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 writing experience. But content can easily be copied, difficult to trace back and there’s no guarantee that these platforms will be here forever.

Web3 publishing platforms emerged not too long ago. Mirror was launched in October 2020, and a couple of months later, a new competitor arrived in the space, providing features that look much like Substack on the Web3, I’m talking about Paragraph.

There are so many publishing platforms out there, with huge communities, great SEO, rewarding writers and delivering great content, why build more on the web3?

In this entry, we’ll dive into the importance of web3 publishing, by revealing its advantages in comparison with web2 solutions.

1 - About Web2 Publishing Platforms

Let’s be frank, web2 publishing platforms such as Medium, Substack or Hashnode are great in several aspects, they’re just not fully adapted to the changes the world is witnessing. These platforms and others in the field excel in the following aspects:

• Great SEO: web2 publishing platforms are incredibly good at building strong domains, making great UX/UI and developing SEO-friendly HTML, which makes them easy to find on SERP (Search Engine Results Page). That’s one of the reasons people decided to quit their own blogs or websites and move to these platforms.

• Clean Interfaces: another reason that made people start using publishing platforms is the easiness of writing. No need to know HTML or Markdown, nowadays. They provide a set of components that make the writing experience smooth and intuitive. Everyone can start, without previous knowledge or even tutorials.

• Subscriptions Experience: platforms like Substack have their focus on email newsletters, allowing writers to communicate with their subscribers through email. With this feature, writers can promote extra work and sell their services. Subscriptions are also important for the platform’s recommendation algorithm, which will find related writers to make you engage with them.

• Strong Audience: these platforms have huge communities, you can find the ones that best suit your interests. There are communities more tech-related, others focused on self-improvement, investment, story, art, you name it. Of course, they are always biased in some way. For example, Hashnode is really popular among developers. These big communities are very important on publishing platforms because they become the one and only place you need to go to find the content that fits you.

• Analytics and Insights: if you’re a writer for instance on Medium, you may have engaged a lot with their analytics. They allow you to differentiate between people who view and read your content. You can see the historical data concerning an article’s popularity, and so on. These analytics are very important for writers to understand which content they need to prioritize or make changes to the articles that are not performing so well.

The list continues, but the benefits mentioned above are already compelling and unlikely to be surpassed. Until now, everything seems to be on cloud 9 for web2, and chances are that these platforms will keep improving, and others will join with new and distinguished features. With the rise of Artificial Intelligence, publishing platforms can help writers to write faster, provide recommendations, make corrections, improve SEO and much more. Everything seems indeed to be flourishing in the web2 publishing ecosystem, but there are some features missing, and very important ones. Let’s address them below:

• Lack of Ownership: this is probably the main drawback of web2 publishing. Your content is actually never yours. The closest you have to ownership experience is writing on your own blog or website. But if that content is used by someone else, things get bureaucratic, and you’ll need to prove on the vast web that the content was copied from you and not the other way around.

• No proof of permanency: private companies come and go. They might exist for 50 years, or 2, and your content will most likely disappear with it, or just become obsolete. The best way to ensure you don’t lose your post is by saving it on a cloud or preferably locally because clouds aren’t permanent either.

• Prioritizes the oldest: people are always looking for the next killer app on the web2, so their chance for rewards is higher. The same happens for the publishing platforms. You want to be the first to start writing and get followers and subscribers before everyone else. Newcomers struggle to be noticed and get rewarded.

• Lack of integration: Medium articles can mainly be read on Medium, and you need the Medium app to read them on mobile, the same happens with other platforms. How many apps do I need to have on my smartphone to read content from different sources? There are already solutions that fetch articles from different sources, but integration could be much more decentralised.

• Difficult to monetize: as mentioned before, if you arrive late, chances are you need a lot of commitment. Days, weeks, months or years, to finally generate revenue. Many writers have great content, but they don’t post regularly. Probably they have other jobs, or they just need their shot of inspiration to deliver something really good. Algorithms tend to prioritize daily writers and strong engagement with the platform. The absence of rewards for their efforts makes many authors to abandon their writing.

• Boring Authentication: email, username, password and email confirmation. You need all these steps and perhaps more to register or log in to web2 publishing platforms. All these steps are something from the past. The user wants easy access. The workaround is to save them in your browser which is not always the safest approach.

There might be other drawbacks worth addressing from web2 publishing platforms, but at least these are the main ones that web3 solutions can fix. Let’s see how in the next section.

2- Web3 Publishing Platforms and Writing NFTs

The first tries to create web3 publishing platforms started with Steemit from the Steem blockchain, which was later forked to Hive. However, these were really focused on communities and not so much on ownership. Publish0x also came with Ethereum rewards and a similar rewarding mechanism as Steem and Hive. The first two did a great job, and I think they still have a strong community that is not looking to abandon it. As for Publish0x, I always thought it lacked good design and interface, besides the rewards aren’t great when compared to the others. Also, they took ages to use L2 solutions, so people couldn’t withdraw due to the extremely high fees on Ethereum's mainnet.

Now Mirror and Paragraph came to join the NFT revolution, by bringing writing NFTs to the space. We always thought of NFTs in the form of images, video or even audio, but it took longer to see them as text.

