Throughout history, stories have provided community and connection. Through mass media, stories are able to reach more people than ever before. These stories, however, are only told by a select few, and fans are treated simply as consumers, when they are so much more.
Story DAO is a radical experiment in community world building. Our mission is to unlock the potential of every creator and fan around the world by building an open Hollywood production platform where communities can come together to create, contribute to, and ultimately become co-owners of the next generation of story franchises. Our hope is that these stories eventually become as culturally relevant as brands such as Star Wars, Pokémon, and The Simpsons.
A Broken Hollywood
Today, the gatekeepers of Hollywood control the distribution of premium content. This has led to a top down decision making model where the production studio and the content distributors become bottlenecks for creators.
There has been mass consolidation in content distribution, resulting in fewer opportunities for creators. The development process is broken and torturous. New unique voices are routinely disregarded, with few opportunities to sell their ideas. When creators do finally break through, the upside for them is limited and mostly upfront.
It’s the community of fans who really bring a story to life beyond its traditional medium. Yet, there is a disconnect in the ownership over this content. Fans are creating interesting art and concepts around existing franchise, but it is not currently monetized, incorporated, or co-owned. Here’s where Story DAO comes in.
How Story DAO Works
We offer a new path for creators, allowing for a different way to generate IP, by setting the foundation for story universes in collaboration with established writers and amazing visual artists. The Story Architect, or the person who runs the production, together with a writing team, will create a new narrative-based universe that will live within its own DAO. The artists will then create NFTs of the characters and other elements of the future story. These NFTs will also act as a governance mechanism for the DAO and be used within the stories in interactive and immersive ways. After the launch and sale of the core NFT set, the writers’ room will start to piece out what we’re calling a core narrative. The community will then help build these universes into expansive stories through a create-to-earn model, with a bottom up structure where creatives exchange ideas with fan communities, build it together, and control the use of their intellectual property into premium content.
Entering A New Paradigm
If you look back on the history of television and premium content, you’ll notice periods of massive disruption every couple of decades. Each of these disruption events was caused by a new technology that had significant impacts on how the content is made, funded, and consumed.
The technology behind broadcast television ushered in the first dominant players in the space: ABC, NBC, and CBS who used commercial advertising revenue to monetize their content. This content was typically weekly episodic and distributed to millions of people without any ability to service niche audiences. Then, the technology of cable television arrived. Cable led to the advent of new television networks that were able to super-serve “smaller” audiences — MTV, Nickelodeon, BET, Comedy Central. Cable also gave a platform for new upstarts like HBO that pioneered a subscription revenue model through your cable provider. The result of this new funding mechanism was the ability to create more serialized television shows like The Sopranos, ushering in the “golden age of television.” Then came the new technology of the internet, giving rise to streaming providers like Netflix who have become the dominant content producers and distributors. Netflix and other streaming providers use a new funding mechanism — direct subscription — to enable a new form of consumption — binge watching.
The blockchain is the next technology that will fundamentally disrupt content creation and consumption. Ethereum and other blockchains enable access and ownership, while NFTs create community and new content funding models. At Story DAO, we believe that the next Netflix will be owned by the community and that the stories created will be told in new, immersive, and interactive ways that Web3 uniquely enables.
Join The Adventure
Stay tuned for upcoming announcements, IRL (very soon!) and digital events, information on how to get involved and much more by following us on Twitter and signing up for our mailing list. You can also apply to our allowlist for our producer NFT. If you are a fan of big story franchises, if you are a creator who wants to become a part of the future of storytelling, or even if you just love to immerse yourself in new experiments, come join the adventure!