Influencer marketing has rapidly evolved into a multi-billion dollar market thanks to the rise of high-speed Internet and the emergence of engaging and addictive social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Linked In, Tumblr, among many others. As we’ve witnessed over the years, social media is a powerful tool that can bring together individuals from a wide range of backgrounds to collaborate.
For example, The Arab Spring was orchestrated mainly with the help of possible coordination during the early 2010s via social media platforms. It was a historic wave of anti-government protests, violent uprisings, as well as armed rebellions that quickly spread across the MENA region. They had started as a response to rampant corruption and economic challenges and had been influenced by the Tunisian Revolution.
While this isn’t precisely influencer marketing, it clearly illustrates the power of social media to influence many people to act or work tirelessly towards a common goal. Similarly, influencers have mastered building a vast social media following by tactfully uniquely engaging with their audience. It’s a form of art and is increasingly being considered a legitimate profession.
In addition to celebrities, famous singers, professional athletes, who already have a large following, many people have made a successful career out of becoming an influencer. In the Fintech space, for example, Spiros Margaris has established a solid reputation as a highly knowledgeable and influential digital transformation specialist and influencer. Then there’s “Crypto Finally” in the crypto and blockchain space who has worked hard to create a prevalent social media account with numerous followers.
As most social media enthusiasts know, these influential accounts can command a large amount of money to promote a particular product or even project. However, centralised platforms such as Twitter and Facebook are making large sums, indirectly, from these big accounts because they can engage such a large audience.
All of the smaller accounts being “entertained” by these large influencer accounts are clicking on those Ads that Twitter or LinkedIn charge a reasonable amount for. But unfortunately, the influencer and even the regular user making meaningful contributions to a social media network never gets a share of this revenue.
That’s one of the main reasons why there’s a need for a truly decentralised, permissionless, censorship-resistant social media service.
Subsocial happens to be one such open platform that enables users to deploy their own decentralised censorship-resistant social networks and marketplaces. Subsocial aims to help people develop their decentralised version of leading websites like Medium, Twitter, Reddit, Instagram, Discourse, Patreon, etc.
Subsocial has been developed to allow users to become free when interacting online and to be able to capture the actual value of their work. All users of other social networking sites regularly offer a lot of value to the network, but they don’t receive fair rewards.
By hosting content exclusively on Subsocial, creators get a chance to receive the total worth of their creations in the form of tips, subscriptions, and other innovative ways to monetise activities. Moreover, there‘s no third party to take an unfair cut of the earnings. Nobody is trying to exploit users by harvesting their data or using manipulative content algorithms to control what they see and influence their emotions or way of thinking.
Subsocial makes use of the Substrate blockchain environment as well as IPFS for maintaining decentralised file storage. This allows for customised news feeds and timely notifications, along with a transparent reputation system. Additionally, there are full-text searching options, rich content formats without having to compromise on SEO.
By using Substrate, Subsocial can easily connect to the Polkadot and Kusama networks. Polkadot is a newly-developed blockchain protocol that brings together a vast network of purpose-built blockchain or distributed ledger technology (DLT) platforms, enabling them to interoperate at scale.
Polkadot will aim to offer cross-chain interaction and a powerful shared security model upon which Subsocial will scale effectively.
The Subsocial project has been awarded two technical grants from Web3 Foundation. It has also been able to complete all the milestones mentioned in its grant applications. It’s notably one of the first 17 projects chosen by Parity to participate in the Substrate Builders Program.
The Subsocial team launched their betanet in 2020, operational and running without issues for several months. In addition, the project team has also launched their web-based decentralised application (dApp), which came only a month after the betanet launch.
Additionally, the team has deployed Sub.ID in August 2021, a handy tool for users to check out their complete Substrate portfolio in a single location, with crowd loan contribution details and non-fungible tokens (NFTs). Sub.ID has now been successfully integrated into Polkadot.js apps by Parity. There are reportedly more than 12,000 Subsocial accounts with balances currently on the betanet chain.
While blockchain-based social media platforms are in their early stages of development and may not be perfect, it is a step in the right direction. That’s because centralised platforms have been recognised by specific users and do not give a fair share of their earnings to active and loyal users.
This post was last modified on Oct 21, 2021, 13:04 BST 13:04