By Itzik Elbaz, co-founder and co-CEO of Artlist
More than any other major tech-world development in recent years, the metaverse has become the ultimate love-it-or-hate-it talking point in and beyond Silicon Valley. Mark Zuckerberg, for one, is a massive fan. His fellow high-profile tech executives are more skeptical, both of the metaverse in general and of Zuckerberg’s Meta in particular. Ex-Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey derided the metaverse as dystopian and dismissed Web3 as “a centralized entity with a different label” owned by and inseparable from “VCs and their LPs.” Elon Musk shrugged at the idea on Twitter, referring to Web3 as “more marketing buzzword than reality.”
Dorsey and Musk have valid points. But their fellow Big Tech titans are undeterred and eager to pour cash into the metaverse. But as someone working in the creator economy tech space, I’m cautiously optimistic about it. Not because of Zuckerberg, necessarily, but because of its potential for digital creators and artists.
Key elements of the metaverse have long been in the purview of creators big and small. In almost every case, artists were doing it first. The live music industry embraced digital avatars years before anyone else. Tupac’s hologram “played” Coachella in 2012; Lady Gaga took one on tour in 2014. Fortnite’s immersive, in-game concerts attended by players without leaving their homes have been enormously successful and transformed what streamed concerts can look and feel like.
It’s not just musicians either. Visual artists have long worked within immersive formats, both digital and analog. Online galleries and museum walkthroughs have been industry standards for years. Art museums embraced AR early in the name of visitor engagement. Projectionists have transformed the masterworks of long-dead painters like Van Gogh into sold-out, room-sized installations. Visual artists were among the very first to see the potential and utilize NFTs. To this day, most people associate NFTs with some kind of visual artwork or image.
That’s an important point here. Creatives of all types understand the value of digital marketplaces just as they have always understood the potential of new platforms and immersive ones. Along with gamers, they’ve seized on niche digital marketplaces. Creators and gamers are currently running the web’s oncoming digital underground.
Not only should creatives stay integral to the metaverse, metaverse builders should actively embrace them. Doing so will enable phenomenal growth not only for the creator economy but also for the individual creators’ bottom lines.
Where developer-built code can meet creator-designed interface
Creators can and will develop amazing products tailored for the metaverse and its spaces – if we let them.
Creators big and small are not going to be able to build the metaverse on their own. That’s up to major tech companies with the technical firepower and infrastructure to do it. But those companies should activate the creator economy to everyone’s benefit, including their own. The metaverse will be empty and boring without the involvement of the creator economy.
Put another way: the metaverse requires big tech companies to build the actual tech and the creator economy to fill it with interesting content. But the onus isn’t only on the creators. It’s the tech companies who ought to extend a hand to creators by facilitating digital partnerships, commissioning their work and reducing platform fees for creators who are driving engagement.
Partnerships and creative commissions within the metaverse will stimulate the already fast-growing creator economy. It will also provide another dimension for creative work – one the creative industries saw coming and started imagining in multiple ways years ago. It will expand creators’ audiences and engagement, while providing crucial additional revenue streams.
This push and pull between built tech and content already exists. Without creators, Instagram is just a contentless and uninteresting platform. Without creators, the metaverse will be boring too. We should encourage metaverse content creation partnerships from all levels of the creator economy. The creators are the ones who should create the experience! There’s no reason the metaverse can’t be visually stunning, boundary-pushing and highly entertaining. But Meta alone isn’t going to make that happen. Independent-minded creators will.
Commerce in the creator-verse
Let’s follow the money. How can investors support creators within the metaverse and financially benefit? How can creators benefit?
Some clues may lay in the world of gaming. Gaming is among the metaverse’s most relevant applications and has helped pioneer revenue-generating immersive virtual experiences and digital marketplaces. As long as there are people in the metaverse or metaverse-adjacent marketplaces and platforms, it will be possible to monetize it from the top-down. But the key is to activate creators and monetize it from the bottom-up.
Advertising space within the metaverse is the obvious example. Digital real estate spaces and limited edition user experiences designed by artists is another. Integration with real-world events has huge potential – Burning Man already trotted out a multiverse experience in lieu of its 2020 gathering in Black Rock City. And, regardless of your opinion of Burners, they’re only scratching the surface.
Dating events, socials, lectures, conferences, fashion shows, e-commerce – you name it, the possibilities for creator involvement are endless. So are the applications and monetization outlets for everyone involved. Potential customers can see how a garment made by an indie designer looks on their avatar to make a more informed purchase. Budding performers can practice in front of a virtual audience to deal with stage fright and charge for the digital livestream. As our very idea of “authentic” presence is upended, what creators can sell, who they can sell to, and what people are willing to pay for will change. People will pay for an exciting user experience, full stop.
Art for the metaverse’s sake
The metaverse is an innovative and impressive way to expose creatives to new markets and commerce, and if history is any indication, they’ll have no qualms about seizing the moment. The entire creative world will be translated into the metaverse. This will be good for the tech companies building it, the creatives hired to make it look and feel amazing, and for investors across industries.
Just as content creators are the heart of TikTok and Instagram, they have the potential to be the heart of the metaverse, too. But not everything will change. A creator-driven metaverse won’t edge out the ways of creative engagement we have now, be it TikTok or art museums, but it could become a brilliant new way to engage and create. Whoever is running the show, the metaverse will be a significant part of our future. But if it goes all-in on the creator economy, it will be a bright and attractive one too.
About the author:
Itzik Elbaz is the Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Artlist, a leading creative technology company that provides content creators with sophisticated editing software tools and over 880K digital assets. Prior to founding Artlist, he worked as a UX engineer and gained extensive experience in designing and building websites. In his role as Co-CEO, Itzik expresses both his rich experience in programming, user experience, website design, as well as a broad business and strategic understanding and operational skills to implement the company's vision and support its rapid growth process, while bringing significant value to customers around the world.
The views and opinions expressed herein are the views and opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Nasdaq, Inc.