to double spin where she immediately lock back saying hey you double spend this you're trying to cheat your way and so there's no reason why you would get the ad fixed means but let's face it though what we're trying to optimize here is not for fraud like basically the thing that the costing revenue to creators is not people cheating it's just the fact that it's incredibly hard to actually do anything to unlock content on the website like I did not create account of Forbes I did not put my credit card number I'm just going to that website can I'm very casually putting like click on the button confirming in my wallet and that's it I'm done I don't have to provide any information and that frictionless experience is a lot more

valuable to them then can you reducing the little fraud that they might have where somebody's kind of cheating their way into that make sense cool transition has been mined let's go check it out on ether scan so you see how it looks so an ether scan can see that it was sent from my address obviously to the lochs address which was my contract that Forbes deployed it's theirs it's not mine I can't touch it and then I received some token which isn't actually paid for this you can see here the one dollar twenty other 0.0 fifty-two eath and then the gas which is actually a slightly less than what I anticipated would pay and then a token was transferred that token was transcribed from zero zero zero which pretty means that it was actually created it's a new token and was sent to me my address

means it's the same address here and here and that token is as you can see an e rc 71 that's a non fungible token so that for the people that were here in the previous presentation that's the same kind of token that equipped toki Diaz it's a unique token that's mine that is kind of my members card to form in that case and it's mine I can do whatever I want with it every time I can go to forms that come now they will check my wallet and if they see that I have the token they will not show me ads that said this NFT is like any other NFT it's actually transferable I can take it and give it to somebody else or send it or sell it to somebody else maybe even and that person then in that case would be the member I'm not a member anymore

does that make sense so for an ad for experience I don't think that's that useful but think about like the number of times where you subscribe to something and after a couple is like half not use are not interested in this anymore what if I could actually sell it the best example that I can think all of the time is like your HBO subscription after game of throne was done it's like you're stuck with it if you had a way to kind of put it back on the market saying hey somebody get it from me I'm gonna sell it for like one dollar five dollars I think that's something that a lot of people would do in that case makes sense and that's possible to unlock another thing that's possible to unlock even though it's an unfunny Bowl token it's something that's splittable so my

week-long membership to Forbes actually seven days were for membership to form and so what I could do here is like give someone one day of ad free experience and then keep six for myself so for that free stuff I don't think that's very useful but think about a paywall article right like I'm a subscriber to the moon in France and I'm sharing a link with my friend and my friend like oh it's a paper article I can't read it what I could do here is like alright I'll give you the link and I'll give you ten minutes worth of my membership so you can read it now and my friend can actually read that article off of my time which i think is something pretty useful in pretty cool cool all right let's go back to working on this oh actually maybe I'll show you open

you guys know what open sea is a platform for non fungible tokens and I can go to my items and you'll see that in my wallet I do actually have a bunch of for stuff because I'm making a lot of demos with their stuff and I click here and you can see that I've got several subscription these are for one weekend the one that I purchased I think is this one or either most recent one and if somebody has an address right now that they can shout I'll yep for me too four months ago I was minted I can happily give them the for membership using that feature so far so good any question at this point go ahead yes let's let's keep moving on but because

that's coming later cool all right I was the same membership one frangible took in their own forms let you have fun thing together what I hacked a quickly earlier this week a small website which I'm going to send you to if you have your laptop or phones with you right now it's called so that Earl can you be if CC - chat that glitch that mean if CC ETH CC - chat CH 18 . glitch GL i TCH that me and that website is a quick website that I hacked earlier this week

it's a chatroom and basically to chatroom that locked where only the people that have a ticket to the conference can come let's step back a little bit some of you came to the conference and purchased a ticket using crypto it happened that this ticket was actually a for essaouira forms an unlock ticket a membership to a conference is a ticket I'm a member of Forbes but I can also be a member of UCC and remember ECC means that I can come and attend some of the formulas speaking slots here so what you did when you purchase your ticket where we're wave for ECC you actually purchased a membership through unlock for ECC that lock is this my contract deeper in the e theorem chain like the Forbes one and this also reusable and I completely independently of the FCC

people if you're in the room hey it's one deployed a website on which I put the same lock and say hey only the people that came to the conference can actually come to that site and that's this site here so let's make a quick quick demo and so basically I need to join to be a participant here to join meta mask is not popping second time annoying all right let's do it again yay okay it's popping evening so to be part of that chat room I would need a ticket and actually if CC sold two batches of ticket once where we've sigh because it started before the migration and the next batch was in dye so if you have a ticket you could actually access this this account that I'm trying doesn't have a ticket but I mean toggle

to another account actually has a ticket here actually know what I'm gonna purchase a ticket inside so you'll see this so I'm purchasing this another ticket to the conference which are not that useful but anyway I'm spending ten bucks for them immediately you'll see that I've unlocked that website and now I say oh thanks for being a member because I'm a member of the conference what's your nickname my nickname is Julian I jump in here and we say hey hello that locked again oh my god what's going on here good work yeah Julian enter cool hello can first person that actually comes to chatroom authenticates

with their wallet that they've used to get a ticket to the conference gets unlock hoody here alright yes the Earl is FCC ETH CC - chat CH 8 e dot glitch GL ith dot me a me should work we've been a mask with any web 3 wallet that you might have on your phones you can even pick your size so what are you on that page right here yay all right

jarrah you you win the come see me at the end you can pick your your hoodie does that make sense what we did here we took that smart contract that UCC deployed and say you know what that membership is cool I'm gonna give access special access to some members of the conference here and these members can come to the chat room in participating here all right make sense let's do something else now you are asking about creating a lock oh you left already you could have stayed it's fine don't worry it's fine let's actually now create a create a another lock that will put on that page because I mean some people here might not have purchased their their ticket with crypto

