Monetizing through Membership with Jᵾlien Genestoux (Founder, CEO at Unlock Protocol)

Captions as YouTube publishes them, usually machine-generated, so product and people names can be misheard.

1. 0:01

   hi sir roberto jose do you want to maybe introduce yourself i'll let that work for jose jose go ahead hi sorry i am um feeding a kid here so um but uh yeah we're working on a uh trivia pum and um um we see several uses for for tokens and non-fungible tokens and things of that sort so uh and also just the idea of monetizing um instead of the attention be a membership so yeah no it sounds uh exactly right about

2. 0:42

   ali yep are you sure you want to maybe mention something about what you're working on oh sorry i thought i thought i did um uh we're working on trivia app uh we um we have our app in both um android and ios uh before this whole thing hit our focus was in sports we uh picked up like 300 plus 300 plus users at some point um we launched late last year so anyway things are going well but now we need to kind of pivot or wait for sports to come back

3. 1:25

   so um it's not only trivia is like predicting sports and other events and now we're doing like your create your own trivia but i guess that's it we we will we'll be in touch and i'll love to hear from our introductions hi my name is aisha i'm from new york city um i am a new developer not very new just haven't been able to code in a while because i'm also a government official in new york city i'm an appointed and an elected representative for the district that i live in

4. 2:05

   and i'm on the ballot for june um i want to be able to create solutions for my community that can help change the way that government interfaces with the community and vice versa so i'm here to learn and here to learn about nir awesome i i can go next uh my name is mike pervis i worked near protocol um and just broadly i had been following uh unlocked protocol for a while and i

5. 2:32

   got really psyched about it and i think originally i just like sent julian a dm just straight up saying like this is awesome i can't believe how rad this is and then later on just like said oh hey there's a typo here maybe you can fix it and then one thing led to another and i ended up writing a drupal module that uses unlock protocol and it was really fun i gave a whole presentation to the drupal community and

6. 2:55

   seeing people's web two eyes like open up like they started to understand like the potential and they had no blockchain experience and this is just such a great way to onboard so i'm just really excited to be here hi my name is julian i also work at near protocol i work on business development side uh and also like very excited to learn more about analog particle well i guess i'll finish uh yeah my name is julian which is a french version of julian and i'm i'm the founder at unlock i'm

7. 3:29

   also in new york brooklyn here so maybe not too far from you aisha uh even though i mean we're pretty much the same distance wherever we are not supposed to get out of our places it doesn't matter uh and yeah i've been working on unlock for about two years uh and maybe i'll maybe uh yeah that's that's pretty much it so i think there's not a lot of people so let's uh let's make sure everybody can ask questions at any point i mean i i think there's a chat uh which uh i've seen people post messages too

8. 3:53

   you can do that you can also interrupt me i mean anything uh anything is is fine cool uh so maybe i'll start with uh showing my screen uh because i've got a presentation we can go through the presentation and then uh and then uh and then obviously we can uh i'll do demos uh so people kind of understand what that is uh let's uh share that i think that's gonna be cool can you see my screen from now and i'm gonna hide this uh all right

9. 4:26

   so what it looks yeah we're saying your picture your screen you've seen me asking great okay cool so yeah so uh maybe i'll start with a bit about myself first uh i'm not myself uh a finance guy even though i studied as a banker i'm more of a web guy and when i say web it's like i've been actually building open web technologies for about uh 15 plus years uh my previous company was doing rss feed stuff i don't know if you guys know

10. 4:51

    what rss feeds are but basically it's a co-building block of the open web if you listen to podcasts it's all powered by rss and so one thing that i've started to realize over the last couple years is that the web is slowly getting more and more centralized and it's because i think in vast majority because of its business model it's because it's using attention as the driver formatization when it should actually be using different things attention it's mostly ads it's basically

11. 5:14

    hey we're gonna i mean as a as a creator i'm gonna make money because i'm gonna sell your eyeballs to some advertisers or sell your private data to some advertisers uh we're then going to be uh basically influencing your purchasing decisions and i think that creates a bunch of a bunch of issues uh and maybe let's start uh quickly with with an example of the kind of issues that it creates a couple weeks ago uh

12. 5:37

    on february 22nd uh the new york post here in new york uh kind of posted this tweet uh which is basically don't buy the china story the corner writers may have leaked from a lab and when i looked at this is like okay uh who do i trust more do i trust more than new york post or do i trust more the chinese government and it's it's actually a very hard question because in some way yes the chinese government has kind of a track record

13. 6:01

    uh in some way but also as an incentive to not tell the truth like it's it's it's they want to be in rightfully like pretty much every government born to be perceived as powerful and and and influential and knowledgeable and so yes they would they could hide the truth but at the same time when i read that story it's like i'm trying to understand what's the new york post's uh kind of interest here what are their incentives and it's clear when i read

14. 6:25

    that thing and then when i read the article and i i you can't read the article that the whole story here is may what if uh might have all hypothetics uh with one very clear goal is to generate what we can see at the bottom of the page which is like retweets likes uh and kind of engagement and so there's actually no substance to that story maybe there's been uh research that has been done since then that would prove this but like if you read the story it's actually only i wouldn't say conspiracy but pretty much

15. 6:55

    a lot of conspiracy with the only reason uh the only incentive here for them is to actually show a lot of ads and if you go to that page you'll see that there is basically an ad every every two paragraphs and so that's how they make money so all of a sudden in your quest incentives are not to make people a reader smarter it's to make basically them spend more time on that page so that they can actually be paid for the eyeballs does that make sense

16. 7:22

    i and i can't see anyone because i'm yeah sharing my screen so if you're making a lot of sense uh let me actually try to see if i can see zoom in another window i don't think i can yes cool i've got two i mean for once having two screens is helpful uh so yeah basically questioning the idea of incentives around content creation and here i'm talking about a publisher but that's actually true for any kind of creation like if you think about uh people doing uh youtube videos uh the one of the reasons why we see all of

17. 7:56

    these flat earthers and and all of the all of these kind of videos being more and more popular is because the incentive for youtube is to surface them because they generate more engagement which means that they generate more eyeballs and then they generate more revenue for google and youtube and so we're in that in that world where the incentives are misaligned between creators of all kinds and consumers and that means that we basically can't trust uh what we're seeing online and that i

18. 8:18

    think is one of the big challenges of the uh of the attention economy and here on that page we want you to kind of uh show a summary of of of things that the attention economy has been creating and so the first one is information overload if you remember like from from 10 plus years ago we were already complaining about the fact that there is too much stuff online and so that's the reason why there's too much stuff is like because it's actually so cheap to put anything out there and the odds of having somebody finding

19. 8:42

    it means that you'd rather put a lot of stuff even though that's completely relevant because maybe some ads will be displayed same clickbait the whole point is to i mean that new york post article is to get you to click on this so that you so that the creator makes money fake news is the same idea doesn't matter whether it's true or false if you look at it they're making money and so that's the that's the general thing another one which i think is pretty big is the idea of awful ux like if you go to a website with a thousand

20. 9:06

    southern pop-ups and and kind of ads in the middle and weird notifications and all of these things with again the only incentive is to get your to get your attention the the consequences are stuff like distrust obviously as we've seen uh stuff like ad blockers which in the end are kind of uh the nuclear option right like basically you cannot make money with ads when somebody has that blocker even the legit websites or the other legit platforms that would actually try

