Another day, another cryptocurrency meltdown. Even the most ardent blockchain boosters will admit that the vast majority of what WIRED recently called the “flashing-neon crypto casino” of memecoins, NFT drops, and DeFi projects will ultimately go poof and take almost everyone’s money with it. The question we’ve been trying to answer in our journalism is: What is the tiny percentage that will remain and be actually useful?
In a TED talk last month, which went online today, Instagram boss Adam Mosseri offered what felt, at first blush at least, like one of the more compelling answers. One much-touted promise of Web3 is that it will let ordinary internet users truly own their data—and store it on a blockchain no single entity controls, instead of having it harvested and monetized by giant tech companies. Most examples of how this would work have been pretty abstract up to now, but Mosseri offered more specifics by describing how content creators—musicians, writers, artists, vloggers, and the like—might use Web3 to gain a measure of independence from dominant platforms like TikTok, YouTube, and yes, even Instagram.
In Mosseri’s vision, a hypothetical country-music singer called Lisa sells her fans subscriptions, not to Facebook or YouTube or TikTok, but to herself. She issues tokens on a blockchain that give the bearer access to all her music wherever it lives online. The platforms still host the music, but they no longer control Lisa’s relationship with her subscribers. They can’t decide what data she sees, sell her subscribers’ data to third parties, or suddenly hike their cut of her income. If she decides to stop using a platform—or if the platform itself kicks her off, or goes bust—she doesn’t lose her subscriber list. In the talk, Mosseri said this would mark “a dramatic shift in power away from platforms like [Instagram] and to … creators.” He also hypothesized that creators could use this method as a form of equity crowdfunding—whipping up investment early on in their careers from fans who would get a share of their income later.
But how will this work in practice? How much independence would Lisa really gain—and what would she lose? And why would giant companies like the one Mosseri works for agree to give up their power? We caught up with him after the talk and asked him to flesh out his vision—which, he conceded, is “less likely to happen than it is not to happen.” This interview has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
WIRED: The idea that you're proposing epitomizes one of the central promises of Web3, which is to give people control over their data. It sounds very enticing for content creators, but all the platforms would have to agree to it. Why would it be in their best interest, and what would make them cede that control?
Adam Mosseri: I'm not sure that they will. But let me clarify—the idea [of sharing data] is not just about portable subscriptions. Every platform has an interest for the creator ecosystem to be built on a stable financial base. I don't think it is right now. There are a lot of creators out there. They make money by way of a jerry-rigged group of tools. Over the long run, you want to see more stability and an economic foundation for the creator ecosystem. I think platforms will be giving up some short-term control for there to be a larger pie in the long run. A big risk is the size of the market for subscriptions. Is there going to be a meaningful opportunity for a million creators, for 10 million creators, 50 million creators?
On the internet, everyone's famous to 15 people.
Exactly.
How much could that affect business for a platform like YouTube, or Instagram for that matter? They are selling ads based on people's views.
You have to differentiate between the platform subscription and the creator subscription. So my idea would be for a subset of creators to use platforms like YouTube and Instagram to build up a brand and demand for what they do. They could post to whatever platform they want, and give away however much they want for free. But they would also have a group of people who subscribe to them, and that relationship is built in a way that no platform can take it away.
At TED you talked about freeing people from the tyranny of platforms and giving them control of their data. Facebook, now Meta, has fought that idea for years, notably when it refused to participate in Open Social, the proposed alliance where people would have ownership of their contacts and friend connections. Do you acknowledge that 180-degree turn?
I definitely acknowledge that historical tension. There's a fundamental tension between a centralized platform [like ours] and decentralized technologies like blockchain. And I acknowledge the potential between our position on things like Open Social, and things like the subscription idea, but I'm not saying everything should be interoperable, or that all data should flow from platform to platform. There are very real reasons for that, privacy being paramount.
So does this mean Meta will be willing to let people take their connections and favorites with them?
I'm talking specifically about financial relationships. That's a case where the benefits are significant and the costs [to Meta] are less significant. There might be others too, I don't know. I don't have any that I want to say on the record, and I have yet to think about them a bit more.
There's a tension there. But the world is changing. The greatest risk a platform faces is not competition, though competition is a huge risk. It is that the world changes to make what you do irrelevant because you are not willing to lean in and change along with the world. And we've seen that for many large companies in many industries. So yeah, this is a different approach than we have historically taken. That just shows that we're open to embracing where the world is going.
You are tying these changes to a blockchain-based system. But what stopped previous cross-platform initiatives was not the technology but the refusal of companies to work together. If everyone agrees to do your idea now, why do you need to use the blockchain?
In this case, the blockchain makes sense because blockchains are immutable. The record is public and available to everyone forever, so we literally cannot delete the thing. That gives weight to the assurance that we cannot take this [subscriber] relationship away from you. Yes, we could absolutely build this on non-blockchain technologies using something like OAuth. But the assurances would carry less weight at a time where trust in institutions has declined.
So you're saying that you could have done it earlier, but it was good to wait for blockchain because no one would have believed you otherwise?
