Where does the ownership of one’s content reside in the world of online writing?

Writers have been using publishing platforms for a long time, either to showcase their content or to generate income. Platforms like Medium, Substack or Hashnode pave the way for writers to get noticed on the vast web, by providing great SEO and easing the way of the writing experience. But content can easily be copied, difficult to trace back and there’s no guarantee that these platforms will be here forever.

The other day, I came across a Medium story from a writer with more than 5k followers. In the article, the author provided an in-depth explanation of a new freelancing platform and encouraged people to give it a try. However, it later turned out to be a deceptive website. The writer immediately deleted the story, and there was no way for me to raise awareness about it, or have a proven record of the source that led to the malicious website.

Mirror is a new publishing platform, launched in October 2020, that aims to fix the ownership gap, and some of the other issues raised before, by creating a Non-Fungible Token (NFT) from the written content.

Every article in Mirror, which they call an entry, is permanently saved in Arweave, a blockchain-like protocol. Read more about it below:

Articles can’t be deleted, and they can be easily accessed through different Arweave sources. This secures the traceback of the content, independently of the Mirror website, which works much like a slick front-end platform to write and read articles (entries).

Each entry is associated with an Ethereum address. People can support the writer, or have digital proof of ownership of the content, by minting the writer’s entry as an NFT.

Below, we’ll be analysing a dataset of 1530 entries issued on the Mirror platform, between the 4th and the 12th October of 2023.

1 — Which authors had their content minted the most?

If you’re not familiar with Mirror’s interface, every time a writer publishes an entry, he/she has the option to set a price or make it free for people to collect (mint). They can also set a maximum number of collections, which is a way to create scarcity around the content.

The following chart shows the top 20 authors that had more people collecting their work within the timeframe mentioned before.

We can clearly see that both Taiko Labs and Taiko Ecosystem are on the top, showing a strong group of people following their content. Apparently, Tako Labs does not tend to set a price to their content, generating no revenue from minting, while Taiko Ecosystem does have a price of 0.005 ETH. However, both make part of the same protocol.

The top 2 are followed by 1kx, Horiza and William M. Pester. And with fewer collections but increased revenue are Scroll Build, opBNB Guide, Ivy Swap and Chainleft.

Most of the authors in this list are protocols or companies. However, some individuals were able to generate either a good amount of collections (William M. Pester) or good revenue (Chainleft). It could be interesting to analyse their content and see what is triggering their fame inside the Mirror community.

Let’s now take a look at the authors from the list above, that generated revenue.

Taiko Ecosystem generated almost 1 ETH in less than 1 week, probably it already surpassed it at the moment I’m writing, which is a very impressive revenue in such a short timeframe. The other authors seem to follow the same order as before in descending order. Kudos to Понятный инвестор which is in this top list and does not write content in English.

2 — Which entries generated the most revenue?

When analysing single articles the paradigm changes. Let’s plot a bar chart next to a line chart, to visualize both the revenue and collections of each of the top articles.

On the top 4, we still see some of the authors that were mentioned before. These are followed by Officer’s Blog, with few collects, a Taiko’s Ecosystem contributor, with a higher number of collects, opBNB Ecosystem, Base Ecosystem, Venom Station and Thumbs Up.

As you can see, most of these entries mention airdrop in the title. Additionally, it’s notable that authors frequently employ the word ecosystem, and the content associated with it is frequently offered for sale at a specific price. Further analysis should be done to understand which keywords are triggering people to collect the most.

This chart also shows that an increase in the number of collections doesn’t necessarily lead to higher revenue. There are more expensive entries, that a short group of people is keen to mint.

3 — Which networks are the most used?

Mirror entries can be minted with different layer 2 solutions to avoid huge gas fees. These are the most used:

From the data collected, most of the entries can be minted using Optimism (1504 entries), then there’s Base with 18 entries and Linea with 9 entries.

4 — My selection of authors

This analysis helped me discover some amazing writers from various fields:

• Web3 Marketing: Daria Strategy

• Economy: Fiat Fudder

• Web Development: starrdev

• Blockchain and Web3 architectures: Emperor

• Crypto & Defi: Almaze Media Blog

Subscribe to them, if you’re interested in these topics.

Next steps

The analysis doesn’t stop here. The next steps will involve working with text. Summarize body content, discover keywords, and much more. The dataset I’ve worked with is available as an NFT in the Ocean Market, feel free to acquire it and do your own analysis.

As I will be posting more content related to the analysis of Mirror entries, more datasets will be uploaded in the future.