21. 9:31

    to do the right thing can't make money because they have these blockers that also means that fewer and fewer uh players mostly google facebook uh apple are getting a larger and larger share of our attention online because they're the ones that actually are able to monetize that um much better and then it also leads to stuff like privacy laws which again like are probably a good thing but at the same time making it much harder for smaller

22. 9:55

    businesses smaller creators to actually make a living because they can't be compliant with these very complicated roles and so we're in a situation where the attention economy is kind of hurting the web very much that make sense you guys have maybe do you guys have other examples or things that you can think of when you read this that tell you like hey all right this attention economy is kind of in some way breaking the web

23. 10:20

    it's like focusing on a click click like to your point like focusing on the click click bait headlines and things like as opposed to like the actual like investigative journalism or something like real substance right yep yeah definitely i mean another one that's pretty obvious and it's everything around privacy right like basically it's i think it's actually proven that ads that are more targeted generate more revenue and so that means that the incentive for

24. 10:44

    creators or anyone is to get you to disclose as much information as possible and sometimes i mean it goes into crazy length to get data that they should not need like your location like when you go to a website say hey tell us where you are it's like a weird like the only reason why they want this is because they can actually show you more relevant ads but in many ways like why would they need to know why would they care where i'm where i'm physically located and that's scary that you have to disclose that more and more

25. 11:08

    on the web for things that are not relevant i guess cool um one thing though that i think is the good news is that over the last uh 10 15 maybe a bit a bit more years we're starting to see what i call the membership economy kind of emerge and so that's visible through a bunch of different things so one of their obvious one is the pay walls you go to new york times right now you can see you read five articles a month at the end of this you're supposed to

26. 11:33

    pay to read more i think they actually lifted that during the the virus but like that's the general idea and pretty much every newspaper in the us but in the world generally is moving into the direction of having basically people pay for the content so sure it's frustrating as a user to say hey i can't read this but at the same time if it's uh if it's a if it's the condition that they're not gonna steal my attention steal my private data and actually create value for me then yes

27. 11:56

    it makes sense to pay for these things and it would also kind of insist on on an aspect that it's actually pretty cheap when you think about this like i mean in new york going to starbucks we can't go anymore but if you went there a couple of weeks ago purchasing a coffee is like three dollars so for the cost of like four coffees a month you can get a valuable uh subscription to something where you can trust the data uh so it's happening on the paywalls it's also happening on a bunch of

28. 12:20

    different things like stuff like patreon that i'm sure you guys know of patreon is a way for people to support their favorite creators their favorite artists and so basically you pay for them so that they don't have to steal your attention or steal your private data anything that's actually very valuable youtube recently introduced a membership per channel so you can actually pay uh i mean any youtuber uh a certain amount that's five dollars uh and and then you can you get access to

29. 12:45

    different things on the on the channel so it's not usually not content but it's for example the ability to post uh kind of emojis or participate in the chat room and things like this which i think is pretty valuable other platforms obviously medium went to the direction or if you know of sap stack which is a an email newsletter system it's actually the same idea where you monetize the membership you monetize some content you monetize status actually let's talk about this

30. 13:08

    there is membership is not just about the payroll aspect it's not just about content in many ways it's actually about status when i was actually at medium before doing unlock after i sold in my previous company and when medium into the payroll we had literally no content behind the paywall and so we asked people like why did you pay for this and a lot of people actually told us that they paid for this because they supported the mission they paid not because they want

31. 13:30

    extra content but because they care enough about the mission and so what they what they're doing this is basically they're trying to get the status of being one of the medium supporters and one thing that medium does pretty well is actually recognizing that status by kind of highlighting and showing a little halo around the uh the members uh the members avatars it's actually very similar when you see somebody uh walk the street with a hat or a t-shirt of a brand basically

32. 13:53

    they're actually trying to purchase or when they purchase that get the affiliation like supreme for example is a brand actually does this pretty pretty well i don't think the supreme t-shirt or shoes would be worth as much if the supreme brand was not on them and so what people purchase here is not just the t-shirt it's the brand it's the it's the status of being one of the users of that and so that's something that i think people should leverage a lot more on the web at this point um what i want

33. 14:17

    to show also is that it's actually oftentimes synonymous for quality to pay for stuff like netflix is a good example of this i mean if you remember the days before netflix like uh maybe 10 15 years ago again like tv was crap we had hbo maybe uh but then there was all i mean the freak stuff was really really bad uh however the paid stuff was generally very very good and so i think moving away from the idea of like everything needs to be free and monetized with ads

34. 14:41

    to a world where hey you pay for the stuff that you care about means that you end up with a much higher quality content makes sense and i've seen a message in the chat so i'll try to see if i can read it otherwise maybe oh yes well seinfeld yeah actually that's a good one except that maybe let's talk about this um there was a bunch of discussion so uh seinfeld's 20 minute episodes uh it's

35. 15:09

    basically the the maximum you can make in between ads which is really really scary when you think about this look then now the the the the the the format of the show itself is informed by the monetization and that's kind of weird in some way like you end up kind of influencing what content is being created based on the business model to actually sell it it's almost like as if painters were only allowed to paint i mean four by three uh paintings because that's how that's

36. 15:35

    the thing that actually fits uh in a living room or on a tv and so the idea that we have to kind of decide of the format of the content based on the monetization to me seems crazy that's a great point yup and actually what i wanted to mention i'll just jump in there yes sorry go for it i'm not sure what that was i think kanan wanted to mention something maybe not oh yeah can you hear me yep

37. 16:09

    yeah um i felt actually 75 to make it fit in that 20 minute window actually when it originally aired it was not we can't hear you great sorry my internet's shitting can you hear me yep uh yep okay i'm not moving i'm staying right where i am seinfeld is actually sped up 7.5 to fit in that 20 minute window when it originally aired it was actually well over 20 minutes i mean that's that's fascinating i didn't know that but yeah it's it's it's

38. 16:52

    really outrageous like you think about this it's like no they're actually making it faster so it fits between ads it's insane you know what what i actually wanted to mention is like i'm not sure if it's true like i would be curious uh julian what you think but like it seems like if you look at like uh entertainment industry uh and then i'll draw parallels to the internet the entertainment industry actually started with ad supported model first so

39. 17:14

    like it started with public airwaves in 1950s 60s then you know moved into 50 50 percent uh direct pay versus advertisement was cable in 80s right and now you have options like amazon studios you have options like um netflix where it's direct pay right mostly direct pay and so then we can say that maybe internet is also going through the same transformation starting with ads and then moving into a more and more direct model

40. 17:38

    yeah i mean it's definitely going through a transformation i don't know that a lot of i mean when you think about like art or content creation uh 500 years ago it was only through patronage right it's like basically a rich king or rich uh a rich duchess would basically hire an artist like michelangelo or somebody else say hey you're gonna paint this this chapel or you're gonna paint this art for me or you're gonna paint my face which is actually what they were mostly doing at the time uh so it was patronage

41. 18:03

    which was a kind of dire consumer revenue except that the consumer was actually seven people uh because they were the only one who could afford that uh then we moved to uh maybe public good like i don't know about the us because i'm not from here as you might have guessed but like at least in france for the longest time radio waves and tv ways were actually uh public and so basically they were funded by government so the content was itself fundamental

42. 18:25

    i don't know if that's better than ads because that would also mean that the messages were uh tailored for the payer but in the end i think the lesson here is pretty clear it's like no matter what the content is going to be informed by who pays for this and so if it's government then it might actually end up being propaganda if it's the if it's the the advertisers the content is going to be targeted or done for advertisers more than it does for consumers

