From digital artists to podcasters, YouTubers to newsletter writers — creators shape our online and onchain worlds. They require a deep, intuitive toolkit allowing them to reach viewers and collectors alike.
Creators are increasingly excited by new tools for direct community engagement. These new platforms open up possibilities for sharing products, stories, event spaces, or artwork. Breaking from centralized, one-size-fits-all options, they offer programmable ways to build lasting fan enthusiasm.
Quality content creators are the lifeblood of social interaction. Without proper incentives, creator burnout would be even more common. A reimagined internet aligns with creator values, not those of exploitative tech giants.
Unlock Protocol supports onchain creators through subscriptions, event coordination, and simple payment solutions. Here, we explore a diverse set of tools that complement what Unlock currently offers to help creators build their personal tech stack.
This onchain creator toolkit gives creators the option to experience the internet through emerging technology that is built for and by creatives to imagine how, where, when, and why stories of tomorrow are told.
Onchain Creator Tools Landscape
Being a full-time creator is no simple task. Even today, the work involved in making a living from creative acts can be quite daunting due to the fractured environment that often works against rather than with creators.
Creators now think of their work as a standalone business, zapping away at the creative process to survive and thrive. However, taking ownership of each of the building blocks that make up a holistic creator toolkit can be not just fun but incredibly liberating. This is one of the many promises of emerging technology: a more free and open internet for creatives.
Reaching into the onchain creator toolbox, we explore comparisons between centralized tools from companies like Stripe for payments and social tipping, Patreon for tiered subscriptions, Sprout for analytics, and social engagement like X or Instagram and their many onchain counterparts. Decentralized tools, like Paragraph, which offers an alternative to Substack, or Bello for onchain analytics, help better connect with and understand a creator’s audience.
When minting artwork for fans to collect, we often think of marketplaces and minting platforms like Zora, Daylight for growth, and Manifold for custom sites and contracts for artists. We’ll explore how these platforms specifically help to create deeper connections between creatives and their fans to not just own data generated onchain but make that data more useful.
To that end, we explore the full onchain creator toolkit, including subscriptions, payments, social media, analytics, marketplaces, podcast streaming solutions, and more.
Content Subscriptions
One of the legacy options creators have for regular connections to an audience-turned-community is the reliability and sustainability of subscription models.
Traditional subscription tools typically include newsletters, Patreon, the YouTube subscribe button, notification bell, or any of the diverse ways members can show support. These are often more passive options where a user may enjoy content from a creator enough to send $5 a month for support but then take a more hands-off approach to future support.
Onchain subscription models allow creators to connect with an audience member directly as well as the entire breadth of their onchain activity for future partnerships or deeper co-creation of brand identity.
Starting with an Unlock subscription puts the ball in the creator’s court. It allows them to continually share moments with subscribers unbound from centralized apps by adding a wallet address to future airdrops, advance event guest lists, apparel drops, and more so fans don’t have to take extra steps to reap rewards.
Email Newsletters and Blog Subscriptions
A writer on the new internet might use popular apps like Paragraph or Mirror to share their latest updates, blog posts, or recurring stories with readers. These platforms are complementary to the subscription mechanisms powered by Unlock Protocol, and allow for simple sharing on decentralized social media, which we discuss further in the toolkit. Thanks to the modularity of onchain solutions, newsletter writers and blogging creators can create their works with nearly onchain writing platform, and manage the subscription and renewal mechanisms through protocols such as Unlock Protocol.
Email Newsletter and Blog Services to Explore
Payments and Social Tipping
Being a creator online or onchain is tough yet rewarding work. This much is known, and it is expected that aligned incentives between creator and platform accrue some sort of monetization or payment for earned views. But for online creators often those incentives are only so worthwhile when hitting a threshold of virality.
