If you want to know why there’s so much talk about crypto and blockchain’s potential to transform the creator economy, one good answer might be that there’s so much in need of transformation.
No one has been more vocal than musicians upset at the very micro micropayments they get for song streams — $0.003 to $0.005 are the most cited figures, which puts earnings at $3,000 to $5,000 for 1 million plays.
Another is that so many other companies, including social media giants like Facebook and Twitter, are getting in on trying to fix a very broken system that it’s an obvious target for an industry built on the concept of eliminating financial middlemen.
See also: Facebook Pivots From News Coverage to Creator Economy
It’s a simple pitch: Creators can take payments directly from fans, with no bank, credit card issuer or payments processor in the middle taking a cut. That sounds great until you actually try to send bitcoin from one digital wallet to another: It’s a process that even technologically-minded people find cumbersome.
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Then there’s the reality that most creators live on a platform of some kind: Twitter or YouTube, Spotify or Apple Music, or one of the many, many content creator-focused platforms for musicians, artists, social influencers, podcasters, topic educators and more. Those platforms tend to want a cut — or pay what they wish.
And there isn’t really a need for crypto payments on those platforms. Sure, in April, Twitter teamed up with payments tech firm Stripe to use crypto — starting with the USDC stablecoin — for creator subscription payments. But Stripe began supporting Twitter’s Super Follows traditional payments back in September of last year.
Related: Twitter Launches Stripe-Powered Super Follows for Creator Subscriptions
That said, as more and more merchants start accepting crypto payments through processors like BitPay and Strike, and more people start actually paying with crypto — more than one quarter of the nearly 60 million U.S. crypto consumers prefer merchants who accept digital assets, PYMNTS U.S. Crypto Consumers study found — it should become easier and more lucrative for individual creators to accept crypto with a pay button rather than a digital wallet transfer.
Of course, if they follow the more common pay-in-crypto-but-receive-cash process that is becoming the norm — in no small part to avoid dealing with volatility — it isn’t really transforming the creator economy as much as it is adding a new payments rail.