43. 18:51

    and so in a world where yeah i mean it's it's kind of frustrating but in a world where consumers pay for stuff they get to decide what they want to see which i think is in many ways sometimes something that we actually want to have more rather than some advertisers deciding what kind of content we're allowed to see i've i've got a quick question on the whole membership economy and kind of the broken business model that is ads um i i think i think we all have consensus that the ads model is pretty broken and

44. 19:20

    it and it sucks and it has like a lot of negative ramifications um but one kind of challenge that i've had um when thinking about the membership economy is that um i mean it makes sense like it makes sense as to have uh to something like this but um because of the way the internet's been built and the fact that all of this stuff is free um it's it's allowed many folks who perhaps

45. 19:44

    um didn't have the funds to be able to kind of support creators and stuff like this to be able to access this stuff and so if we entirely move to a membership um economy by default um a lot of people who can't afford um to support creators will probably get um uh won't be able to get the same access that they do today so like my question is like how do you beat free because i completely agree that everything's screwed up

46. 20:07

    like how do you beat free yeah so it's it's a very good question it's definitely one of the challenges that i've i've been thinking a lot about this and i think the misconceptions that's actually it's free like uh free content there's a price uh it's actually i mean first there's actually a very tangible price like in the us uh at this point half of bandwidth to news website actually spend for ads so you go to you load a page on say

47. 20:29

    i don't know uh let's take business insider right half of your bandwidth to download that page is actually consumed by ads bandwidth actually has a cost like you actually pay for this in your cell phone subscription uh right now i'm using google fi it's about 10 bucks per gigabyte so that means that i'm literally paying five dollars per gigabyte for ads so basically rather than actually pay for ads i pay for the

48. 20:53

    midway for these ads which is kind of insane if you think about this it's like a very backward way of doing things so that's the first cost but there's a ton of other costs like and the team at brave actually did an amazing job on that front where they identified that there's actually battery costs like running code for ads consumes your battery that's energy cost that's also kind of means that your cell phone has to be more expensive because it's going to be running more i mean basically more cpu cycles so you need a bigger cpu you need more memory

49. 21:18

    and so you end up paying a more expensive device just to see ads so you don't pay for content which is again like completely backwards if you think about this but let's see even a higher a higher understanding of things how much you think advertisers make from you on a monthly basis as a normal web user in the us i mean when you when you think about this and i know if you have that number

50. 21:41

    but basically uh google makes and google is by far the best at monetizing with ads they make about 20 bucks a month per user in the us which is a decent amount but it's actually not outrageous if you remove uh if you remove the next one is actually facebook and they see sasha's comment here or abel's comment sorry uh the next one is actually facebook facebook i think at this point is making about

51. 22:04

    10 bucks a month uh per user uh in the us so yeah that i mean good but again like not crazy the rest all together is about making 10 bucks as well so basically if you decide hey i want to see no ads 0 ads and i want to cover the cost of this it would be just 40 bucks which is yes a lot of money for a lot of people but if you just account for this that it's already half of it is paid in

52. 22:26

    bandwidth that's only actually an extra cost of 20 bucks and so basically for 20 bucks you remove all of the externalities of ads i think that actually might be a good deal uh so generally i think the misconception is like around the fact that it's free it's not free we pay for this in many different forms uh and in practice though uh the externalities there's a ton of costs that we actually have trouble measuring like i mean again like i don't want to go to

53. 22:49

    find politics but like the the fact that people kind of hate on each other on the web is a direct consequence of the business model like what amount of energy spent arguing about things that are not worth arguing about just because basically the incentives for creators or for people participating in the channel is to actually be aggressive toward one another this is a huge cost uh and to me that's definitely a thing that we should think

54. 23:12

    about more when we do that kind of things yeah i completely agree i think negativity sells so like um these the way that these kind of um systems are designed means that um you know they want people to be polarized because polarized means eyeballs and eyeballs means engagement and engagement means ads i completely agree yeah i think you're bang on the money there and it's interesting that you bring up all of these things here

55. 23:37

    because um i get i guess in i didn't really understand this fully i didn't really appreciate this until brave came about and kind of broke this stuff down but yeah you're totally right there are so many different um uh you know costs that we paid people just don't see yeah yeah that's a really good point i really like that yeah and i mean and maybe the biggest hidden cost is like the fact that we're actually wasting so much time on the

56. 23:58

    internet like since it's all done for to attract our eyes like if we spend maybe i don't know i mean an hour less per day or 15 minutes 15 minutes less per day that actually is 15 minutes that we could spend doing something more productive in many cases uh and so uh i mean we're all working from home at this point i'm sure there's a ton of people that end up being kind of lost in scrolling on twitter or scrolling on social web who would actually be more productive if

57. 24:24

    the incentive for twitter and the rest of the social web was less about getting your attention and more about providing value and and so these are all externalities that we need to think about when we say hey this is free otherwise it's like no it's not free there's actually a cost that is maybe hard to surface but i think in aggregate if we move away from that model we're going to see how costly that was that actually was i loved it yeah yeah that's it i love

58. 24:48

    your framing it's a really good way of framing it um i i do still think that um uh like this is a good step forward but i think also like um i guess i could go i could go more but i don't want to hold up the conversation in fact you should probably sync up and post this stuff to kind of go deeper but i have some more thoughts on this but i all of this to say is um i really like your framing and i really like the way

59. 25:10

    you put this i mean i think this is a great step forward i think this is a really good thing that should exist yeah definitely uh maybe one one little caveat and so there's the cost of paying for stuff but i think the biggest cost is actually not so much about paying for things like when you go to say netflix i mean yes it's i think it's 10 bucks or 81 bucks a month right now that's this but maybe the biggest cost is actually the friction like the fact that i have to sign up uh put it on my all of my devices put my

60. 25:37

    credit card number in there yes i'll do this for netflix because i'm going to spend enough time on there but will i do that for every single newspaper even though if they charge like one or two dollars probably not the biggest cost for me is not so much dollars that it is friction and it's also in a way the fact that they want so much information from me like a lot of cases when you have to sign up for a service they ask for your date of birth your your kids name your you know what i mean your gender and sometimes like hey why do you care about this like i just

61. 26:01

    want to pay for this let me pay don't ask anything from me and so this friction is also kind of an artifact of the attention economy where there was an incentive to get capture as much value but i think if we move away uh from advertisement or from attention as a driver we also need to think more about reducing friction and so i think that's definitely one of the things that makes conversion rates and prices higher at this point is because there is so much friction if you go to a page and you have to put

62. 26:26

    your credit card number and your create an account and confirm your email and then do that over and over again you're not going to you're not going to convert many many times if on the other end it was much easier much simple kind of a one-click thing that means that people would convert more become members more often which means that prices could go down as well which creates kind of a virtual loop sorry a virtuous loop where all of a sudden the more con the more members there are the cheaper the price is which

63. 26:51

    means that the prices can go i mean the conversions go higher which means that there's even more members and that i think would be a much more virtuous loop for the economy for the web economy where you you don't end up paying 10 bucks for everything you end up paying like two three dollars for some of the stuff that you care about which actually might take the cost of memberships down i love it i love it yeah i i see the value here because you've kind of packaged it really well in that

64. 27:14

    and this is essentially reducing the friction therefore making the membership economy a lot more successful because you're right again another hidden cost there where every time you go to a new uh news outlet you have to put your email credit card all of this um stuff again and again again and that creates friction and that prevents more that prevents more people from actually paying for content and so this is lowering the barriers for that

