Creator loyalty programs
Creators are businesses
Just like a business striving to ensure that customers are retained throughout their lifecycle, creators are faced with the challenge of ensuring their viewers and supporters continue to engage with them throughout their journey.
It’s difficult for a creator to keep up with the requirement for more clicks and attention. Especially in an ecosystem where more and more people are realising the opportunity in developing a career out of making people feel something through different mediums of crowdsourced content.
Nonetheless, if a creator remains authentic enough to resonate with an audience, and continues to hone their authenticity and talent for attracting attention to their content or creation, a simple talent can become quite a lucrative endeavour.
Thus, the business of a creator is established, earning revenue through monetisation models baked into the platforms used to distribute their content, through merchandise, donations, advertising deals, affiliate programs and more.
Such a business deserves to be treated as such, and so the question remains as to why some form of gamification is yet to be established for the engagement and support of the creator’s fans.
Businesses leverage gamification to incentivise loyalty
What are gamified rewards in the context of a business?
It’s a simple process of quantifying a customer’s engagement with the business and to subsequently deliver on unique & exclusive offers to such customers as a “thank you for your business, we hope you return”.
Businesses understand that customers have options in today’s abundant society, speaking from a western citizen’s perspective, and therefore implement measures to ensure the customer remains attached to the business.
Some financial mechanism for establishing this attachment is quite effective. The banking industry has demonstrated this quite clearly, in that it is uncommon for an individual to change their personal banking institution throughout the first 50 years of their life.
In turn, businesses offer rewards to customers for repeat engagement. These rewards typically come in the form of points that can be accumulated to then be redeemed for credit, a voucher or a gift card. This accumulation of points over the lifespan of the engagement between the business and the customer is what establishes this unique attachment, or better yet, deep capitalist connection. In this case, both the customer and the business are capitalising on the exchange that has become too fruitful for the customer to depart and do business elsewhere.
This is at least an idealistic depiction of a loyalty program, but gamified rewards are just that, a program to cultivate loyalty.
The creator, as we’ve established, eventually becomes a business, yet has no technology medium to cultivate this loyalty unless they invest in it themselves.
Creators struggle enough monetising their content to invest in a new platform.
Rampant demonetisation and bans have spooked the creator industry… well at least if you‘re verbose, but I digress, these actions have introduced precedence which denotes that creators are indeed at the mercy of the technology platforms they use to distribute their goods and services.
The interesting requirement for new technology enhancing the creator experience is to make it free… somehow, or at least free enough to allow any creator to access it.
Linktree and Beacons.ai are great examples of technology services solving a simple problem for creators, while also ensuring access to the solution for any and all creators.
For a loyalty program to work for a creator, it must be free to access.
Points & gamification on a free platform
For a technology platform to exist, it must be able to draw revenue from somewhere.
Introducing cryptocurrencies…
Yes, I’m aware that cryptocurrencies have had enough light in the social-sphere, especially due to how hyperbolised the concept of an NFT became, but hear (or read) me out.
Loyalty programs offering branded currencies are just cryptocurrencies with less versatility. From an engineer's perspective, the only difference is the database in which these “points” are stored in.
A solution that this engineer has theorised is a way to support creators with their very own loyalty programs whereby fans have the ability to trade the rewards they earn on the open cryptocurrency market.
With this approach, creators can actually enable loyal fans to earn from their engagement by enabling the trade of their points-based rewards without actually selling their fans an NFT of something. Creators become their own federal reserve bank, and the new currency, aka quantified engagement, is redeemed for deeper access to the creator — giving it inherent value.
This way, when someone wants to buy your feet pics, they can buy them off someone who earned their right to see them.
Jokes aside, cryptocurrency can enable a free and open loyalty program for both creators and their fans.
For objections and criticism to this theory, please contact Ryan on Discord
New creator revenue streams without the guilt
Just like NFTs, decentralised creator loyalty program currencies can embed their own royalties meaning that a creator can earn from the trade of their own points.
Unlike NFTs, no NFT is sold in the process.
- Creators issue their points to fans who engage, support and refer their content.
- Points can be accumulated to gain access to exclusive content, discounts/credit to Patreon or other perks and benefits.
- For fans that love their creators, but love money more, these points can be sold to the highest bidder, supporting the creator in the process.
Conclusion
I hope my rant was worth the read. If you’re interested in learning more about what I’m proposing here, please head over to https://usher.so/creators
If you’d like to start earning rewards and points for engaging your favourite creators, send them this link and tell them there’s something interesting here to read.
Thanks,
Ryan
