Cocreation: Landscape and Value Accrual

Key Insights

• Co-creation protocols like Story Protocol, StoryCo, and others enable creators to mint or reuse onchain content as NFTs to create more in-depth and complex derivative works.
• The co-creation market map contains four major categories: production platforms, creation governance, value distribution tools and post-release tooling. Of those, production platforms have the most potential – and the most competition.
• Production platforms can be classified by their go to market strategies, with media specific, brand specific, and platform agnostic being the main approaches.
• Agnostic platforms likely have the largest TAM at the cost of having the most unclear user acquisition path. On the other end of the spectrum, brand-specific platforms have easier routes to users but constrained TAMs.
• The end result of co-creation adoption is likely to be expanded creator value flows, increased total amount of creators, and potentially high – but not necessarily Web2 level – platform profits.

Currently, content creation is confined to mega-corporations who own every facet of IP and user-generated content (UGC) platforms like Tik Tok who have limited content types and overly cater to large, mass-market content. While UGC platforms enable more creators, the revenue capture is heavily concentrated in the platforms and large accounts due to the fact there is only attribution at the top of the funnel.