The new, more open internet allows space for all creators to reap the rewards of their creations no matter the vanity metrics held on a single platform, which we’ll touch on later in the toolkit. The rewards creators seek often come in the form of payment for minting artwork, writing, or shared revenue between protocol and artist for transaction or sequencing fees. This aligns a blockchain with those who create demand for taking up space in an ecosystem.
For this new generation of creators, payment can accrue on marketplaces like Zora, OpenSea, or any of the many other minting platforms or through direct tipping as seen on decentralized social platforms like Farcaster or Lens.
When creators connect a digital wallet to these platforms, they enable owned distribution mechanisms that are no longer reliant on opaque, centralized algorithms. This creates better congruence between the creator and the platform since blockchains benefit from creators using them.
Social tipping is a whole new mechanic that has emerged recently. This flywheel, where creators help one another by tipping tokens to high-quality creators (or friends) rather than working against the platform or its often extractive practices, creates a more positive symbiotic relationship.
Tipping and Marketplaces to further research:
Social Engagement and Analytics
As creators, we often use social media as a preferred medium for sharing our work. However, in recent years as the social landscape has evolved, we recognize that there are more diverse outlets for said medium than ever before. One extended arm of the social landscape is the increasingly popular idea of decentralized social platforms and protocols, namely those preferred by onchain creators: Farcaster and Lens.
These protocols, which have enabled developers to build various apps like Warpcast and Supercast for Farcaster and Orb or Phaver for the Lens protocol, use underlying blockchains and algorithms on top of familiar user experiences to help creators find distribution of their ideas and artwork.
For creators focusing on one or both of these protocols, the rewards are nearly endless. Creating a channel on an app like Warpcast or a club on Orb facilitates community interactions for any niche one could desire, sort of like a subreddit. Many creators opt to build a community and foster a fan-like relationship, while those used to legacy media platforms will have quite a smooth transition.
One often-overlooked part of being a creator is the need to check in on how your posts measure up by looking at the analytics side of things. Of course, analytics can be seen as vanity metrics or used to the creator’s advantage for further growth. To supercharge your growth as a creator, look no further than Bello for a wide look at how you’re doing across social media and various blockchains.
When it comes to measuring a creator’s audience or posts, legacy social media often has built-in analytics that show very surface-level metrics. The nature of a decentralized social creates infinite possibilities for creators to view both their own metrics as well as take a gander into a peer’s success through open source analytics software like Farcaster Studio.
Onchain Social and Analytics Tools to Research:
Podcasts, Video, and Streaming
Being a creator on traditional media outlets certainly isn’t limited to sharing images or text. The onchain landscape offers a vast array of video and audio apps for fellow yappers as well.
Thousands of creators, both new and old, are finding new revenue streams, connections to new fans, and ways to express themselves through live streaming platforms like Unlonely, a Twitch-like alternative, while podcasters are combining subscriptions and audio sharing platforms like Pods to allow listeners to collect podcast episodes.
Collecting clipped moments on Unlonely or podcast episodes on Pods gets the audience involved in low-cost support for their favorite creators. On the other hand, apps like Drakula are perfect for sharing TikTok-style clips from podcasts, combining all the best mechanisms creators crave, like simple shares to social media, social tipping, and revenue sharing.
A Wishlist for Tomorrow’s Creator Toolkit
The creator journey is never over, and the onchain ecosystem grows by the minute. Keeping up with this landscape of revenue streams, marketplaces, tools, and protocols is enough to make heads spin.
As we look to what’s possible for creators of tomorrow, Unlock and its many partners are proud to serve alongside an onchain ecosystem that holds a bright future for creators of all mediums: online, onchain, and in person at events and beyond.
Creators should give feedback to app developers wherever possible to improve these systems so peers feel more welcome to utilize their capabilities. App developers looking to take advantage of high-quality creators would be wise to incentivize and align with creator needs rather than only focus on protocol needs.
Future creators looking to come onchain will desire a deeper connection to a growing audience, wider distribution, and revenue streams that create align with the heavy lifting that often comes with being a creative onchain.
