I got into Web 2.0 without knowing it. In 2004, I decided to launch an image bank with a key characteristic: anyone could post their photos. Not only professional photographers as it was already the case with traditional image banks such as Getty or Corbis, but by any amateur photographer with a digital camera. From a few photos per day, to hundreds of thousands of images per week, the micro-stock model had in a couple of years completely disrupted the historic image bank players forcing them to totally reinvent themselves.

In 2005, we already had a name for this type of user generated content (UGC) and a new Web was born, Web 2.0 like a phoenix raising from the ashes of the 2000 crash.

It's more than fifteen years later and a new version of the Web is currently emerging, named web3. A more minimalist version this time around, no space, no decimal. For a few years now, excitement around new technologies like blockchain has been building. And in recent months, it has become particularly more thrilling. It is no longer just about crypto currency and speculation, nor is it just about infrastructure. It's about new concrete applications: NFTs. They have opened up the way and have allowed people to grasp the power of these new technologies, in their simplest and most naive form.

I find it entertaining to imagine what fotolia would look like if I had to create it today. And it's hard to imagine it as anything other than a decentralized marketplace in which each photo would be represented by an NFT available in one or more copies. Each NFT would include in its contract the payment conditions of the photographer. And when I go further with this train of thought, I can't believe that it doesn't exist yet or that it won't exist very soon, as obvious as it is.

It's a logical sequence of events. Web 2.0 gave us our autonomy and freed our creativity, but at the price of our personal data. Web 3 allows us to free ourselves from the platforms and give us back control, as well as the remaining freedom that was stolen from us.

The Web 1.0 models were naturally inspired by the media formats of the time (press, TV, cinema), Web 2.0 has reinvented them all by giving the power back to the users. And once again, Web 3 allows to re-imagine them in a decentralized way. These changes will not be insignificant and will induce deep adjustments in the structure of the models, in their sustainability and in their weight in the ecosystem. New emerging models will not just be decentralized version of the former one but brand new models we cannot even figure out.

Once again, the cards are reshuffled, a new world of opportunities opens up and with it the possibility for everyone (and especially for others) to explore it.