A web3 version of YouTube built on Ethereum and Solana offers video makers the chance to actually make money

YouTube has more content than god. Five hundred hours of video are uploaded to the platform every minute. Every month, one third of the humans on earth use it to watch videos. And it’s free! 

But it’s free because it’s ad-driven, rooted in a business model that leverages your behavior to sell you back to yourself at a premium. And while a few YouTube creators make millions of dollars, most people are shipping content for eyeballs, willing to disregard revenue in hopes that some of the nearly three billion viewers might see what they have to say.

Glass.xyz, an on-chain video platform where videos are “owned by the people, not the platform,” is empowering more direct monetization for creators. Glass estimates that 97 percent of video creators in ads-based economies don’t make enough money from their videos to break the poverty line. By “monetizing world peace through world trade” Glass is pushing for a sea change, according to co-founder Dayo Adeosun.

“A lot of people are like, ‘you're making money? Doesn't that deplete your desire to continue to wanna create?’” Adeosun said to me recently. “What depletes my desire is posting on Instagram for likes and views, and posting on YouTube for views – barely making any money.”

On Glass Protocol, creators upload videos as non-fungible token (NFT) editions that can be purchased by collectors. People who hold the NFTs get to watch the full video – while everyone else can only access a preview. Holders can also access other connective opportunities with the creators. All the money – aside from a 10 percent fee on primary sales and 2 percent on secondary sales – goes to the video creator.

Adeosun imagines a place where “you could drop one video, make a $100,000 and then you don't need to drop again until you're creatively feeling good,” he said. “You're going for income, but you're staying for freedom.”

Adeosun was motivated from an early age by the pursuits of creative and financial freedom. As a teenager, he had an opportunity to play for the English football club Brentford, but was convinced by his mother and family to go to high school in Brooklyn and play for Poly Prep. “The reality is I didn't wanna go to the MLS (Major League Soccer). I didn't want to go to a lower tier thing where you can't really even monetize.”

Instead, Adeosun studied at the University of Chicago and pursued entrepreneurship. While there he started building Spott, a real-time crowdsourced map that helps Gen Z find “friends, food, and fun,” but he wasn’t able to monetize it properly, so he and his Spott co-founders, Sam Sends and Varun Iyer, pivoted.

The Glass.xyz web site

At that time, Sends was working on a decentralized video platform, inspired by the monetization viability of platforms like NBA Top Shot where NFTs were selling for thousands of dollars. “And these are just basketball video highlights!” Adeosun exclaimed.

In a world where more than half of internet bandwidth is used to watch videos, Adeosun and his co-founders saw an opportunity to build the web3 creator platform, shepherding Glass through crypto’s teenage years and into a more mature era – in a way he sees as not dissimilar from web2’s own evolution.

“What we're doing is literally just Only Fans but mature, so everything has to be professional,” he said. “That's one of the biggest reasons why crypto's not where it needs to be – it’s a whole industry wide thing. Crypto is [figuratively] 17 years old. When the internet was 17 years old, you had Spotify, you had YouTube, you had Facebook, you had Twitter – childish versions though, mind you.”

“So crypto's going to have to have the same thing happen that led to 2008 recession – all that stuff from when the internet was 18 years old; it's getting lit, having parties. It's the funnest stage – its teenager stage. And that’s crypto right now, and when you're in it, it's fun, but the thing is, it's not easy to figure out what’s real here and what’s not real, right? So what is real that's supporting creators? Only Fans is real, but it's not a good-looking real.”

The fact that 86 percent of today’s young Americans want to be social media influencers when 97 percent of video creators aren’t generating meaningful revenue is not a good-looking real, either. Adeosun’s generation grew up surrounded by emerging gig and creator economies whose builders promised flexibility and freedom. In theory, platforms like Only Fans unlock routes to financial and creative autonomy, but when those young people become adults they’re confronted with a heavy dose of reality.

“After 22, 23, 24, human beings have real-life jobs, and that's a shock for most people,” Adeosun said. “For Gen Z – I'm 24 – it's a shocker. They're actually hugely unprepared. They're just doing any type of job with no focus – taking consulting jobs and jobs they don't care about. Most people are lost, right? In the same way, most people are irrational. FTX just slammed a lot of people, and that's just humans. The worst things are committed by humans.”