65. 27:38

    exactly and so so maybe let's uh let's move to demo so uh we couple weeks ago we actually launched an experiment with forbes the large uh publisher here in the us where you can unlock a net free experience uh that uh thing was actually taken down this week uh because they're maintaining some stuff it's gonna come back late uh later so i'll do another demo uh which actually might be uh might be interesting uh for you guys so let me see if i uh can you see my screen now uh yep i think

66. 28:02

    you oh yes can you see my screen uh yep yep so i'll maybe i'll show you these links in the in the chat room so you can go there as well uh and maybe i should have mentioned this uh the way we can actually reduce friction uh and at the same time ensure the permissionlessness aspect of monetization on the web because i think it's actually critical that nobody owns this is by using blockchain uh so at unlock we currently use ethereum we're actually pretty happy with theorem

67. 28:26

    uh at some point we might use near who knows but yeah we use ethereum the benefit of this is like now when you go to a website you don't have to create an account your wallet is your identity in some way and so not only it's your identity but it's your way to pay for stuff and so that means that any creator can easily put a lock on their website and that's what unlock provides basically an easy way for people to create a smart contract that they put on their website that allows them to monetize so this guy is actually an artist from

68. 28:51

    mexico uh i think we have people from mexico here he's a musician and i would incentivize you to go to that page uh the idea is like uh he put his music there but he locks the music so you can listen to the first 32 seconds uh which i'm going to do here i'm going to try to see if i can can you hear the music not your no can anyone hear the music or yeah cool so 32 seconds i can listen to this but after 32 seconds is actually going to stop so i'll go all the

69. 29:16

    way i can listen to more the only way i can listen to more is by unlocking this so i'm going to click on that button here what's going on here oh yeah and so basically he's telling me hey i'm going to charge you 0.01 each which is at this point about two dollars uh maybe two dollars something for uh i think that's uh five years or yep five yeah five years uh so i'm unlocking this piece of music for five years and it's it's very easy i'm just click on here and metamask

70. 29:42

    which is my crypto what uh is going to pop up say hey do you want to pay uh for this uh gas price is extremely high today but we'll take uh i mean it doesn't matter we can pay less uh uh here so i'm gonna do that uh and so i'm gonna pay basically 2.09 uh cents for him for his music and then about three cents uh to the network uh you know let's actually uh uh pay a bit more so actually it can go

71. 30:06

    uh there and then as soon as i've done this basically the content is unlocked so you say hey thanks for your purchase can you hit continue and you can look at now the the the the the kind of the the the cd i guess the disc is playing and you can see that i got now four minutes worth of music so i can actually listen to the rest of his music uh here cool i don't know if you can hear this but yeah what's really in it shows unlocked here

72. 30:30

    obviously as a status what's really cool about this is actually that content is actually hosted on ipfs so it's completely permissionless decentralized uh he publishes his music and i'm able to actually uh listen to his music pay him for the music so he actually got two bucks for me or he's gonna get two bucks for me uh sometime soon what we've done at unlock is we decided to and that's actually one of the challenges of blockchain is like the idea of finality the idea of like the transaction being mined

73. 30:53

    we basically say hey for two bucks nobody's going to cheat or yes someone is going to cheat from time to time but it doesn't matter the friction here has to be taken down which is why we do this thing optimistic unlocking where even though the transaction is not final we're able to kind of already know that it's going to eventually happen and then unlock the content any question about the experience here i was just going to ask about the timing but you already said that so

74. 31:18

    so you unlock it before the actual transaction happens yes exactly we're able to look i mean the transaction is uh is uh in some way what's in the transaction is deterministic where we can actually know what's going to happen at any point based on the state of the chain and so if we know right this is the state of the chain if this would go through now it would be mine so we assume that that user is actually paying for this has enough on there on their account and so basically we're going to do that a couple times uh and then eventually the transaction

75. 31:42

    will go through if we find that the transaction would fail then we would immediately lock back and say hey no no you're cheating here you're trying to tell us that you're paying but you're actually not paying for real i mean it's not magic credit card actually works the same way right when you go to the bank or so the bank to the store and you purchase something of your card the money is actually not taken from your

76. 31:59

    bank right away it's taken from your bank sometimes up to 30 days later because they have a system in place that kind of allows them to assess how likely is the fact that the transaction will go through even if you use a debit card it's usually not instant there's a couple uh kind of minutes for the transaction to actually be taken from your bank account uh which is the same mechanism that we use here and good question why do we not see that much

77. 32:21

    of the credit card enabled workflow on the internet is it because the chargebacks and how expensive it is that micro payments are not possible essentially so yes that's one of the things uh first uh quaker are actually much i mean quite hard to use outside of a very small number of countries like yes the us you can use tribe it's great stripe is actually i think available at most in 30 countries at this point which means that a lot of countries actually left out of that of that world and then you said it's

78. 32:46

    basically the cost of the stripe or the credit card infrastructure is so high that for two dollars that would actually not be worth it like basically charging me two dollars here uh means that he would basically give i mean 50 cents to credit card companies for that for that for for that sake which is kind of a lot of money in that case so so quick question for me you know i'm sure we're going to get into

79. 33:08

    the fungibility of you know the keys which yes i have some background on your company so okay we have we haven't got there yet um but my one question is you know why aren't you using a wire or now recently announced circle pay like why why ethereum i mean it sounds so much like so much overhead when you could literally use the underlying network which is what you're talking about but with an actual

80. 33:32

    stable and you know some onboard that people do understand right like an apple or google pay yeah so that's actually something i'll show you later it's actually part of the one of my demos but yeah we do allow people to pay your credit card and then eventually with apple pay google pay or any of these uh other other systems it's definitely something that we're working on uh soon so i mean i'll show you the demo after after this if you if you don't like awesome thanks cool uh let me let me maybe show you

81. 33:56

    another another example um this guy chris black uh actually writes a lot about defy and has done a bunch of videos uh that he's locked basically say hey you can't watch my tutorials about uh this one is about chai which is a an interest uh it's a stable coin with an interest rate think of it like savings accounts basically and so you can you cannot watch that full video unless you become a member to his blog and so basically you would pay

82. 34:19

    to die which i think is uh kind of starting to move into the your question can an uh is basically the idea is that he's using a stable coin here and so i'm gonna i'm gonna just do that if i click on that button and say hey you wanna pay to die for seven days i'm gonna say yes so i'm gonna i hope i've die on that account uh so there's actually two transactions here i need to first allow him to spend my die and the second time is actually purchasing uh the membership here i'm gonna confirm and you'll see that immediately uh you've

83. 34:43

    seen in the back the video appeared and i can actually pay play the the the tutorial that he has i mean i don't know yeah and so now i can learn about uh i can learn about uh about chai right cool that makes sense this is awesome so same kind of experience very easily he's locked i mean he's recorded his video actually put it on vimeo and then put a lock on it and so that allows only the members to actually view

84. 35:07

    the content so he's monetizing with this rather than actually putting ads in the middle of the content which we could do obviously but i would always kind of raise this question of like hey are these ads paying for your content uh is the stuff that you put in there kind of trusted or that kind of thing like now that i pay for this i become the customer which i think is a good uh is a good way cool any any any question about that experience

85. 35:31

    no we'll do it on youtube or because youtube has its own advertising yeah exactly so you could actually do something similar on youtube where you would basically record the youtube video uh but then you would have to embed that video on your own website because youtube doesn't support the protocol per se so you embed the video on your own website and then manage the uh the playback on your own website so that's possible it's a bit harder uh but yeah that's definitely possible here