I'm not saying that. But there is a truth to that framing. It has less to do with blockchain and more to do with competition in the market for creators, and us feeling a sense of urgency for being the de facto platform for them. Instagram specifically has enjoyed immense market fit with creators for a very long time. Now, a lot of other platforms have wised up to the value of creators. As more power shifted from institutions to individuals, the competition for creators and creators' business has exploded. And it has created a strong incentive for us to do way more to help creators make a living directly, as opposed to indirectly.
Traditionally, creators build an audience, and they monetize that audience. Branded content on Instagram is probably a $15 billion industry, roughly—I don't know, many billions of dollars. Now we're building more ways for creators to make a living. So we announced the first test of NFTs this week, performed tests around affiliate marketing, experimented with revenue sharing and longer-form video. We launched subscriptions, which we are still testing.
Let's talk about your hypothetical country singer, Lisa. She sells a subscription to her content on all platforms as blockchain tokens. But pretty much every major use of a blockchain also requires some other intermediary services: Lisa probably wants software that connects transactions to a list of actual subscribers so she can grant them access to her content. And maybe she needs a CRM, and maybe she needs analytics. And she also still depends on the platforms themselves to distribute her content. Their algorithms can boost or suppress her stuff, or take it off, or the platforms can go bust. So isn't Lisa just as beholden to centralized platforms as before, and in some ways even worse off? She doesn't necessarily have control over everything, but she's on the hook for everything.
I strongly disagree with the characterization at the end. But I agree with everything before that. In this world, yes, she has dependencies. But the idea here is that she has options, and she can move without losing her community. For instance, she could swap payment providers, she could move platforms—if she gets kicked off Twitter, she could start using YouTube, and she would still maintain all the relationships with all her subscribers. Yes, there's an expectation that her subscribers have of her, but she has way more independence. I would also point out that subscribers can vote with their pocket, so if she doesn't produce good content, they will stop paying, presumably. That's actually a healthy incentive.
Blockchain is a public record of transactions. Theoretically, it's anonymous, but if somebody wants to badly enough, they could probably figure out who your subscribers are. If it's country music subscribers, it probably doesn't matter. But if Lisa makes BDSM videos, or has a radical political newsletter, that's different. Also, Lisa's competitors might find it useful to know who's subscribing to her or how many subscribers she has. How does she protect that information?
There are a bunch of really interesting privacy implications and trade-offs about what you store on the publicly accessible blockchain. Maybe it's anonymized and hashed, but it's publicly accessible, so you can count the number of subscribers. It's going to be one of the more interesting things as we try to design this system, in collaboration with the community.
You're pointing out a potential downside. There's always the risk that something gets implemented improperly. But I think a world where you might be able to get more fans because you can move from platform to platform outweighs the downside of people knowing how many subscribers you have. I'm not trying to pretend there are no downsides. This idea is clearly less likely to happen than it is not to happen. But it would be amazing if it happened, and I think we should be taking swings like this.
I'm sure some critics will note that while you're talking about blockchain and NFTs, Instagram still has tremendous challenges in content moderation, and its algorithms radicalize people against their wishes.
We can work on more than one thing at once. Yes, we have responsibilities to keep people safe, and to be thoughtful about algorithmic responsibility. But we also have a responsibility to deliver value to the people who use Instagram, whether they be creators or average folk. Safety is incredibly important, but if we agree with those who say we shouldn't build anything new as long as anything bad ever happens on Instagram, then we're never going to build anything new ever again.
With well over a billion people on our platform, even if we were an order of magnitude better, something bad will happen to someone somewhere. That is the harsh reality of what it means to be a large platform.
Your vision doubles down on creator content, and presumably will become more of the Instagram experience. But what about the poor schmoes who aren’t “creators” but just want to share things with their friends? Would they get driven out when your algorithm prioritizes the attention-getting behavior that comes from broadening monetization from sponsors to creators?
Friends are always going to be an important part of using Instagram. We're going to continue to value friend content very highly in Feed and Stories, but they're never going to drive most of the time spent on the platform.
The most interesting opportunity for us is to be at the intersection of friends and creators, where people can discover things to talk about with their friends. I'm making a huge push to shift more of our ranking toward what we call “exploration-based ranking methodologies” to try and help you discover new things to do. We haven't been good at this historically. By far the leader in creative monetization has been YouTube, and by far the leader on finding new talent has been TikTok. That's something that I want to correct.
It sounds as if you're more excited about this new model of monetization than targeting ads to users, which is the entire underlying business model of Facebook and Instagram.
No, they're both valuable. The benefit of an advertising-based business model is that you can provide a free service to over a billion people worldwide. Some people use it to stay in touch with loved ones, other people use it to make a living, or at least to just pass the time. All of those things are valuable. That doesn't mean I don't like subscriptions as a business. Both business models have merit.
What’s the time frame for these things?
It's going to take a long time. I'd be pumped if something like this happened in a few years. As for the investing-in-people idea that I outlined in the talk, I'd be pumped if it happens in six or seven years at scale. I think it's more likely 10 years.