Value4Value is more than meets the eye. It’s a monetization model, a content format, and a way of life. It is about freedom and openness, connection and free speech, sound money and censorship resistance.
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Monetization Model: Let’s get one thing out of the way: monetizing non-scarce information is difficult. The default monetization model of the online world is advertisement, a model that relies heavily on surveillance and gameable analytics…. [more]
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Content Format: There isn’t one content format when it comes to Value4Value. When it comes to podcasting, including your listeners into the feedback and content-creation loop is tried and tested. By including your audience into… [more]
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Way of Life: Value4Value is more than a monetization scheme; it’s a lifestyle. It’s a mindset of abundance and fairness, a new way of looking at value—value in general, but digital value in particular. It is… [more]
There are multiple pieces that make it all work, not the least of which is bitcoin and its lightning network that allows the frictionless automation of micropayments. One of the most important things to understand is that information is not scarce and thus has to be monetized and thought about differently. It is a crucial mental switch that is quite difficult to make at first: the switch from a mindset of scarcity to a mindset of abundance.
Podcasting really flipped the scarcity-based economy of radio broadcasting on its head.
Watch the talk: Adam Curry @ BitBlockBoom 2022
Listen to Adam talk V4V on TFTC RIP #409:
The V4V model provides a solution to the problem of selling information. A solution that allows you to step away from the attention and surveillance economy, towards an economy of value, openness, and abundance.
The solution begins with acceptance. Selling digital content in the traditional, transactional way doesn’t work, or at least doesn’t work very well. A transaction involving a digital photograph of an apple is very different than a transaction involving a physical apple.
More and more creators are discovering the V4V model for themselves:
The skill, time, and talent/personality employed to create artistic expressions are valuable, and their supply cannot be easily reproduced/replicated even though the individual manifestations of them (the works of art) can be. This is, ultimately, what creators must figure out how to monetize if they are to make their work economically sustainable. […] Nostr and Bitcoin give creators of every type of content the opportunity to directly own and control the distribution and monetization of their time, skill, and talent, more so than any other service or platform on the Internet.
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