Today, content creation and distribution have moved online and is in need of sustainable, fair, and free business models.

A significant portion of online media applications and platforms today rely on online advertising for revenue generation within their business models. Most online media companies oversee three-sided marketplaces between content creators, content consumers, and advertisers. Worthwhile content from creators compel the attention of consumers, while advertisers insert marketing materials into the user experience hoping to capture some new customers and get a return.

This model comes with a number of issues. For one, an advertiser must cast a wide net for a return on their investment and even in the most successful advertising platforms like Facebook top tier click-through rates are below 2%, meaning that users pay with a degraded, cluttered, and slowed experience over 98% of the time. More importantly, this model suffers from fundamentally misaligned incentives. Since businesses jealously guard their source of revenue, consumer media platforms are built and optimized for advertisers before consumers. Finally, the advertising markets today suffer from a high degree of monopolization further degrading the commerce, governance, and freedom of expression of digital media.

Decentralized marketplaces built on blockchain technology now allow us to experiment with new business models for digital media by cutting out private platform middlemen and misaligned third parties. Cryptocurrency-based micropayments and token cryptoeconomics create the possibility of passing fair compensation between content creators and consumers directly, aligning their incentives proportionally to the great content and valued attention they bring to the marketplace.

The Props Project by YouNow is taking just that approach in the space of live video streaming. With an existing business that has already supported a fair, two-sided marketplace for a number of years, integration of Props cryptocurrency into YouNow’s upcoming Rize platform will even further strengthen the value proposition of ad-free business models in today’s digital media.

I look forward to digital media that isn’t riddled with ads, but instead allows people all over the world to convert their attention, their talents, and their content into fair market value — just by having access to the Internet. And I’m excited to help Props pioneer some of the first glimpses into that world.

To learn more, visit the Props Project website and join the discussion on Telegram.