Feb 19, 2022
Web3 alternatives to Spotify, Youtube, Google, and Instagram
With the advent of decentralization, many dApps (decentralized apps) claim to replace the centralized ones. This new generation of dApps comes with all the current apps’ features with added benefits.
With several existing real-world use cases for blockchain technology and specifically for Ethereum, it is evident that the era of Web3 is not theoretical. Following are some examples of web3 alternatives of current monopolies.
Do you remember searching for shoes on your phone, then seeing an ad for the same on your laptop while scrolling through YouTube?
Everything you do on centralized browsers, from visiting a site, entering passwords, making a purchase, can be tracked and shared with third parties, which they can use to run ads.
Google earned $100 billion-plus in ad spend, most of its annual revenue.
Every time we load a web page, we often see irrelevant and irritating ads. Even after setting up multiple ad blockers, they fail to block the ads. They do not only ruin your browsing experience but cost you 50% of your mobile data and affect your phone’s battery life by up to 20%.
Brave solves this
Brave is a privacy-focused internet browser that lets users navigate to websites. It has various unique features like:
- No ads: You don’t get any ads on Brave.
- Reward on ads (BAT): You can choose to have ads on the browser and get rewarded in cryptocurrency made by Brave called BAT (Basic Attention Token) for watching ads.
- No digital footprint: Brave does not track your data like other web browsers.
- Time and data savings: On the home page of brave, you can see how much data and time you saved that would not have been possible if you were not using Brave.
And this is why, for the fifth year in a row, Brave doubled the number of monthly active users, going from 24 million on December 31st, 2020, to over 50 million by the end of 2021. They ended the year with over 15.5 million daily active users.
Spotify/Apple Music/Amazon Music/ Youtube Music
The music streaming service made over 8 billion dollars this year! And it is sad to hear that only a fraction of those earnings go to artists across the globe.
Most artists are paid by significant labels, which means that Spotify takes a cut from the revenue and pays the money to label. Labels further take cut before paying to artists.
In 2020, iGroove Music reported that the Spotify payout for one million streams varied from $850 in Argentina to $5,479 in Norway.
To earn something close to the minimum wage of the US ($1200), an artist needs 220K to 1.4 Million streams.
This leaves no room for artists to make a significant amount of money.
Audius solves this.
On Audius, any music creator can upload and monetize content.
There are no restrictions like the need to be signed to a label or have a massive following. Audius also rewards artists with Audio tokens for achievements such as top-five weekly trending tracks and top five trending playlists.
The platform has onboarded over 100,000 artists with over six million monthly users. Audius offers the highest quality sound across free music platforms, supporting streaming and downloads at 320kbps.
Currently, only 12% of the music industry revenues goes to artists, but Audius aims to bring that number to 90%. This is possible because no middlemen are taking the cut, and artists own their music.
Youtube
Centralized web2 video streaming platforms have lots of problems. If we consider YouTube, things like:
- Copyright Issues
- Scam comments
- Censorship of certain topics
- Uncertain and low income for creators
YouTube paid only $100 — $400 for 1 Million Views in India in 2020. When the whole platform exists because of the content that creators create, then why does YouTube sucks up the majority of the earnings?
Odysee is here to solve this
Unlike big tech companies, Odysee was created by the same team behind LBRY, a blockchain protocol. While YouTube stores video uploads onto its centralized servers, Odysee works in a very different way.
It uploads the content to the network, and computers in that network share the data and keep it online, and the LBRY blockchain only contains the information on where to find the files.
It is a decentralized video streaming platform that runs on Library (LBRY) blockchain. It has better moderation and doesn’t use your data as YouTube does.
The creator gets the ownership and gets paid without any middlemen taking the cut because the content exchange is peer-to-peer (direct) and not through a middleman like YouTube.
Instagram has around one billion monthly active users and is one of the fastest-growing social networking sites globally.
It collects data about your location, likes, and time spent on various app sections. It compares your data across Meta’s apps like Facebook, Messanger, and WhatsApp and then runs targeted ads from it.
In 2019, Instagram accumulated more than $9 billion in advertising revenue in the United States. It is projected to generate more than $18 billion in annual ad sales in 2021.
Showtime is the decentralized social media
Showtime is an NFT social network to discover and browse digital art. It is a decentralized Instagram for NFTs. You can have a profile, you can follow people. You can see your NFTs across all platforms, whether it’s SuperRare OpenSea, Foundation, Nifty Gateway.
You can like NFTs, comment on NFTs, share NFTs. You can discover and follow new crypto artists browse the trending page with Showtime. The platform shows a variety of art styles and experience levels. Now, you can also create, buy and sell NFTs with Showtime for free.
This is just for NFTs, but there is a huge possibility for the current social media to become decentralized.
There are various apps like Aether, Mastodon, Minds, Diaspora, and MeWe, which provide a better and decentralized social media for the world where we own our data and are not prone to manipulated content ads that the current social media serves us.
