Can you Make 6-Figures Writing on Web3 Platforms?
Can you Make 6-Figures Writing on Web3 Platforms?
the benefits of writing in web3 with a specific example
Today's article is all about the key benefits of web3 writing platforms, ending with a fun hypothetical example :)
Before we jump in, if you haven't subscribed to this newsletter yet, make sure to subscribe now! It helps us out a ton and it allows you to stay in the know on Spatium updates, book market trends, and NFT books.
Before we get into web3, I want to walk through the typical advice for aspiring web2 writers.
The most common pieces of advice say you have two options when it comes to your content and brand:
Pick a niche.
Write about whatever you want.
I tend to enjoy a mix of both. A lot of times I have a few topics I’m very passionate about which fuels all my writing.
But I like the openness of writing whatever hits me that particular day too.
If you write about whatever, then people will follow you because you are a good writer.
If you write for a niche, then you can get followers who love that niche.
So it depends on your goals.
All that to say, most people in web2 also suggest joining Medium. If you join their partner program for $5 a month, then you can get "paid" for your writing.
You’ll see big stories on Medium like, How to Make $7,000 a Month on Medium.
Those people do exist, but for the average Joe, you’ll be lucky to make your membership back each month.
But, you’ll have a few articles that do well and pull in $50 or so. Just enough to keep you writing on their platform.
Along with Medium, most will also suggest that you build an email list. Many writers use a platform like Substack to do this. Others use email services like Mailchimp or Convertkit.
The classic strategy I see is this:
1. Build a following and an email list.
2. Write every day until you have a good idea of the articles that work and don't work.
3. Expand on the articles that work, do more research, and write a short ebook.
4. Sell that ebook on Gumroad and/or Amazon.
5. Build a course around that particular topic and sell that at a high price.
6. Rinse and repeat.
Oh, and all this time you should be building a following on a social media platform. Oftentimes, Twitter makes the most sense for writers because it’s all words.
This is not a bad strategy. But I want to poke a few holes into it.
This Strategy is Hard Work
I have been at it for 4 years and still haven’t unlocked it.
I’ve sold 2 copies of my book on Gumroad, and 1 copy on Amazon. I’ve made $80 on Medium. And I have ~100 followers on Twitter.
One problem is all those platforms are separate.
I have 300 followers on Medium, 0 followers on Gumroad and Amazon, and 100 on Twitter.
There is no carryover.
You have to build an audience on every single platform.
This is where newsletters like Substack or Beehiiv are more helpful than Medium. At least then you own your following.
The Money isn't Great
You earn pennies on Medium. Amazon takes too many royalties. Not to mention, you need a good audience to sell on Amazon (or Gumroad). And you definitely can't make money on Twitter unless you are an uber influencer.
And when you do get to make money on social media, it’s powered by ads and controlled by the company, not you.
What is Writing in Web3?
These are the problems we are going to solve by using web3 platforms instead.
Let me introduce you to the alternatives to all these services within the DeSo ecosystem.
First, what is DeSo?
DeSo is a decentralized social media blockchain.
Woa…that’s a lot of garbage words there. What does it mean??
It means it is an open database that anyone in the world can tap into.
Medium, Twitter, Amazon, and Gumroad all have their own databases for storing your data and content.
DeSo is an open database shared between every application built on DeSo.
This means your followers on one app carry over to the next! It means you own your followers like you own your email list.
But it’s not a million years old like email.
I’m not knocking on email, it is still king. But DeSo and blockchain technology opens up a new power source for your writing.
DeSo has some great alternatives to every web2 platform we've discussed so far...but with even more monetary opportunity!
Now, before I continue, I realize I may have already lost some of you.
I just want to throw it out that DeSo is not the ONLY blockchain for writers.
But for the purposes of this article, I’m going to focus on the DeSo ecosystem.
Just know that there are alternative ecosystems out there (like Polygon) that offer writing platforms too.
DeSo Writing Platforms
Within DeSo, we are going to focus on these apps:
Zirkels: the replacement for blogs and articles (replacing Medium)
Spatium Stories and NFTz: the replacement for books and compilations (replacing Gumroad and Amazon)
Diamondapp, DesocialWorld, Desofy, Stori, and Pearl: the replacement for social media content (replacing Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok)
Reminder…all these platforms are controlled by your ONE single account.
The books you publish on Spatium Stories will show up on Diamondapp, DesocialWorld, Desofy, Stori, and Pearl.
And every blog you post on Zirkels will also show up as a blog on Diamondapp or DesocialWorld too!
Alright, we have our platforms. Now let’s talk about the advantages.
The Advantages
Diamondapp, DesocialWorld, Desofy, Stori, Pearl
The main income source I’ll mention here for writers is that your content can be tipped via “diamonds.”
To see the power of diamonds, let me introduce you to a powerful analytics tool also built on DeSo.
Here you can see my personal analytics:
https://www.openprosper.com/u/davidjwriter
If you look you can see in my 550 days on DeSo, I’ve made over $100 from interacting and using social media!
That’s already more than I’ve ever made on Medium, let alone Twitter or any other social media.
Now, this didn’t all come from tipping on my posts.
It also comes from a unique feature of the DeSo blockchain called creator coins.
Essentially, you as a creator, have a coin associated with your account.
Other people on DeSo can buy your coin, almost like investing in you as a creator instead of investing in a company.
When people invest, you get to take a small percentage (called a founder’s reward) adjustable by you!
