When you build a business on advertising, the theory is that if you retain enough customers, the long-term economics will work out and you’ll eventually be profitable – Chris Dixon
Web2 is built on advertising. Big companies like Facebook and Google make most of their money on advertising, and many web2 startups build their customer base using advertising.
When you build a business on advertising, the theory is that if you retain enough customers, the long-term economics will work out and you’ll eventually be profitable.
Instead of the value and control accruing to a company at the center, it gets distributed out to the edges, to the people who actually build the network.
This means you no longer need advertising.
Tokens are self-marketing. When someone genuinely owns something and feels skin in the game, they want to evangelize it.
Bitcoin is the ultimate case study of this: a trillion-dollar network that was built through community-led evangelism and R&D.
(This couldn’t have happened without social media. In the pre-social media days, it was vastly harder to do bottoms-up evangelizing. In this way, web2 enables web3.)
This is also why the token distribution mechanics are so important. The key is fostering a genuine community— and distributing ownership to the people who do the hard work of actually building the network.
Also, self-marketing networks are a very powerful force. In the good case, this force is paired with a genuinely useful network. That has not always been the case, leading to memecoins and such.
