Twitch/Youtube Streamer Synthetic

Me and someone else in the discord were discussing the possibility of a synthetic based off of the popularity or some other metric of streamers. I will post a link to the original discussion here but the gist of it is that we could have a synthetic where the price of the synthetic is the avg views per month of a streamer (or something similar). Fans of that streamer would be able to “donate” to that streamer and receive a token.

Part of the motivation for this would be to provide a “feeless” way to support twitch/youtube/etc. streamers (Ideally, there would be very low or nonexistent gas fees) as well as allowing streamers to not have to rely on a corporation to make a living.

Another really unique feature that this would provide is the incentive for fans of a streamer to grow the community and promote that streamer. Since the worth of the synthetic is potentially based off of avg views per month, if the streamer gets more views then the fans who have the coin obviously make a profit.

As far as potential issues goes, I think most of the issues surround either the exact metric used, or UI/UX aspects, specifically around making intuitive and easy to use for an audience that may not have much knowledge or exposure to crypto.

Link to original discussion: https://discordapp.com/channels/718590743446290492/783187606908829736/815544600429199382
Link to just one site to use for price feed: https://www.twitchmetrics.net/

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Happy to continue conversation here.
The additional reason this makes sense to me is that this will benefit the streamer to gain more popularity.
Let’s suppose I have a long position on views of a particular streamer, so I will obviously try to promote their stream as much as possible. Now, instead of just a passive consumer of content, I am active participant and if my efforts are successful than I will get paid and the particular streamer got more audience without spending anything on promotion because people are doing it for them. Its a win-win for everybody.

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Still everything will depend on how well we set it up economically.
Tech part will be the easier of two.

This is something that I really like about synthetics, is the ability to tie the value of a coin to something that can be grown as a community and benefits everyone. I think this is something really key.

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I was thinking about this last night and I discovered that streamers are not paid according to the number of views but the process is quite complex.
These is some algorithm that takes many variable in account like views, average watch time and audience’s geography location (Third world country vs first world country) and only then is the revenue calculated.
So we first need to know that.

Second major concern is this:

Suppose someone gets liquidated and disputer challenges that, now we need some proof of all the metrics of a particular timestamp and it should be trusted by everyone in the community as the sole truth (Streaming platform don’t give information about streams publicly) so we somehow has to get that information so that it is publicly available and people trust it.

So for the first part I agree. And I think that this brings up a bigger problem on how a streamer would get “paid”. Ideally, it should be very similar to donations or subs, where user A donates 5 dollars to streamer, streamer gets 5 dollars and user A gets 5 dollars worth of synth or something like that. But Im sure it would need to be more complicated than that.

Second part I also agree with. However, for twitch there are sites that give that info, such as Streamers with the most viewers, March 2021 · TwitchTracker https://sullygnome.com/ and another one that I posted above

However, I’m not sure about other streaming platforms. For twitch we would most likely aggregate from the above sources, we could even use chainlink for that.

This is sounding like we might need multiple price feeds for each streaming platform.

Also, even though technically the streamer wouldn’t be paid according to views, if that streamer has their own synthetic, then they would also profit

The problem with the $5 example leads us back to the gas fee problem. You pay $35 dollar to get a token worth $5, you’ll never be able to get that amount of return.
And let’s suppose that people do buy tokens representing the number of views, do you think there will be people willing to offset the increasing number of views.
Although I do have limited knowledge about it, but the number of views always go up. Now as the developing countries are getting cheaper internet and everyone is getting online, so the numbers are bound to go up before the saturation point comes and I don’t assume we are there yet.
So point is we will easily find people willing to purchase the token and believing the views will go up because it makes sense because of the reason stated above and they can also influence it by sharing the streams as much as they can but who will be willing to take the losing side that thinks views will not increase.
So more effort has to go in designing the whole economics.

Ok, let’s suppose we get the data about streams from the websites you quoted. But what is the guarantee that they don’t start manipulating the data?
Lets suppose I have bought Synth asset worth $500K and these website owners are on the opposite side of the trade then how do I ensure that they won’t change the data according to their advantage given that the data is not publicly available so they personally asked each and every streamers to give them access.

Or on a second thought, what if the platform themselves start manipulating data?
They are a centralized authority and nobody can stop them from doing whatever they like.
Heck, we won’t even have clue they are doing it.
It is not on blockchain so they can do whatever they want.

