When I first heard about Zora’s new “creator coin” ecosystem, I was skeptical. 

Creator coins? Really? We’ve seen this movie before—BitClout, Friend.tech, Rally. Every time it ends the same: fans get rugged, platforms get rich, and creators get yelled at by their followers and billed by their lawyers. 

But eventually after spending time on Zora, I’m starting to think the unthinkable: they may have actually figured it out.

The $185 Billion Heist

In 2023, Meta, TikTok, YouTube, and Twitter collectively pulled in around $185 billion in advertising revenue. Meta alone extracted $134.9 billion from creator labor, while YouTube vacuumed up $31.5 billion, TikTok roughly $16.1 billion, and Twitter around $2.9 billion.

The creator cut? Meta “generously” paid creators $2 billion total. YouTube distributed $70 billion over three years (their most favorable metric). That’s not revenue sharing—that’s digital sharecropping.

The global ARPU (average revenue per user) on Meta? Just $13.12. In the U.S.? $68. These platforms have convinced billions of creators to work for free while extracting industrial-scale value from their attention.

This is a much bigger problem than most noncreators realize. Everyone loves to talk about the booming creator economy. Major publications marvel at the enormous revenues that top creators are pulling in on social networks and content platforms. But hidden under Mr. Beast’s shadow is a harsher reality shared by the vast majority of creators today. There are over 200 million of them active across the world. Most are not making a living. And perhaps more importantly, none of them are capturing even a sliver of the value that they’re actually generating. For generations, creators had to no choice but to accept this. But things are finally changing. And Zora aims to ignite that change. 

Why Every Creator Coin Failed (Until Now)

BitClout, Friend.tech, Rally, and a graveyard of other SocialFi experiments all flamed out for the same fundamental reason: they prioritized speculation over creators.

Creators were treated as volatile assets to bet on, not partners to build with. Fans were reduced to exit liquidity. It wasn’t a creator economy, it was a degen casino. .

Zora took a radically different path. Instead of launching creator coins as pure speculation vehicles, they built creator-first infrastructure with genuine UX innovation, economic alignment, and culture that actually matters. 

The Real Innovation Isn’t Tokenized Posts

Let’s be honest: turning every post into a tradable token is clever marketing. But it’s not the sustainable moat.

The real breakthroughs are:

• Creator-aligned UX that’s faster and more intuitive than any previous SocialFi attempt

• Culture-first community building real scenes, not just speculative moments 

• Aligned incentives where creator, fan, and platform success are mutually reinforcing

• Recurring revenue streams for creators, earned every time their content trades, forever

That last point is crucial. Unlike traditional platforms where viral content generates one-time value that platforms capture, Zora creates perpetual royalties. Your 2025 viral post could still be generating income in 2035.

This also solves the creator monetization paradox that’s plagued Web3. Most creator revenue streams in the space have required artists to essentially rug pull their fans (launching memecoins) or sell them snake oil (99% of NFT collections) to make money. Your favorite creators in web2 have been pitched countless crypto business opportunities over the years and in all likelihood, every one of them basically boiled down to Ponzi schemes dressed up as community building. Creators make a quick buck, fans get left holding worthless bags, and the relationship is permanently damaged.

But Zora is different. Creators make money when their fans make money. Everyone is incentivized to stick around and win together. No exit scams, no bag holders, no choosing between ethics and eating.

LifeofThom has racked up millions of views and thousands of likes on his top instagram posts. For artists like him, it’s easy to see why Zora’s pitch resonates.

At scale, it creates a patronage system that would make the Medicis jealous, except your patrons can also profit from their good taste. 

The psychological shift is profound. Instead of algorithms deciding who sees your content, market demand determines what goes viral. Instead of hoping brands notice you, your community directly funds your work. Instead of platform dependency, you own tradeable assets that appreciate with your cultural impact.

That’s infrastructure for a creator-owned internet. 

It’s an extremely ambitious vision. And $Jacob will need to make some great chess moves as Zora grows. But the bull case is not as far fetched as it sounds. Because eventually, if/when the first superstar emerges from Zora’s scene and catapults into the zeitgeist (while taking their HODLrs along for the ride) millions of creators and their fans will become more obsessed with the Zora flywheel than any of your favorite Base influencers on X. 

Five Bold Predictions For Zora’s Creator Economy

1. The Creator Middle Class Finally Emerges 

With aligned incentives and recurring revenue, Zora enables sustainable income for creators with small but passionate communities. The era of “influencer or broke” ends.

2. Brand Partnerships Could Ignite A Bull Run on Creator Coins 

If Zora keeps growing, advertisers will eventually enter the mix. They will offer creators money for sponsored posts. Someone will crack a revenue-sharing model where a portion of these sponsorship fees automatically flow to the creator’s token holdrs via smart contracts. Imagine getting paid when your favorite creator lands a Nike deal. If this can be figured out, the market for creator coins would explode

3. Legacy Platforms Will Panic (And the internet will think it’s hilarious) 

If Zora achieves genuine network effects, expect Meta, TikTok, and YouTube to completely lose their shit. Remember how paranoid Zuckerberg got about the metaverse the moment it started to look remotely threatening? As a reminder, it’s called Meta now. 

Expect tone-deaf “creator initiatives” and desperate revenue-sharing announcements when they realize that platforms like Zora challenge the foundations of their business models. 

4. Curators Become Kingmakers 

Tastemakers who consistently identify rising talent will build massive followings and capture enormous value in this economy. . Think RapCaviar for creator tokens, or A&R scouts with public track records and tradeable reputations. In culture industries like music, curators have enormous power due to their ability to launch stars. Now take that power and combine it with the enormous demand for alpha in the defi world. Then ask yourself why everyone on Zora is trying to be a top creator, but no one is trying to become a top curator. 

5. Quality Wins, Finally 

The initial token farming rush gives way to a creative renaissance. Expect established Zora artists like RIZ LA VIE (40M+ streams in his top song, 500K monthly Spotify listeners) to leverage demand by premiering new work on Zora as a tokenized post.. Why? Because the fans are the label now.

Zora is still early, still imperfect, still figuring out sustainability versus speculation.

But for the first time in a long time, creators have real leverage and a real shot at ownership. Not just of their content, but of the system itself.

Turns out the best way to democratize media wasn’t to give everyone a camera, it was to give everyone a cap table.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​