86. 35:56

    make sense eventually we do hope that youtube implements uh the unlocked protocol as well like allow me as a youtuber to kind of put my luck on my own uh videos and then stream from there cool another example that i like very much uh and actually this kind of let me uh let me toggle too i'm using ethereum as you know and i've got a bunch of accounts and so i'm going to switch to an account that actually is not a member so the guys at scout scan is basically a company building dashboards

87. 36:20

    and so what i will show here is like locks are not just about content they can be about software itself there's stuff that are locked features that i like that i cannot use unless i'm a member of that software and so that's what scout did basically so that dashboard is locked and you would uh kind of unlock the membership uh to get access to dashboard that account doesn't have eso i can't purchase the membership but if i toggle to another account uh you'll see that i have a membership here

88. 36:42

    that that that kind of uh segues into the uh the question that uh canaan had about uh about uh about uh nfts so the way the membership is actually represented is through an nftn so that account is a member and you can see that since i'm a member i've got the entity in my wallet and i can see all of that all of the dashboard now and see what's going on here uh so non-functional token i think is a critical uh element of the of the of the discussion here so as i've

89. 37:06

    discussed basically membership are represented as nfts and you see that the things that i purchased are now uh are now uh final so i'll actually go there uh you'll see that uh i've received so when i purchased the key to the to chris black's uh video stream uh you can see that i've transferred about two i mean about two two diax likely from my account to his lock which is the smart contract that he deployed

90. 37:31

    for his membership and in return i received uh a brand new nft nfc number 44 uh to my address uh for his lock basically and so that nft is mine i can click on this and you'll see that i'm actually able to view that i purchased it two minutes ago and it's token id 44. uh let's actually go now to openc which i'm sure you know is uh basically a a non-fungible store and that's what starts to be interesting uh so i'm gonna basically go to the nft

91. 37:56

    of that uh membership so you'll see that it's basically the child tutorial or i should have clicked on this um you'll see all of the type stores but like basically the tech tutorial nft that i just purchased here it's a token 44 and it's here on on on on open c can anyone paste their ethereum address in in here in the chat room mean i hope somebody has an econ address i'm i'm finding mine i'm going to send it oh yeah cool i'm trying to log in with near sorry

92. 38:28

    and so what i'm going to show here is like uh obviously i'm a member of chris oh great uh sasha are you going to get this uh so uh i'm going to do i should beat me yeah so what i'm going to do here is oops i click too fast uh i'm going to i'm going to gift uh i'm going to gift you uh the chai membership uh sasha so i'm going gonna transfer this obviously this is a transaction so metamask in the pub say hey do you want to transfer this again gas gas gas fees are pretty high today i think there's a lot of activity

93. 38:53

    going on on chain and we could talk about like why near would be better in that case but i'm going to transfer that membership to you uh sasha so you're gonna get it in a hopefully in a couple seconds uh i mean it says one minute but let's let's see uh here and what's gonna happen after this is like basically i am not going up uh did you go through no not yet after this what that means is i'm not gonna be a member anymore so that means that i will not be able to play chris's video anymore but then sasha can because sasha is a member after this

94. 39:18

    does that make sense and so sasha if you want to go to that page right now you'll see that it should be locked for you because the transaction has not the transfer has not happened uh let's actually refresh it let's wait a couple more seconds hopefully it's going to happen soon um you see here why i'm very frustrated with etherscan i've been telling them that they should use unlock to monetize their stuff rather than actually put these dumb ads i don't know what that's for

95. 39:40

    but i mean there's a ton of like pro features on etherscan which could actually be monetized via membership by a lock say hey you want to uh i don't know view the inspect what's going on in the uh in the input data here you could do that it's a pro feature and you unlock uh etherscan gold for like i don't know five dollar a month and then you get access to these features uh i think uh this hasn't went through yet let's uh

96. 40:04

    oh yeah it did so um you see that the transition actually the nft number 44 was transferred from my account to sasha's account if i go back to that video and refresh the page hopefully yep you see that i cannot play the video anymore because i'm not a member anymore and so i would have to unlock it again uh here but sasha i think can you confirm if you go to that page that you can actually play the video uh as well no i'm trying to see so i'm on the page trying to refresh it and

97. 40:30

    you need to click on the button uh because it needs to know about your identity so click on there but it will immediately say hey you're a member and then that should be fine oh i see uh unclickable video connect so connecting to metamask yep you need to yeah minimize needs to know where you are oh yeah i got into video right away exactly cool right that's awesome so so one of the little

98. 40:54

    nose video yeah so so that what are the cool things about here is like remember what i did here i unlocked this video and actually that nft is vetted for seven days so that means that basically i've got seven days to watch the videos uh i can watch it 50 times basically if i do that uh for seven days but after seven days that turns that membership is not valid anymore one thing that's really cool about unlock is like i could transfer my membership only

99. 41:18

    partially i could actually have sent to sasha rather than sending my seven days which i did here or six days and 23 hours and whatever 52 minutes i could have transferred to him only say 10 minutes so my membership would have been reduced by 10 minutes and then sasha's membership would have been extended by 10 minutes so since he didn't have anything he would have had one valid for 10 minutes that's really useful in the context of paywall so like we discussed this earlier today uh

100. 41:41

     paywalls obviously are frustrating because you end up there and you can't read the content but one thing that you can do with unlocks like i can share a link with you guys and say hey here is 10 minutes worth of my time for you to read that article and so that's actually a very helpful way to kind of share content between people as a way to say hey here's stuff that i think you should read and here's a little time off of my membership that you get if you want to purchase your own you can obviously

101. 42:04

     but at least you can get a little bit of my time from this what's really cool about this maybe even further than what i what i described here is the idea that you can as a publisher you can capture some of the time you can re-monetize that transfer so here chris black is not doing this but he could have said hey every time somebody transfers a membership we will burn some of the time so if you

102. 42:25

     transfer seven days i'll burn one day so that means that if i go and transfer my membership from from my account to to sasha now sasha i sent seven days sasha only received six days because chris has burnt one day on the way the benefit of doing this is that it means that if we go back and forth enough at some point our membership would have expired and so that means that he would we would have either sasha or me would have to purchase a new one and so that's a way for creators to monetize

103. 42:50

     a secondary market of membership and i think that's actually something that's huge and has a ton of impact uh down the line around these kind of things yeah have a quick question off that if uh can you guys hear me okay yep sweet um so yeah thank you for that julian and you know i deal with you know primary secondary markets every day you know i i deal with the nft space from the gaming perspective and a lot of questions i get rightly so

104. 43:14

     from creators and gamers and you know game developers is well even if i'm monetizing the secondary market i'm still competing with it the primary and secondary are in effect competing and the way you get around that in nfts is you sell boxes you sell packs you sell chances at skins you have daily shops but in your model um how do you get around that because your primary market

105. 43:39

     which is them selling access is always competing with the secondary market them selling access and you know it like let's say i bought a lifetime membership they don't want me to transfer that that's how they make money is no people buying lifetimes they want you to transfer it if they can't recapture some of the time they actually want you to to transfer it if they can recapture some other time which is what i just explained like basically the idea that if you if you've got a hundred years membership and you

106. 44:02

     transfer this and every time you do so you lose two years is actually something that they want because that means that they can monetize that transfer much but so so you're okay so okay okay but let's work it down math right let's say the 100 year membership cost a hundred dollars yep and i can in the second guy can sell can can go buy a hundred dollar membership or he can buy the 98 years left on my membership for five dollars because i'm done with it he's

