When the internal figures of the streaming platform Twitch were published a few weeks ago after a hack, it was up to the so-called normal people to shake their heads again. Not because of the fact that people actually watch other people play video games and pay them to do so. One has got used to such absurdities for beginners by now. But then one could wonder how much they pay.
Neatly listed, you can see in the stolen data how more than 80 streamers on the platform earned a six-figure sum from subscriptions alone in the past two years. The income from donations, sponsorship deals or the flourishing merchandising business are not even factored in. The only problem is that the money is distributed quite unevenly. The top percent of the streamers are happy about more than half of the income. The distribution of income is even more unfair than in the so-called real world. The richest one percent of the population “only” holds about a third of the wealth.
When it comes to distributing funds on the community-based web, Twitch is not the exception, but rather the rule. If you look at Spotify, for example, artists need more than three million streams of their songs in order to achieve an annual average income that is close to a minimum wage. On the crowdfunding platform Patreon, just two percent of the petitioners managed to get an amount of more than $ 1,000 a month. Even the booming newsletter industry, which until recently was said to be a way out for authors who publish on their own, is suffering from the imbalance: the top ten newsletters made more than 20 million US dollars with subscriptions Sales. The sediment remains for the rest.
The blog platform mirror.xyz wants to make the distribution of income on the net fairer again
At some point the social web started with the promise to provide more equality. And not only in terms of social participation, but also in terms of monetary participation. It doesn’t help that a few dozen teenagers have now become multimillionaires. The vast majority remain exempt from the attention of the masses – and the corresponding windfall. One speaks, streams and broadcasts, somewhere in the no man’s land between hobby and, at best, precarious occupation, into the void. The opinion of observers is unanimous: the so-called creator economy needs a middle class.
A new one should judge it now, well, it is actually not quite clear whether it is for mirror.xyz already has a suitable term. The website does not speak humbly of itself as “the next big change in the history of symbolic communication”. With a decentralized, crypto-based network owned by users, “Mirror revolutionizes how we express, share and monetize our thoughts”. Uff. There is a lot to unravel first.
First of all, Mirror is a blog platform on which you can publish all kinds of projects. However, participation is linked to its own cryptocurrency called $ Write. Anyone who publishes here can also spend an individual currency for sponsors, which in turn gives them a share of the ownership of the work – and accordingly also a future share of the proceeds if the author decides to auction it off as an NFT.
Not only the authors, but the entire community has a self-interest in ensuring that the financed projects are successful. That sounds pretty utopian, of course, the project stands or falls with people’s belief in the concept of cryptocurrency as such. Perhaps it is an alternative to the previous centralized system, in which large players such as Facebook or Twitch divide the funds raised according to opaque keys and siphon off the creativity of the community.