The rise of social media has led to the proliferation of influencers who can use their clout to promote products and services to their followers.
However, these systems are often inherently unfair with more prominent influencers often receiving disproportionately more airtime, while social media companies also take a big cut of the profits. There is also significant debate about who owns the content that is posted on social media, and who should be receiving revenue from posts.
In the latest episode of our Blockchain Hustlers series, Morgan Coleman presents his LaMint platform which allows users to be paid for their creativity. LaMint allows creators to monetize every post, photo, or video, with prices starting as low as $0.05 and going all the way up to $50 and above.
What other social media platforms get wrong
While existing social media platforms don’t necessarily get anything wrong from a user’s perspective, their infrastructure is not necessarily built to help creators monetise their content, Coleman said.
‘So they can’t do micropayments, they can’t do peer-to-peer payments, and they can’t do smart contracts. What we can do is facilitate all those tiny transactions that people are willing to pay for and content without having to take on a subscription,’ he said.
Coleman added that the reliance on subscriptions is another limitation of these platforms. ‘What LaMint can do is charge fractions of a dollar or fractions of a cent for content. So as a consumer, you increase the amount of content that you can engage with without having to take on an excessive amount of subscriptions.
‘But also as a creator, you’re able to monetise things that may be too small to monetise through a subscription or valuable pieces of content, but people might not necessarily want regularly.’
A problem with social media advertising
Another area that social media companies currently need to improve is that they are heavily reliant on advertising. This is often the most common way that creators earn an income through their following, said Coleman.
‘The problem with that is that it’s unpredictable, it’s unreliable, and a lot of the time it has a pretty big administrative burden. So if you’re a micro-influencer that’s got 5,000 fanatical fans, but you’re not quite able to do all the admin of invoicing, LaMint is a great way for you to be able to take those fanatical fans and turn them into paying customers on every post rather than trying to convince them that they need to subscribe.’
Instant transactions
He added that payments to creators are instantaneous because it is based on BitcoinSV’s peer-to-peer capabilities.
‘We’re using BSV, which means that the moment the transaction occurs that money is then in your wallet. And then it’s a really simple process of withdrawing that money directly to a credit or debit card, and then you can spend it freely in the real world.
‘So to give you a bit of an example that I like to use is imagine you’re a restaurant blogger or food blogger, and you’ve posted that you’re going to New York’s best steak restaurant and you hide the content, the location of that restaurant behind a $0.10 paywall.
‘Somebody can pay that $0.10. And by the time you have finished your dinner, you can use your earnings to pay for that meal.’
Why build on BSV blockchain?
Coleman said that the decision to build LaMint on BSV blockchain was ultimately easy because of how well it works.
‘I came into this space in January (2022) and I had a problem that we needed to solve. (And I asked), what is the protocol that’s going to allow us to solve this? All things being equal, and all the politics aside – it’s BSV.
‘It’s the only one that allows a creative to be able to then spend the earnings in the real world the moment a transaction occurs and it’s the only one that’s got the scalability and the infrastructure already there for us to scale to millions of transactions a day.’
Coleman noted that BSV also allows for the development of additional revenue streams such as smart contracts and NFTs.
Demonstration of LaMint
This episode of Blockchain Hustlers also includes a demonstration by Coleman on how LaMint works, including:
- A demonstration of the app works from both the perspective of a user and creator;
- The ability to add photos, videos and other content to the platform;
- The option to charge for certain pieces of content/posts;
- The ability to pull content from other platforms to LaMint;
- Real use cases of how the platform can be used.