107. 44:33

     obviously going to buy the five dollar option sure the creator can take off two years but you understand how effectively they just lost 95 but but why would you sell yours for five dollars that's the thing that i don't understand like this is crazy because i'm done yeah but no i understand but but but in in practice you're you're the one who's living 95 off of the table here not the creator not the publisher like basically the idea is like you're

108. 44:57

     wasting your thing i actually do think that one of the models that eventually will emerge is like most creators will send long-term membership and you'll see people kind of rent membership by the hour by the day so rather so i'll purchase like 100 years worth of netflix and then i'll sell by the day uh my monthly my my netflix membership at a much higher rate than what i would do uh if i divided 100 years times 365 days

109. 45:22

     for my membership the idea is like now the short-term membership is actually more expensive on a unit basis than the long-term membership and that's exactly what we want here i mean think about i i mean i don't know how old you are but like the blockbuster dates right like how did like dvd rental work exactly like that basically the studios the studios would basically sell uh thousands or hundreds of thousands of dvds

110. 45:46

     to stores uh and kind of recoup immediately their costs saying hey we're not taking any risks beyond this so as creator i'm selling all of my content uh to the two stores and then stores are taking the risk of renting the dvds by the hour or by the day and i think that's exactly the kind of model that we can now have again here where you've got kind of people taking risks around content that are purchasing all of the content or as long as

111. 46:10

     possible of the content and then selling kind of the content in pcs to people who are interested in this because a creator is generally not the person distributing their work like if you think about a journalist most of them work through newspapers because they're not interested in working in distribution they're actually interested in writing content so when you purchase uh when you create your membership you'll say hey all right i'll sell memberships are only 10 years and i'm going to sell them for a thousand bucks

112. 46:34

     what happens after this if i've sold enough it's not my problem in some way like i'd much rather have people redistribute my content because that means that i'm increasing my reach and that means that later on i'm gonna i'm gonna get more subscribers more members more paying people for my long-term content yeah no no it makes sense you know just supply and demand and if you you know make the supply uh you know decreasing enough such that that recoup

113. 46:59

     time is you know enough percentage then obviously it will balance it exactly that's that's in the end exactly this but like i think the critical aspect is the idea that the creator is usually not the distributor so the the creator is usually not the merchant so that's they'll do one membership long-term thing if you want to do this you get it and then we'll end up having a lot of businesses actually doing the job of uh slicing basically long-term membership into short-term memberships

114. 47:25

     make sense yeah thank you um let's go back to the presentation uh so yeah basically i think we went through this but basically all of these membership aren't unfundable token one really cool thing about the non-functional token as you know is like they've got metadata associated with them which means that as a creator i can actually ask stuff for my from my members so i don't know like if i'm doing music i might want to know uh i mean i don't know if i'm let's say i'm

115. 47:48

     doing a conference rather than music and i won't sell tickets as memberships i can ask the t-shirt size and the t-shirt size is basically something that i would put inside of the nft's metadata and that is something that actually is very very cool because that allows me the creator to kind of ask for my members optional information or maybe even make it required i don't think it's usually worth it but that allows me to kind of communicate with these members in kind of unique ways and get information from them that

116. 48:12

     they want to disclose and so rather than actually use some kind of other system the nft itself the members card become the thing that we use to exchange value which i think is extremely interesting in that context cool so yeah one thing that i want to uh basically close on is that the idea that the membership economy can be completely decentralized and so that's definitely one of the things that uh enables or is enabled by by

117. 48:37

     by by blockchain and permissionless similarly like basically as a creator you can deploy your own membership uh put it anywhere you want on your website inside of your app on the chat room uh in the physical space i didn't show you this but you can actually generate qr code from memberships from nfts which allows you then to kind of prove that you have the ownership the membership in the physical world they're programmable which is the kind of thing that we described around the idea of splitting them in pcs because they're

118. 49:00

     based on time they can also plug them in different smart contracts so you can have a smart contract that basically updates the price of the membership based on how many memberships have been sold and so you create a bonding curve the id's like hey i've got my blog the first membership is gonna be one buck the second one is gonna be two bucks the third one is gonna be three bucks

119. 49:15

     and that's something that's easy to do uh by using blockchain uh because you can actually have these composibility aspects which would not be possible to do if the membership is sitting on a database because that means that i have to implement this when it's something that i could use there and then maybe more importantly i think it may be critical here is the idea that they're fun like all of a

120. 49:31

     sudden there's a whole world of possibilities that were completely outside of the the realm of thing that could be done that become possible uh when you use uh crypto and blockchain based memberships cool i think that that wraps it up uh please follow us on github and on twitter uh you got the both of these uh things here uh and uh yeah i'd love to i'd love to hear from you guys uh

121. 49:55

     um either now or maybe later as well because i think we're running out of time four minutes i'm really curious julian like like if you see like a like a healthy tension or competition between like you know just the brave way of doing things of like you know the whole like like where does attention and membership intersect and like what that like compatibility looks like yeah so i mean uh definitely there's an intersection

122. 50:19

     here uh so brave is two things in my mind it's on one side it's the web browser and i actually i'm a huge fan of the browser in itself the idea that they're putting inside the browser a lot of decentralization technology including wallets but eventually also i think ipf ads and bunch of other things blocking ads which i think is definitely valuable and then brave is also the bat ecosystem and bat i think is actually not the most uh

123. 50:43

     well-informed approach the idea of monetizing attention is exactly what you're trying to move away from and so basic attention token bats i think doesn't do enough on that front yes it's cleaner it means that uh ads are more respectful but in the end the incentives for creator are still to get more of my attention and i think that's actually a problem that said that is an erc20 so nothing prevents you and actually i've done that from deploying your own

124. 51:07

     bat based lock so you can charge bats for membership you say hey i want five bats for my members every time they want to become members and that's definitely something you can do uh right out of the box with unlock at this point so competition might be a big word uh definitely aspects that are i think uh good on both sides but definitely working together yes it's it's possible today um i don't know how much time we have

125. 51:32

     left to uh go more into questions i'm happy to stick around if we're going to do that but um i just want to say like i just listening to your talk here in the the whole conversation i really really appreciate your views on this and i think you you like you really get it like you really understand this and um yeah i i'm just a big fan of everything that we spoke about the nfts and um uh your approach with unlock i think it's i think it's amazing i was just in the chat like saying this is

126. 51:57

     like freaking cool um thank you one kid yeah yeah no problem no problem um one question i do have um is uh when will it connect i know we yeah i know we had this discussion before it is there uh so it's it's there in a strange way uh it is there on the paywalls uh maybe i'll send you a demo after this uh one thing that yeah uh i'll send you a demo but yeah it's actually working

127. 52:20

     uh it's a bit different from what you probably expect uh for a bunch of reasons so one thing will be done so far is when people put a lock on their own uh on their own websites uh obviously uh they might not have their own favorite web3 provider and in that case we will provide uh can one which is the unlock account and what we're moving into the direction now is the idea of allowing creators to

128. 52:43

     actually specify the provider that they want to use and so they can say hey i don't have a provider on my website myself but then i want to use what i connect and in that way now what it can actually actually works with unlock i'll post i'll post a link after this and then uh i mean it's actually something that we're going to write on our blog pre next week awesome i'm excited um i can't wait to see that yes