Let’s not overthink, writing NFTs are simply JSON files that are stored on the permaweb. This term is used for decentralized storage solutions such as Arweave and IPFS. You can learn more about this in the following Mirror entry:

Platforms like Mirror and Paragraph are just a front-end to access and submit the JSON files. However, is the combination of writing NFTs and these platforms that solve most of the issues that web2 publishing platforms are facing. Let’s see how:

• Proof of Ownership: every time you write an article on Mirror or Paragraph, an ID is created that represents your JSON file. This ID is used to fetch the work on Arweave for instance. The JSON contains the contributor’s wallet address and more information that serves as proof of ownership. If someone mints your work, a contract address proves that the person who minted also owns the piece of work, but still, everybody will know who first created the article. So there’s no loss of ownership in the process.

• Permanent Storage: as mentioned before, NFT articles are currently being uploaded on permaweb solutions, such as Arweave and IPFS. They are decentralized and permanent storage solutions, which makes the risk of losing one’s content way smaller than publishing on web2 solutions.

• Easy Integration: this has room to grow, but nowadays there are already some wallets that allow you to read the NFT articles you’ve collected directly from the wallet. You have Zerion for instance. The options are endless here, for example with Zerion, when looking at your writing NFTs, you have the option “Read”, and it takes you to the Mirror article, on the Mirror website. But this doesn’t have to be like this in the future. Since the body of the article is stored in a JSON file, each wallet can fetch the information from the JSON and build its own front-end that suits its UX/UI. This would allow people to read from their preferred wallets, without the need to install several applications. The fact that the content is in JSON format, could bring much more interesting integrations, such as applying Analytics, Machine Learning and LLMs to the content. This is a world of possibilities.

• Opportunities for All: since NFT Articles are collectibles, people can easily buy whichever piece of content they want. Most known authors will still prevail, but that’s the natural flow of it. However, new ones won’t be as damaged, as in web2 solutions. If they write good content, that people are willing to buy, there won’t be any obstacles for it.

• Easy Access: just connect your wallet. There’s simply no need for email, username, password and so on. Wallets prove your identity in the blockchain, and that’s all that is needed to have access. Users can simply connect with Metamask, Wallet Connect and other fast solutions.

While Web3 publishing platforms bring forth innovative features, they also retain some of the advantages that were already established in Web2 solutions, such as writing simplicity and a streamlined subscription experience. However, similar to Web2 platforms, these Web3 platforms still have some crucial elements that are yet to be fully developed:

• Weak SEO: if you look for mirror entries on the Google Search Engine, you’ll have a hard time finding them. Mirror’s use of code IDs and wallet addresses in their domains is not the best approach to making content visible on the SERP results. Paragraph improved this, by using human-readable domains. So their content is much easier to find. Improving SEO is very important to bring visibility to these platforms, and make more people adopt them.

• Search Engines: this is very important in publishing platforms, and neither Mirror nor Paragraph provide search engines on their platforms at the time I’m writing, which makes it difficult for people to find content outside of the recommendations, and subscriptions. There are some websites that work as search engines for web3 NFT articles like Bress, but they are far from having the same experience that web2 publishing platforms deliver. However, I think is just a question of time to start seeing them flourish.

• Biased: these Web3 solutions are still very biased in producing crypto-related content. If we want blockchain, crypto and web3 to go mainstream, and achieve mass adoption, we need to start using web3 platforms to make content related to other fields. Steemit for instance, is very good at this, they have communities from a wide range of fields.

3 - What makes people to acquire NFT Articles?

The answer to this question is ambiguous. There are several reasons why people engage with Writing NFTs. Some could be:

• Support: people are willing to mint an article just to support their favourite writers. It is as natural as buying goods at a grocery shop that has the vegetables and fruits you appreciate the most.

• Speculation: just like the other types of NFTs, writing ones are no different. People mint them expecting that they might increase their value in the future. That's why it is important for some NFTs to set a maximum supply because scarcity drives uniqueness.

• Utility: some posts can be useful for day-to-day tasks, like tutorials, guides, recipes and more. Accessing them from your Ethereum wallet streamlines the process, eliminating the need to search on applications or saved websites.

• Crowdfunding: writing NFTs emerge as a powerful tool for both project funding and transparency, empowering supporters to remain informed about the project's trajectory.

• Premium Services: if we take the example of crowdfunding, businesses can incentivize participation by offering exclusive perks or airdrops to contributing wallets. Similarly, certain writing NFTs can unlock access to bonus features or platforms, driving their acquisition among users.

There might be other reasons that drive people to mint writing NFTs, but in the end is like doing a "clap" or a "like" with some meaningful contribution.

4 - The future of Web3 Publishing

At this stage, web3 publishing platforms require minimal improvements to surpass their web2 counterparts. They mostly need to fix the drawbacks, and they will be just like web2 platforms but on steroids, with all the benefits that web3 publishing platforms and NFT articles bring.

The possibilities are endless by crawling the JSON files (Writing NFTs) from the permaweb, and developing seamless integrations with existent wallets and other applications. I encourage developers around the globe to build search engines, new front-ends, provide analytics and much more to enrich the ecosystem.

Ideally, soon we'll be able to seamlessly access writing NFTs and diverse Web3 content directly from our preferred wallets, eliminating the need for multiple app registrations. Simply safeguard your seed phrase, and your content will remain permanently accessible across any device.

To come back to the initial question:

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

Well, you have the answer now, let’s keep building!