Will Today's Influencer Content Still Be Around in 20 Years? The Answer Lies With Syndication. Yes, YouTube and Instagram may still be around in 20 years. The real question is whether two-decade-old content will still be visible.
By Matt Cimaglia Edited by Amanda Breen
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A few years ago, my niece visited me in New York. She was telling me about a new show she was watching about six friends who lived in Manhattan, met regularly at a coffee shop and got into hijinks. The characters' main apartment, she told me, was only a few blocks away from my own, and she wanted to visit. This would be the highlight of her trip.
The "new show" she was referring to was Friends. She'd never heard of it before. But she loved it and was binging every episode more than a decade since it went off the air.
Great television shows will live on like this because streaming networks and syndication rights keep the shows alive for posterity, nostalgia and new fans alike. But there is another genre of content exploding right now, one with thousands of hours of top-quality content being produced by some of the biggest celebrities in the world: influencers.
Related: How to Get Influencers to Promote Your Brand
What will happen to this growing community of millions of content creators? People who are turning their passions into professions? Yes, YouTube and Instagram may still be around in 20 years. But will two-decade-old content still be visible? Or will the life's work of these influencers fall to the wayside?
Where do influencers fit into a future-proof web?
These are significant questions made all the more timely by the ongoing international conversation about digital sustainability. Discussions around Web3 technologies, including a decentralized internet, are grounded in future-proof practices that will ensure digital content remains alive for longer.
"The average lifespan of a web page is 100 days before it's gone forever," note the people at IPFS, whose goal is to surpass HTTP to build a more resilient internet. "The medium of our era shouldn't be this fragile."
The stakes of this conversation sharpen dramatically when honing in on influencers. They are essentially entrepreneurs who are transforming their lives and passions into businesses, often one-person shops who want to focus more on content and less on administration and maintenance. What will become of their content decades down the line?
One company taking a stab at a solution in Jellysmack, whose new catalog licensing tactic, launched in January, offers lump sums of $50,000 to $50 million to YouTube creators for licensing rights to their back catalogs. The deal is simple: Jellysmack analyzes and predicts how much ad revenue it believes a creator's channel can return within five years and essentially purchases the rights to the creator's YouTube royalties for that duration.
Related: You Don't Need to Be on YouTube to Make Money With Video Content
"There's a lot of value in the YouTube libraries creators have generated, but creators typically have to wait years for YouTube to pay out back catalog earnings," a representative from the company told me in an email. "Creators license their YouTube monetization royalties to us in exchange for upfront cash."
While they call this "licensing," I think of it as the new version of syndication. And it's not a bad bet.
The trajectory of content over the last several decades has been an increasingly democratized approach. From the moment cameras became affordable for independent filmmakers, waves of artists began telling their own stories from beyond the Hollywood system. The technological advancements of the last two decades have accelerated that trend exponentially. Movies are being shot on iPhones. Content-management systems are allowing creative collaboration to thrive on a global scale, opening new opportunities for anyone in the world with the right mix of talent and drive.
The future looks a lot like the past
It's taken a while for artists, distributors and rights owners to figure out licensing in the digital age. In many ways, we're still in a transitionary period.
But innovation in this space isn't unheard of. David Bowie's "Bowie bonds" were an early version of a similar idea. In 1997, Bowie raised $55 million from investors and used that money to buy the rights to his back catalog of 25 albums produced before 1990. The royalties then became securitized into bonds, earning returns for whoever had bought a Bowie bond, which had a face value of $1,000.
Essentially, Bowie received a lump-sum payment from his investors, who — similar to Jellysmack — were happy to give him the money in exchange for royalty payments down the line. And as my niece who discovered Friends two decades after it went off the air has shown, younger generations will find great content and fall in love with it if given the opportunity.
Related: 10 Memorable Quotes from Pop Legend David Bowie
In a Web3 world, royalties will be worry-free
Helping creators keep their full rights and royalties is blockchain technology. NFTs may seem like an annoying trend, but they represent the future of art.
NFTs come with a secure, transparent, verifiable record of ownership and authenticity. Royalties remain embedded into every sale. In the progressing trend toward creators keeping control over their work, Web3 technologies, including NFTs and smart contracts (where every interaction with a client is logged into the blockchain), represent the next step in technological democratization.
This might seem like a big pivot, but it's a natural progression that has been happening slowly for years. Once the formula is secured, creatives will be able to enjoy seeing their hard work rewarded well into the future — both financially and in the faces of future fans.