they're using their bank account the or the credit card but let's still invite them to the chat room for this we're going to create another lock and we'll put that other lock as an option on that page so I'm using the unlock dashboard I'm not sure you can see very well but that's basically a tool that anybody can use to deploy their own lock their own smart contract their own membership in that way maybe I'm gonna make this bigger so you can read this faster this is more legible ish ok cool so I'm gonna click on that button create a button and I'm gonna say if CC chat alright that's basically just for this let's make it valid for you know what one day let's make we can actually limit the number of

members that we want to have let's say we want to create some FOMO and say only the first hundred people can come so I'm going to create some FOMO here and say alright let's let's create five short and let's make it free so that it doesn't have to be something that you guys pay for so it's actually gonna be using you thrown in 0 I'm gonna set me here minimis is gonna pop up murder musk is gonna pop up yes and ask me if I want to deploy this there's a quick bug here it's actually gonna be much cheaper than that in terms of gas it should be about like 20 cents so I'm creating that transaction now and we'll have to wait now for a couple seconds for the for that lock to be deployed even though we have the address actually we can already do that but let's let's

check on users can so the lock is being deployed by me obviously and we'll wait for this but in the meantime I'm gonna take that address which is the address at which the lock is going to be deployed we use create - which I think you guys know of that allows us to kind of guess not guess actually know what the address is going to be and I'm gonna go back to glitch which is this fantastic no code application so I can update the lock address so you'll see how that ECC chat application is made it's a very dumb JavaScript application that's hosted on that website called let me which is actually pretty cool for anyone doing a web development and what I'm going to do here is go into the JavaScript of that application please ignore most of that it's ugly and gross and I wrote this very fast but the lock

has been deployed let's check it out afterwards and I'm going to end up on the unlock configuration big blob it's a little blob of JavaScript I put on my page let's say hey I'm gonna lock content on that page for members that have a key to this I'm going to add a third address here because there's already two for the two types of locks at the tickets the sigh and the die die one and we're going to add that new one that we just deployed so pasting that address here adding no option there's a bunch of motion that I could put and Glitch actually has this cool feature that it also saves and so now hopefully I'll be able to click on going back to this you'll see that my lock has actually been deployed you see here it

actually cost me 46 cents or slightly less than the five that we're initially showing and if I go back to the little chat room I'm going to toggle account because that account has already a membership so it will not see the prompt to become a member again but let's assume I'm using member account five which doesn't even it doesn't even have easy well that's weird basically I'll refresh that page because I remember with that account so I cannot access the content this time when I click on the button I'm starting to be very frustrated all right let's do this again click on the button nope dismiss why does it work on this miss you can see that now that other lock that other membership has

been added to the options I've added the option of zero eath which is the one that I've just created for the ECC chat and that account doesn't have enough fun so well toggle to another candidate enough funds and now you can go there and for the people that actually did not purchase your ticket with crypto we can go there and pay just for gas to get access to that to that chat room with me here actually this is already a member and it's my own account this one should not be a member maybe it is actually no it's not cool damn it all right and I can purchase my FCC membership HCC chat membership here this time okay make sense I'm gonna pay for this right away and you'll see that

now I can say Julian cheap and yay hey bug then hey cuckoo cool make sense so you're asking how to Depot your lock you see that was actually fairly simple it's a smile contract once it's deploy it belongs to whoever deployed it we can't touch it we can't change it we can't upgrade it we can't do anything with it it's yours and ours there's a bunch of parameters that you can set and basically that's useful here unlock in practice is a membership record for membership can be used for payrolls as we've seen with Forbes can use by applications as we've seen with the chatroom can be used for conferences as we've seen with ECC but can also be used in any other contact you say hey you're a musician and you want to give

discounts to your closest pants you say hey purchase my NFTE purchase become a member of my fan club and then when you go to my shop if I boxed or you get a discount on my t-shirts or my hats or maybe my CDs you also get discounts on my concert next time these kind of things cool alright I think I'm actually left with one minute so I'm gonna give that minute back to you guys for questions no questions take it nope no fee for diversity pie let me actually thanks yes know if I'd ever goes to deploy unlock doesn't take anything on this the reason for this is because we do think that most people will actually not have equip doublet at least in the early days

you guys all have crypto wallets I hope but most people out there don't in this case we actually allow them to unlock with query card and this time we take a few on the credit card transaction I can show you how that works what's interesting about this is like as a user I would pay for my credit card and I pay unlock Inc to not unlock the protocol we paid unlocking the company to make the transaction on chain on my behalf and this way we'll charge you a little bit on your credit card to perform that transaction any other questions thank you this question will be right on time okay perfect how do you split the NFT I can say like four one days yes so Rayna you would have to use ether scanner which sucks we split it in time base so each n ft as an expiration date

that's what its unique that expiration it is time stamp in seconds and so when you spit it you basically remove some seconds from the first one and add seconds to the next one basically make sense one cool thing that we didn't mention about this which I'm actually extremely excited publishers when they allow football to transfer or split their membership they can say hey you know what we're gonna monetize that so going to market we're going to say hey you can give I can give you one minute or maybe one hour but the publishers say if you do so we want also that you give us back 10 seconds or 10 hours in that way they basically reduce the available membership aggregate into something smaller which means that I'll renew mine or your renew yours earlier cool all right thank you very much I'm happy to

answer question and give you your hoodie Joe is gone all right well I guess he's gone thank you very much [Applause]