INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
The feed has become the all-powerful determiner of success for creators
Facebook, Patreon, Medium, and other platforms have amassed considerable power over creation, determining what gets seen, by who, as well as
the options creators have to get paid
Larger media companies struggle to stay independent against these platforms, complicating their relationships with readers and
viewers.
There once was a wholly different vision of the web, one that was far more decentralized and independent
The feed wasn&t sponsored by a company, but rather was an open protocol known as RSS — one that has died, or perhaps has become undead
Yet, that vision of an open, decentralized world still animates some people, including Julien Genestoux.
Genestoux has worked for years to
empower creators to spread their content and get paid in the process
He previously founded Superfeedr, which developed a &Feed API& that built upon RSS and Atom to make feeds more useful and real-time
The company was eventually acquired by Medium, which Genestoux joined as well
He also conceived the WebSub protocol, which has been recommended by the W3C, the international standards body behind the world wide
web.
Now, he wants to rethink the ways that creators get paid through a new protocol called Unlock
His mission has quickly attracted the attention of venture capitalists, with the New York-based company behind the protocol announcing today
that it has raised $1.675 million in pre-seed funding led by General Catalyst and Cherry Ventures.
Unlock protocol provides creators the
ability to add &locks& (aka smart contracts) to their creations by adding a snippet of JavaScript to their website, similar to how one would
add Stripe as a payment option today
The audience for that content then buys &keys& (aka tokens) to the lock
Creators control the economy around keys — whether they expire, how much they cost to buy, and more through their settings on the
lock.
This basic framework has a couple of interesting properties
First, keys are tradable — they can be sold to other people
This creates a secondary market for content on the web, which is tough to build using today existing paywall technology
Like used books, Unlock keys allow users to get delayed access to content for perhaps a more affordable price.
Genestoux also envisions
Unlock being the future syndication layer of the web
Here, you might have to stretch a bit to see it, but the idea is that if locks and keys are how access to content gets shared, then Unlock
has the opportunity to be the core protocol for all sharing and distribution.
To accelerate that vision, Unlock allows a creator supporters
to reclaim some of the value of their tokens when others buy keys on there recommendation, creating a referral economy
The hope is that the incentives encourage more sharing of high-quality content, avoiding some of the fake news and other opprobrium that has
hit Facebook so hard in the past two years.
Perhaps the most powerful point though is that Unlock is not a centralized platform, but rather
Anyone can implement it on the web, and there aren&t any gatekeepers or filters between a producer and a consumer of a creative work
In this way, Unlock tracks back to RSS and other open feed protocols.
It an ambitious vision, and one that up until now relied pretty much
exclusively on Genestoux to see it through
Unlock also announced today that it has hired its first employee, Ben Werdmuller, who was formerly an engineer at Medium and then Director
of Investments at Matter., the digital media accelerator
Unlock has also published the code for its protocol on Github.
In addition to GC and Cherry, Consensys Ventures, Kindred Ventures,
Betaworks, 122 West, La Famiglia, and Coinbase Ventures also joined the round.