129. 53:07

     um also i mean i have another question but i don't want to hold it up too much um if anyone else has a question oh girlfriend yeah awesome wicked um yeah so i guess i guess my um my question is is around um like how how do you how do you how do you explain this stuff how do you make this stuff understandable because you know specifically with your ether ex ethos scanning example right so ether scan

130. 53:30

     to my knowledge is completely free as of today right am i correct yeah okay perfect great i think yeah yeah completely free and it's an ad run ad run business so yes um it's it's i mean etherscan is like undoubtedly a really strong um tool for the ethereum ecosystem and just um amazing tool where you can just yeah super duper valuable right um and so you want something like that to be like super duper accessible to everyone

131. 53:54

     um but everything we just discussed is that um you know there's hidden costs and you know we're we're paying for that and we don't realize that um how do you how do you so i think yeah yeah i think premium is the answer here like users can i mean as you said extremely valuable too for the ethereum ecosystem there's a ton of features that are actually used by only a small fraction which are like the pro advanced users like i mean i showed you this but like

132. 54:18

     showing the details of a transaction i don't know that anybody i mean i go look at the api calls and the but most people don't right like and so i think these are stuff that you could say hey you know what this is a paid for product uh verifying smart contracts is definitely a thing that actually is costly for them because it actually involves some stuff on their end which they wouldn't have i mean which they could easily charge for because like again normal users were doing just verification of the transaction might actually not care about the pro

133. 54:43

     version but having kind of the extended version of the free stuff i think is extremely valuable as well so for me it's membership is definitely flexible enough that you can have maybe a free version and a paid version but even like a free version and many paid versions you can imagine in the world like hey there's ether scan for nft and you unlock the nft interface on ether scan and an easier scan for esc 20s and you

134. 55:06

     unlock the erc20 interface on ecoscan we're actually chatting with a bunch of wallets in the ethereum world you have a similar idea where you can unlock some specific features in your wallet that would just that would be just uh for members of a specific lock gotcha yeah so making making making that process of of um adding tiers and memberships a lot more frictionless i think is the big the big selling point here exactly and that allows also for experiments right like it means that they can do many things and then kind of

135. 55:38

     change their i mean change their strategy over and over like you can have right now membership for for pro stuff that eventually evolves and includes more features or another kind of membership that you introduced later you can also transfer members from one to another these are things that are actually extremely possible and extremely easy going back to the programmable aspect of the chain

136. 55:55

     uh i didn't show you this but like obviously this is a smart contract it's all on an ether scan it's verified we provide the apis which means that people can easily kind of hook that on i mean basically use that in their own application in ways that they want and so these programmable aspects maybe i should have insisted more on that i definitely think that can be implemented by everyone in different ways gotcha um and i don't know julian do you have

137. 56:18

     um time for one more question a few more questions or um how do you like yeah i'm available for a couple of minutes yeah sorry okay awesome awesome yeah i'm i'm loving this energy and like i'm i'm really enjoying this conversation um i guess i guess i'd be curious to hear your thoughts on like what's your vision of the ideal internet do you think um the ideal internet looks like um a freemium one where um something that unlock is like everywhere around the internet and like

138. 56:42

     every different website has um tiers of like you know free stuff but then also has like tiers of premium stuff like how do you see this yeah i mean definitely there is a world in which that's the case maybe the most ideal version for me is a world in which there's bundles in which like rather actually pay for many different websites i pay once for all of the website that i care about and it's also also something that's really easy to do with unlock like once you've deployed a locker smart contract i can put it on my

139. 57:06

     one website and i can give you the address and you put it on your own web charging i mean if somebody pays for my content they'll also get your content as well for free we can definitely have an agreement together say hey we'll do 50 50 or we have a dio which actually splits the revenue using roles that we decide so for me the ideal world eventually is one where yes we pay for stuff more than we are paid for stuff in some way uh which is kind of weird uh because i

140. 57:30

     again don't want to be sold to advertiser or anything like this so it's a world in which yes i pay for this uh but at the same time it's a world in which it's kind of frictionless easy and end up and can also end up pretty cheap for most people um yeah maybe that's coming back to the question that uh earlier uh mike i think asked or about the about bat one thing that i think is uh we should

141. 57:54

     not i mean we should not uh i mean that i should insist on is the idea that whoever purchase i mean the on the smart contract the method to purchase a membership is actually called purchase for most of the time you purchase for yourself like i'm going to purchase for me i'm going to purchase for i mean my own membership but i can also purchase something for you guys as well so i say hey all right i want to purchase a membership for for for sasha i can actually purchase the membership for sasha so i'm the one sending this

142. 58:18

     selection and he gets the nft right away the benefit of this i think is that you can open the door to maybe a smarter way to do advertisements where rather than actually pay the creator you support you subsidize the customers of the creator and in that world basically you have a much healthier thing where the creator is still working for the consumer but the consumer themselves if they want to disclose information or kind of see ads then they can because the creator is

143. 58:42

     going to pay their memberships if that makes sense yeah i like that i like that so instead of kind of going the ad model where um you're kind of paying for attention of the user um the advertiser trying to get the attention of the user would essentially subsidize the the product for the customer exactly exactly i mean just just in your ejection i mean that's that's pretty much what happens today right maybe not

144. 59:06

     that exact model but that is the freemium model of course right where the you know advertisers in effect adding you know google ad network to your site does subsidize the eyeballs right instead of charging them membership yeah but i don't have to explain devil's advocate here they're actually not no i think it's actually a very different model like in that case uh the advertiser is actually paying the creator they're not paying me to pay the creator they're paying the

145. 59:29

     creator which actually is very different because it means that now for the creator i am the i'm the thing that they're selling to the advertiser yeah the product right yep i end up being the product well rather than actually be the the actual consumer of content no i mean i can't i can't yeah sorry no i was gonna say do you have any counterpoints for that i'd be curious to hear your arguments and thoughts around

146. 59:58

     this oh me oh uh well you know look i understand the psychology is different but i think the end result is the same right the end result in either case is look the end user viewing something has to be monetized from a creative standpoint i agree with you that i think um you know from the perspective of if i put g ads on my site you know my my propensity as an advertiser or you know as a content creator it can get as much data from the end user as possible

147. 1:00:30

     now and i don't get a choice as a consumer then i cannot choose like i go to your website i'm going to be i mean my attention and data is going to be stolen right in that in that scenario in the other scenario it's the opposite right i get a choice of paying for your stuff and then say hey i'm going to pay for this don't steal my data don't sell my attention i'm going to pay for this and there's also a world in which i'm going to pay for this and you necessarily don't know

148. 1:00:53

     about this but like that money is coming from somebody else is coming from an advertiser that actually is paying me or giving me money for me to purchase your stuff it's a completely different flow i think it's actually more than i mean it's more than the psychology it's actually the incentives are completely different okay i mean now you as a creator is not trying to get data from me you're trying

149. 1:01:17

     to get business from me which is a very different thing yeah but but why why would i as the creator want to have you opt-in to a model in which the advertiser pays for you to see ads rather than just forcing you that choice you you don't opt into that model you you from your perspective as a creator you actually don't see where the money is coming from you don't know that this money is because i earned it

150. 1:01:41

     through work or because i earned it through giving away some attention ah you don't i see what you're saying so you're saying you're saying this is a completely user-facing choice yes exactly it's the user who decides how they pay for things and so they couldn't so i see you're saying a user can pay 50 cents and get untargeted ads they're free and they can enter all their info and get targeted ads or they can pay five dollars and no access exactly like basically they get to

