Traditional social networks offer creators the possibility to monetize mainly one-to-many relationships.
The basic description of these transactions is: the creator shares a product and gets paid for the placement.
It’s a reasonable way to make money, but it narrows the scope of how creators can create and capture value. There are few well-connected nodes making substantial amounts.
Some interactions that users crave and can lead to sustainable businesses include:
Direct interactions from followers to creators
Inter-follower transactions
Sub-community formation/transactions
Proxy Studio is an interesting place for experimentation on how decentralized social can monetize through various interaction types:
Direct economic transactions - through a Hypersub subscription, people pay Alex directly for access to his group chat and newsletter.
Shared capital and pooled information - in a many-to-many relationship, through Mercenary Capital, Proxy members surface investment opportunities and pool capital for collective dealflow/access.
Ownership in community-generated initiatives - the chat is filled with idea people with a bias towards action. Initiatives launch independently but as a result of community interactions. They usually share economics with Proxy.
Intra-community transactions - There is an increasing number of transactions between Proxy community members. For instance, a member with whitelist access might share it. Another is the secondary market for shares of Mercenary Capital or the Hypersub NFT. These are prime candidates for monetization.
The beauty of Farcaster is that communities like Proxy, or Degen form and become experimentation grounds. These emerging behaviours give us a glimpse into the future of the protocol and social as a whole.
Study Proxy.