Money Can't Buy Love Decentralized Video Release Case Study

2024-02-05

Recently, I took a video that I recorded called Money Can't Buy Love Interview, and turned it into a Multiplayer Internet Experience.

The video was hosted using decentralized technology and the rights were managed automatically using a SHARE Protocol Pay-For-Access (PFA) smart contract on the Polygon blockchain, with SHARE Protocol Liquid Community Royalty splits.

I charged $1 for lifetime access to the 7-minute video, which also includes the ability to download it.
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On the first day, the video generated $157 in revenues which came from $1 purchases via Apple Pay, Google Pay or Credit Card on a SHARE Video Player Web Link that was posted to social media. In 12 days it generated $450 in revenue with 1,254 total views.
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Traditional video streaming pays creators around $0.03 per view, so this was about 12X the revenue that this would have generated on Youtube. Since the transactions were processed on blockchain all payments were instant in comparison to traditional video streaming where payments are monthly––making time-to-revenue about 200X faster.

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The most exciting part of this release was how I used revenue-sharing incentives to maximize distribution in the first 24 hours.
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For this video, I shared 100% of the revenue with the public by open invitation––meaning all revenue generated was split with 81 unique consumers.
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The chart above is a visualization of the 81 unique consumer splits in the revenue sharing smart contract. This is in contrast to more traditional strategies where collaborators are included in royalty splits, rather than consumers.

The reason I did this is because I wanted to get more people to watch the video, and for me, it was worth sharing the revenue associated with it to achieve that goal. Revenue share "splits" are ownership shares in rights to royalty revenues. In this case, they were granted freely to my audience at no cost.

To distribute the splits, my first step was to thank every one of my supporters who had previously bought an earlier work that I published. In my thank you note I included an exclusive offer to join the splits for the new video for free via a link tap.

My next step was using an incentive-based strategy to maximize the distribution of the video and get more views in the first 24 hours. I did this by asking people on social media (X and Instagram) to share the link to my post in exchange for 1% of the co-ownership of the transaction revenue stream.
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Anyone who reposted my X post or Instagram post about the video release within a certain time window would receive an invitation link to join the splits. I posted the news at 2pm on 12/15, just hours before the video would be live and available.

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Immediately, people began sharing the post and within a few hours all the splits had been claimed––there were more reposts across platforms than splits available for co-ownership.

My social media following is relatively small with around 6,000 followers on X and 17,000 followers on Instagram. On X, the post received 56 reposts and 10,000 views that night. On Instagram, the post received 175 reshares and over 7,000 views. My average number of retweets on X platform in December was 3.8 and my average number of shares on Instagram in the same month was 26, meaning that reshares on X spiked by 1,378% and on Instagram by 581%.

For people who reposted twice or went above and beyond in their support, I awarded them additional revenue splits. The goal here was to reward support to create a multiplayer and mutually incentivized group around the video.

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All of this generated excitement, and increased demand and traffic toward the video on SHARE Protocol.
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This strategy turned out to be 2X more effective at generating reach than my prior strategy which explicitly invited individuals and businesses from my network into 70% of the splits.
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One potential reason this strategy was more effective is because it rewarded past actions rather than expecting future ones. Additionally, with a higher number of splits available the spectrum and number of people incentivized to participate was much broader. That said, the lower price point and 100% split distribution meant that the tradeoff was revenue––which was completely acceptable for my goals.

With SHARE Protocol liquid splits technology, people were joining the smart contract revenue transaction stream in real-time using a simple link tap from social media and seamlessly authenticated using Google Sign-In and Passkeys. The majority of my audience on Instagram had no prior use of crypto.
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In the background, smart contract transactions mapping user identities to a split property right were executed on the blockchain, and an email notification was sent to each person so that they could easily cash out and manage their decentralized property right in the future from the SHARE Protocol dashboard.
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These are complex mechanics happening, but completely seamless to the user, and all happening live in real time. In fact, I was able to do a live countdown as joins and payments were happening which generated additional hype and incentive to join splits by the minute:

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As a result of this strategy, 81 people started to get paid passive income alongside me––100% of the revenue was distributed among the collective. The amount of revenue received by each person was in proportion to their split percentage ownership and had nothing to do with them needing to be responsible for a sale or transaction on the video.

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I also collected 81 email addresses––one for each person who opted into joining splits. This is a repeatable process I can use to continue to build a multiplayer community independent of social media platform algorithms.

The energy from the direct messages, reshares and transaction notifications that I received was so positive that night that I felt strongly compelled to go live on Instagram and engage with the community. It almost seemed like if I didn't go live I would be leaving people disappointed in a moment that was extremely interactive. Much of the interactivity came from the fact that splits and revenue were being distributed to people in real time.
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My livestream got 1,271 views and reached 1,175 new people who weren't previously following me. All 81 people were paid, and 20 people off-ramped crypto into their bank accounts with a single-step conversion without ever having to understand crypto.
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One observation was that some participants have not yet off-ramped, which could mean they'd need to see more revenue generated before going through the process (the people with the highest combined balances from this and previous releases have off-ramped).

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However, what's even more interesting is that the demand to join splits and participate in co-ownership was largely independent of the amount of revenue generated. It's the deeper connection to the experience that seems to be the magical moment.

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This case study demonstrates the power of revenue sharing paired with decentralized property rights management that extends beyond music alone.

Given the flexibility of SHARE Protocol, an interesting future experiment would be to combine the power of live streaming with the power of SHARE smart contracts to see what impact that has on distribution and transaction volume.

Fundamentally, this technology can apply to any product or service, and the application layer is independent of the underlying infrastructure. SHARE protocol is a set of building blocks for digital rights management and revenue sharing in a multiplayer internet.

To learn more, reach out to us at formless.xyz/creators

-Brandon

Watch "Money Can't Buy Love Interview - FORMLESS SZN 1", powered by SHARE protocol.