Po.et was conceived by publishers for publishers — we aim to make digital assets more attributable and remove the friction for real financial exchange

Internet vs. Publishing

The advent of the internet has arguably impacted the publishing industry more than Gutenberg’s printing press did about 500 years ago. While publishing was once reserved for resource intensive corporations, the World Wide Web has created flat structures where anyone with access to a computer or a phone has the ability to become a publisher. Specifically, the internet radically decreased the costs associated with both creating content and acquiring an audience for distribution. Social media applications and open-source CMS software built infrastructure on top of this trend to provide easy, mass-market tools for building digital publishing brands.

Beyond this, the playing field is starting to level between the most savvy traditional publishers and top digital native publishers. Both have massive audiences, robust newsrooms that create omni-channel content around the clock, and a technology infrastructure that brings speed, efficiency, and intelligence to the forefront.

Nascent digital native publishers must be scrappy if they want to compete in this market. With reduced budgets they are not able rely on an in-house editorial staff to consistently push out quality content. Similar to its effect on sharing information, the internet has made it extremely easy for digital publishers to outsource their content needs to a global pool of stringers or freelancers. While outsourcing in its current form has become an extremely viable alternative to content creation, it creates a great deal of marketplace friction.

Enabling the true flow of value within the publishing and digital media industry from publisher to editor and content creator requires creating information about the work — who made it, is it licensed, and what is its history — discoverable anywhere media is found. This is a prerequisite. It starts with reputation and attribution, and eventually can lead to leveraged financial exchange, directly through media itself.

What Are the Problems That Are Surfacing Within the Industry

First, the sheer volume in the number of new brands has made it difficult for publishers to differentiate themselves from the rest of the market and to acquire a large enough readership. Digital native publishers, for example, aspire to have the credibility that traditional publishers carry and they have continued to hire well-respected journalists to earn more of that street cred. As Netflix pours more money into creating quality content to be taken seriously as a movie producer, digital native publishers will invest more in quality journalism to establish their legitimacy as news outlets (to be vindicated when a digital publisher like Vice wins a Pulitzer Prize in Journalism). Finding content that is equal parts credible, accurate, and unique is extremely difficult because editors have to scour disparate platforms for talented creators.

Second, the internet has made it extremely difficult to verify the attribution of a creative work.

Once an editor has identified content that they deem worthy of publishing, they submit to the long process of ensuring they have the right to use it. This process itself is both time consuming and siloed. Digital asset alterations happen so frequently that they often go unnoticed and undocumented. Downloading a work, resizing it, and re-uploading it for better network performance results in a completely new asset in terms of attributable metadata.

Lastly, current processes that facilitate financial exchanges between publisher and content creator cause a great deal of marketplace friction. Centralized marketplaces like Shutterstock and Adobe Stock help connect content creators with publishers, but charge both parties a premium for using the network. Apart from these hubs, publishers are forced to source works independently, engage each creator individually, and negotiate payment structures on a per-project basis. Even if both parties can agree on the terms quickly, today’s financial infrastructure can only process these types of payments over the course of an entire business day at best.

Blockchain Technology

Blockchain technology has quickly manifested itself as the answer to business problems faced by the world’s largest industry verticals.

At its core, blockchain technology allows anonymous parties to transact in a trustless environment by eliminating intermediaries, which are usually necessary to ensure that conditions of an exchange are met. It accomplishes this by equally distributing a ledger of events that occur within a network. Equal access to this ledger makes it easy for network participants to verify changes in ownership of the asset being transacted.

A blockchain for the publishing industry can help alleviate the problems of reputation and attribution and eventually enable a true content marketplace by providing a protocol for establishing and transferring ownership of creative assets. Once a digital asset is confirmed onto the blockchain, it effectively belongs to a corresponding identity or, more technically, a private key. Any changes made to an asset are connected to a corresponding identity and recorded onto the blockchain. Blockchains also allow frictionless creative asset transfers since it’s able to verify all ownership changes cryptographically.

Po.et

Po.et aims to extend these benefits of blockchain technology into the publishing industry by establishing an open platform for recording metadata and ownership information for digital creative assets. The underlying protocol powering Po.et is the proof of existence, which allows content creators and publishers to certify that an asset was created at a certain point in time.

Po.et’s value proposition for publishers evolves throughout three product eras:

The Rosetta Era The Gutenberg Era The Alexandria Era

During The Rosetta Era, Po.et will provide publishers with a standardized metadata schema, an identity management system, and authentication badges. Standard metadata formatting enhances internal discoverability by creating a searchable catalog for all of the publisher’s timestamped assets. An identity management system grants publishers an immutable edit log to better keep track of changes made to their assets. Lastly, Po.et authentication badges provide publishers with a visual representation of an asset’s registration on the Po.et ledger.

We aim to further empower publishers during The Gutenberg Era by establishing an open, distributed content network that connects their editors with content creators. Publishers will be able to search for, access the title to, and license any asset registered onto the Po.et ledger. Po.et will make content distribution more secure by employing cryptographic licensing terms. All agreed-upon contracts and terms of use are adjudicated by blockchain technology rather than middlemen.

Lastly, we believe that publishers will derive the most value from the Po.et network during the The Alexandria Era. The focus of this stage is on bolstering the protocol’s developer documentation, APIs, plugins, tutorials, and other educational resources in order to drastically simplify the process of creating publisher-centric media DApps. We envisage every publisher dedicating their development talent to exploring custom solutions based on proof of existence.