Humans do shitty things but they also do good things. We can’t let FTX-like catastrophes or the ad-fueled subterfuge of centralized creator platforms have the final word. At our best, humans respond to catastrophe with care and a vision of something better – something more enduring, more equitable, more transparent.

“Glass estimates that 97 percent of video creators in ads-based economies don’t make enough money from their videos to break the poverty line”

“We started this with the goal for transparent monetization for video creators and viewers,” he said. “That's all we have to do. If we make that simple and clear, then people will go out and do that.”

Glass is using Arweave for decentralized storage so that if Glass ever goes down, the value created on Glass can live on, a marked improvement over web2 platforms – let’s use Twitter as an example – where a hypothetical rich tyrant could forcibly take power and threaten the survival of all the value created on it. Glass is building “on the scale of centuries,” and Adeosun told me he hopes I document with video because “we think that's the most important medium of the next 500 years.”

They’re off to a strong start. At this time last year, Adeosun said, Glass auctioned a music video NFT by Two Feet & Grandson for 11 $ETH (about $14,400 today, but approximately $44,000 when it sold), making it the highest-selling music video NFT ever. As of this writing, Glass has 845 collectors on the Solana network, with more than 2,000 on Ethereum, and there are currently 70,000 people on the waitlist.

Not everyone can drop a video on the platform yet, but they intend to open it in 2023, and anyone can already apply. Applications are reviewed by the team, where the main criterion is community activity. “If you have an engaged community, we'll send [your video] to our collector chat, and it'll probably go through right to the teams, so a good amount of people – like 40, 50 – are seeing the video before it's going out,” said Adeosun. “And then you already have confirmed collectors by that point, so you're getting distributed.”

The collective buy-in and shared equity between creators and collectors are powerful motivators. Music videos have been the focus thus far, and they account for the majority of Glass.xyz's current trending board, but video’s application obviously extends far beyond music.

Deathwish’s song So Tuff So Cute via Glass.xyz

The top-ranking entry is a nearly six-minute Origins video from the collective, RŌHKI, a group that’s using storytelling and world-building to extend their narrative beyond music. The sold-out collection includes 50 NFTs and has a floor price of 10.99 Solana ($148.48 as of this writing) on the secondary market. It’s a hint of Glass’s expanded scope, which will introduce connective and monetizable opportunities for creators and collectors of all kinds. 

“Wait until you see the amount of monetization that these collectors get,” said Adeosun, embracing the market dynamics of the Glass ecosystem. “[As a collector], I will collect a video that I think I can monetize, then I could list it on the second day in the marketplace for a little bit higher. Either the video is gonna be more lit and bring more people, or it's not and I have to market it myself – to try to make this video more lit and raise the price and actually support the artist to raise the price of that video.”

“But maybe I'm fine just taking a loss, too,” he continued, “because It's not really taking a loss. You bought it for the experience.”

For the time being, it’s clear that that experiential aspect is a priority. For every new video, there’s a dedicated Twitter Spaces that precedes the drop, where Adeosun and his co-founders host the video creators for a public conversation about the art. 

During our conversation Adeosun told me I had to join one to truly understand what Glass is about, so I showed up to one with the artist dvdv. “Technology is part of us and part of nature,” she said during the session. “We’re not as separated as we thought we are and we never were.”

Without alignment, community is tenuous, and therein lies the power of web3. Using technology to align incentives toward creator support while building shared equity with fans will help mitigate that illusion of separation. 

At the top of the hour, Adeosun called the drop like an auctioneer, narrating as 20 editions were gone in less than one minute. It eventually sold out.

“Hopefully you’re in the Twitter Spaces. Hopefully you’re active with the drop,” Adeosun told me, describing the connections Glass is trying to facilitate. “Regardless, you can still speak with the creator and you get to connect. World peace through world trade – that's what I believe in. I don't think you need to buy anything – the only thing you need is good relations with human beings.”