🏦 Creators: TikTok Monetization is Bad

📈 Crypto: “Not Your Keys, Not Your Coins” — But I Lost It!

🛍️ Product: Creator Platform Shopping is Happening

Creator Monetization Needs to Evolve

In January, Hank Green released a video highlighting the flaws of TikTok monetization. Several large creators followed suit this month, talking about their own earnings and how cross-posting on other platforms generates orders of magnitude more cash. The core criticism is around how the Creator Fund stays static while more creators start pulling from it. This creates a zero-sum game for creators, AND as TikTok gets larger and attracts more users and creators, existing creators make less. Meanwhile, on a platform like YouTube, the they are transparent about the take rate, which is a percent of ads running on your videos. This means as YouTube gets generally more popular, creators generally make more as well.

Even as we’re decades into creator platforms existing, we haven’t solidified “standard” monetization practices. Specifically we haven’t agreed on what the appropriate or fair take rate for ads, subscriptions, and now “creator funds" should be. With the winner-takes-all pressure for social and consumer products, companies like TikTok can unilaterally make decisions. Yes, creators can migrate, but they leave massive audiences behind or aren’t where billions of people already are. I don’t know what the right answer is, but creator monetization needs to evolve in the next few years.

Friends Can Save Your Wallet

Warning, not news, just interesting math that I wanted talk about! A common saying in crypto is, “Not your keys, not your coins,” meaning, if you have the key or “password” to a wallet you effectively own the coins because you can transact with them. Given how crypto works, it doesn’t make sense to have “Forgot my password” flows, or SMS one time codes, which is a conversation for another time. So how can you protect yourself? One idea is to split your key with other friends and family, so that no one can individually act but if you get retrieve the shares of the key, you get the whole key. But how does that work? It’s scary to just chop it into pieces, because that reveals info about the key itself. Time to talk about middle school math!

When you put a point on a graph, that point can be on any line on the graph — you can draw a line going up through the point, you can draw a line going down through the point, there are infinite lines! But the moment you have a second point, only one line can go through both of those points. If we think about our key or secret as just a secret number, we can define it as the value where the x axis is 0. So once we know the line, we can find the value where x = 0. You can share the two points with two different friends. Either friend will not get information about the secret, but if you retrieve both you can get the secret!

That’s cool, but can we do more than two — let’s do some high school math! If you remember parabolas, you might remember for two points, an infinite number of parabolas can exist, but when you have three points, only one parabola is defined. And this pattern holds for polynomials with increasing degrees (functions where exponents look like x^3 + x^2, etc.). So you can share 3, 4, 20, X number of values, as long as you define a complex enough function!

A better and more detailed explanation, Samir’s Secret Sharing

YouTube Shoppable Videos

Susan Wojcicki, the CEO of YouTube, shared the company priorities in January, and most people focused on the NFT news, but the Live Shopping experience seemed to slip under the radar. YouTube is enabling a “creator tagging pilot program that gives viewers the chance to browse, learn about, and shop products featured in their favorite videos.”

What this means to me is a UX to quickly tag items with shopping links with affiliate tags to take a cut of purchases. This isn’t new for blogging and written content, but seems to be lagging in a big way for larger creator platforms. I’m interested to see how larger platforms like TikTok, YouTube, Twitter and Instagram. Shout out to my friend David who’s working on this at Twitter!