I know I am stretching it very much but we should go though every possible loop hole.

All very valid points. One possibility im looking at is using arweave (or some other platform) and building an alternative streaming platform. Truthfully besides that I don’t see any other guarantee that the platform or the streamers won’t try to manipulate data. I know twitch has dealt with viewbots in the past. Maybe we don’t have the synth be set by the amount of views then? That was just the first metric that came to mind.

I don’t agree that the number of views always goes up. But, depending on how we set the initial value, that could certainly be the case.

I see a couple of possibilities here. Either:

a) we simply make a coin that represents a certain streamers views and people can short/long that coin (assuming we can solve problems listed above)
or
b) we make a coin that provides a better, alternative revenue stream for content creators and viewers.

I’m leaning towards either b or a combination of the two.

So, I’m going to really quick summarize the problems:

  1. Gas fees
  2. Data integrity
  3. Short vs long positions on a metric that is more likely to go up
  4. Providing profit to both content creators and viewers
  5. Economic System Design

Anything I’m missing?

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For the gas fee issue, one solution would be using something like matic/polygon or some other L2 solution.

Do you think people will be willing to switch to some other platform?
They have all their audience that they have built, years of hardwork just for a token to work properly.

It looks like we are trying to fit our product forcefully into the current infrastructure.
Maybe we should wait for decentralized streaming platforms to come :sweat_smile:
So do you think we will be able to tackle all these problems according to current scenarios?

Not sure to be honest. I think a decentralized streaming platform could become popular, and we’ve seen content creators switch to other platforms before. That was more of an aside but that could be something for the future potentially.

I think all of these problems are solvable, just going to need to do some thinking. I think the inital MVP/POC would be a twitch extension that allows users to support a streamer through buying their token, however we decide to design it.

This is a wonderful idea, the amount of exposure UMA would get would be astronomical on top of it already being a great platform. Please figure this out <3

We will try :slight_smile:

Adding this here from discord:

Right now, most content creators rely on youtube ad revenue, donations, sponsorship’s, or whatever. While a lot of work has gone into making alternative platforms that provide a fairer, more consistent profit stream, A synth tied to an existing platform like youtube, or LBRY, or whatever other platform you use takes away the reliance on any one platform. As long as views on your content increase, the synth increases.

By taking a look at LBRY, it seems like you would have to publish on their platform and build an audience on that platform. But with a synth, it wouldn’t matter where your audience is, since the value would be determined by avg amount of views (platform independent).

As well, this would make it so that you can still make a profit as a youtuber even if your content gets demonetized :slight_smile:

I maybe able to help - I do consulting work for Children Media

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I have been contemplating these concepts from the creator and media aggregator side of the equation. Let me apologize in advance because I haven’t finished reading the entire thread. One thought that comes to mind - the tokenization of creators or synthetic substitute is a way for creators to migration away from YT - following the NFT model moving artists away from galleries. The creators build enough backing that they don’t need YT -

Have a look at tryroll.com - empowering creators

I agree and disagree at the same time. I believe that this synthetic should be platform agnostic. One could argue that the synth itself is a platform but I don’t see it that. Like you said, yes the tokenization is a way for creators to move away from youtube, but at the same time they don’t have to. As long as the token is tied to the popularity of the creator, and enough people own that token, it doesn’t matter what platform they use.

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The relationship between popularity and the synthetic is interesting. In discussions yesterday we breached this topic at length. Popularity is the controlling mechanism that YT uses over creators. (And when I use YT it usually always applies to the others, Insta, Tik, FB…)

With a synthetic solution how much popularity does one creators really need to be successful? We have theorized much less than in their current state of relationship with YT. With YT too much popularity can get you removed from the search algorithm, too little and then they won’t serve ad’s in your videos. It’s the evils of centralization control. I have first hand experiential references.

The solutions for the Creator Economy will set the creators free from centralized control - no?

Synthetic = Creators Freedom = New Ways/Platforms for Interacting with their Audience.

I am not suggesting that this team needs to create a new platform along with the synthetic. I’d suggest that creators should build their own Web3.0 solution once they have tokenized success.

Thoughts? Please let me know if I am missing something here about Synthetic’s. I hope it’s obvious that I am coming at this issues from a different angle.

I am looking forward to learning more about Synthetic’s for everyone here - thanks