151. 1:02:06

     choose a sliding scale i see exactly and then the advertiser could actually even decide what kind of content they want to uh kind of subsidize in some way through me it's like i don't know if i'm a brand that actually cares about uh the environment i will not uh kind of subsidize content from a publication that's against the environment i don't know if that makes sense uh which is something that's actually very hard to do right now and that was exactly the way that's

152. 1:02:30

     that's actually that's actually not a bad value proposition now that i'm thinking that's what you should take to forbes you should take that to forbes and tell them i can guarantee you ten thousand dollars per article per month all you put in is my plug-in and users choose how they want to pay i like that that would actually as an advertiser seem like a coherent argument for why they should use you because it gives them predictable cash flow and they don't care how they get it and they don't have to do any a b testing

153. 1:02:55

     of what really works and what gives them that cash flow yep okay i'll take it that's pretty much exactly what happened with forbes right like you removed the ads by getting a subscription right so yep bought on and the cpa is actually much higher which is good for them that was really funny to see twitter by the way um like people were so confused when they're like why is forbes

154. 1:03:20

     asking for my vetted mask while like they thought they were like people were just so confused and then it was like oh my god this is so awesome um yep that's hilarious yeah when when will it uh be coming back you said in a couple of weeks right uh we hope in a couple weeks they're basically changing a bunch of their stuff on their end so hopefully soon i'm excited i didn't get a chance to use it the first time but i'm excited to play with it uh i mean there's obviously

155. 1:03:44

     more than forza like you i mean i'll i've seen a bunch of links actually follow us on twitter because there's going to be a bunch of interesting things coming very very soon already following oh yes definitely awesome excited to see that stuff come out great yeah i i you may have covered this earlier and i apologize i was late but i actually think this is um actually the solution you were just

156. 1:04:10

     talking about is something that's going to come to a head here very quickly there are any number of publications that i want to read a specific author in that i don't want to subscribe to because i'm already subscribed to seven other just like streaming services and i i think that's an incredibly powerful model for me to be able to say yeah i want to read this article i saw on twitter um but i don't want to pay for it i'd rather the advertiser advertise to me i think that's incredibly powerful right now i

157. 1:04:35

     think you're at the right place at the right time yeah there's definitely a bunch of other things like this is one of the options another one that i i think is going to happen at some point is the idea of liquid memberships like i might be i might have membership that i trade back and forth between the stuff that i'm currently reading right so like i read that article and i've got a membership new york times now i go to washington post it's like oh

158. 1:04:52

     fuck i'm going to swap easily mine your time i mean it's an nft right so you can swap an nft for another uh time base so it's like hey i've got one week of york times i'll get seven day on six days of washington post and i can do that transparently as i browse the web i think that's actually also a very powerful way to say hey you know what some stuff i will pay for explicitly and some other stuff i'm actually fine kind of seeing the value uh kind of propagate in a liquid way in some way

159. 1:05:16

     yeah absolutely and and publications could even consider it down to specific uh writers exactly so you could say you could if you could segment it that far the new york times or daily beast or whomever could say well you can subscribe to just this person at a lower rate um and then they know what's driving revenue directly to them and who's doing it yeah and if you at some point you're on another page you say hey we know you got

160. 1:05:40

     the subscription to that other guy do you want to swap this one for this one no you on that article and yeah that's going to cost you a couple cents but if you if you're into this then maybe you'll say sure i'll do this the whole goal is to make it frictionless like let's make it easier and easier to build this kind of experiences because that actually is going to increase conversion rates and make things much much easier for everyone it's fantastic thank you very much

161. 1:06:04

     i i i hope all of these um paid ethereum newsletters start using unlock because i think that would be pretty cool trust me i've been preaching for that uh i have been predicting that yes i mean one of the one of the criticism that i make to the i mean ethereum but i think all of the blockchain ecosystem is like we need to do more dog fooding like i'm i'm i'm 100 i'm i'm very disappointed when i hear a lot of very vocal uh crypto people who don't

162. 1:06:28

     even have a crypto wallet on their phones and who's like how do you how can you preach about a version of the future that you don't even want to live by i mean i see why you do that because you've got a bag uh but it's frustrating that that yeah you're expecting somebody else to kind of create value for your bag 100 yeah uh what's what's the biggest friction point so i know there's a bunch of newsletters out there and i know they um all like either accept eth or they

163. 1:06:52

     accept uh fiat dollars what's the biggest friction for them to adopt something like unlock uh so actually some of them do right like uh for example camila russo the defiant uh you can actually get uh uh i mean a membership right it's like a discount uh yes it's it's exactly she has an og membership oh actually it's pretty cool it's like the first 100 people uh pay 70 days i think she's i mean sold like half of these uh 70

164. 1:07:16

     memberships at this point so yeah uh so that's pretty cool uh we're seeing more and more honestly it's generally it's taking time like we're our stuff as you said like well connect it's the thing that makes it easier and so we're in a phase where we every day we remove some of the friction it's it's obviously taking too much time uh we wish it was faster and easier but we're getting there and that's actually something that we're pretty excited about

165. 1:07:39

     right right and so um uh the biggest friction is is um just the friction unlock or um like for these ethereum okay it's unlocked as a friction i mean i actually didn't show you this we have the credit card thing uh if you've got a couple more minutes i'll share my screen and show you how the credit card actually works it's actually pretty cool yeah i saw that that was pretty cool it was on the um uh the ethereum hack money um hackathon

166. 1:08:02

     so yes you could even pay by credit yeah yeah but i obviously chose die of course uh yeah no it's good but let's assume you i mean it was 50 die let's assume you don't have die in your wallet actually a bunch of people did this so i'm going to show you on this blog it's actually mine but i've got a five minute membership so i can actually do many demos in a row it's much easier

167. 1:08:18

     for me to do these then kind of get rid of my membership and get a new one every time so can i become a member here i'm going to click on that button and i'm using uh chrome which actually has a crypto wallet in it uh and you see that in that wallet here i've got enough e so i could purchase that membership but i don't have enough psi uh because psi is actually going to go away so i need to get rid of that completely but what i can do here is like switch to credit card and then now immediately we're going to show you a fiat price

168. 1:08:41

     which is a lot more than the dollar price because i mean credit cards are taking fees here uh and so i'm going to click here i'm going to put my uh my name actually uh i'm not going to put my credit card here because i'm doing this with you all and i don't want you guys to see my credit card number but you get the idea right actually let me show you on the staging page so i can actually show you

169. 1:08:57

     a credit card uh that actually works right out of the box um i'm clicking here up i need to switch to uh rinkaby obviously obviously because it's a test it's a staging page let's refresh so click on become member uh in same view basically we've got two membership venus is kind of a stable coin on rinkaby and i'm going to use credit card here and pay basically this and i'm going to use a fake credit card number for stripe which actually is this and

170. 1:09:28

     i'm going to hit purchase and you'll see that this transaction will go through very quickly and i'll be able to read that content uh yes hopefully soon very quickly so what's going on here it's taking more time than it should i mean it's gonna happen uh but yeah you get the idea right yeah cool it's taking way too much time i think it might be the demo effect here all right i'll stop it here so i'm

171. 1:09:53

     actually not missing with uh with things weird okay cool all right i got the idea that that was pretty cool yeah it's weird okay i'm no worried about what's going on anyway uh cool any any last question i guess i'm good on my side um this was amazing i don't know if anyone else has any other questions yeah this is great thank you so much yeah thanks again for watching thanks for having me all right chat soon

172. 1:10:23

     of course thank you thanks bye-bye bye see you guys take care take care