To sum up: the main sources of income from these apps are tipping and founder's rewards.
Zirkels
This is a new blogging platform with a ton of fun features for making money online.
There is a free version, but for more money-making features, you might want the paid version which is $70 a year. So $20/year more than Medium. Not bad for a brand-new platform.
With the paid version, you can have your own blog that people can follow. This is like setting up a blogging page on Medium.
Instead of following you, people can follow your blog, you can have guest writers, etc.
Zirkels has built a ton of different ways to make money on their platform.
The first is by posting blogs…obviously.
Even without the paid tier, you can post as many articles and blogs as you want.
These not only show up on the Zirkels platform but they also show up on all DeSo apps as a blog too!
This means that your followers on Diamondapp can give you diamonds (tips) for your blog! Medium can’t do that.
But wait, there’s more!
Zirkels also has a unique reward feature for readers to reward articles straight from the Zirkels platform. Now, Zirkels takes a small cut of these rewards, but they have to pay the bills somehow, right?
You also get these payouts daily too! Not monthly like Medium.
I’ve been writing on Zirkels for about 3 months now and have already made $11 from rewards on Zirkels!
But wait…there’s still more!
If you do the Zirkels paid tier and get a blog, people can sponsor your blog for as little as $0.25 per day!
That may not seem like much, but it’s pretty powerful if you have a ton of sponsors!
Now, Zirkels has a lot more features I won’t dive into right now. But those are the main sources of income I’d say: rewards and sponsors.
Spatium Stories
Last, but not least, Spatium. Or Spatium Stories.
Spatium Stories allows you to securely publish your longer works and sell them all on-chain as an NFT.
Right now we are utilizing the DeSo blockchain to make this secure and decentralized.
We think of ourselves as a competitor to Gumroad or Amazon.
Although currently we only have fiction titles, we are not a fiction-only platform.
Whether you have a short story, fiction book, non-fiction book, or a long educational paper you want to publish and earn from, Spatium Stories is for you.
The main source of income for Spatium is pretty obvious: selling NFT books.
This isn’t too different from Gumroad at face value, but if we dig in, it’s much better.
Spatium vs Gumroad
First, remember that any book you publish on Spatium is minting an NFT on the DeSo blockchain.
The followers you have on DeSo can see your books while scrolling through their favorite social media app. And they can even buy them directly through those apps!
NFT books solve a ton of problems like censorship, used digital book sales, IP protection. And they give readers true ownership of their books.
But we’re not here to talk about the benefits of NFT books. We have tons of articles on that already.
On Spatium there are two ways to mint your book:
MOD: Mint on Demand titles have an infinite supply and are only purchasable through the Spatium Stories platform itself.
They are still DeSo NFT’s, so you can buy them and give them away, show them off, or even resell them on any DeSo app.
RARE: Rare books have a limited supply and can be purchased through Spatium Stories or ANY DeSo app.
These could be for collector's editions, unique covers, signed copies, etc. You could even use these to gate an exclusive room on Vibehut where you can do a live course on your book’s content!
To summarize: you can make money with Spatium from primary sales of your book AND secondary sales of your book. (Any book can be resold on the DeSo blockchain and you, the author, can make royalties on those sales).
Let’s Get Into Some Numbers!
Whoo! So those were the advantages. Now, let’s look at a hypothetical example!
Let’s say you are a writer and this is what you publish:
You send 3 Tweets a day for a total of 15/week on your favorite DeSo app.
You write 1 blog a week on your Zirkels blog.
Twice a year you compile 10-15 of your most popular blogs into an ebook and sell that on Spatium Stories.
Once a year you publish a limited edition ebook that unlocks a live course on Vibehut, and unlocks the recordings after too.
Essentially the same strategy we saw earlier for web2 writers, but converted into their web3 counterparts.
Ok, so we have the content. Now, how about followers?
Currently, DeSo has some low daily active users. The latest numbers showed around 2,500 if I'm not mistaken.
BUT, this is a hypothetical example, so let’s get ambitious and optimistic with this.
Let’s say we’re a little further down the road and DeSo has 1 million daily active users!
Twitter has around 260 million daily active users, so this is 1/260th of Twitter. A lot more than we have now, but not a crazy number either.
Let’s go big again and say you have 1% of those followers, or 10,000!
Again, this is a big number, but if we compare this to email lists, many online writers have much much larger audiences.
Now, not everyone that follows you interacts with your posts.
So let’s say that of your 10,000 followers only 5% interact with you daily…so 500 people.
Now Let's Get to that Money Math!
Tweets
When someone gives you a diamond for a post, it actually ranges in monetary value.
You can give between 1-8 diamonds.
1 diamond is about 1 penny, but 8 diamonds are about $5,000!
Let’s assume on your 3 Tweets a day, your 500 people interact with that Tweet in the form of diamonds.
Let’s break down the diamonds like this: 90% are 1 diamond ($0.01), 5% are 3 diamonds ($0.05), 3% are 4 diamonds ($0.50), and 2% are 5 diamonds ($5). You never get above that.
That means that at 15 Tweets per week you are earning:
15 * 500 = 7,500 diamond interactions per week.
Let’s breakdown how many of each diamond tier you’re earning:
1 Diamond: 7,500 (total) * .9 (percentage of 1 diamond) * 0.01 (price in USD) = $67.50
3 Diamonds: 7,500 * .05 * 0.05 = $18.75
4 Diamonds: 7,500 * .03 * 0.5 = $112.50
5 Diamonds: 7,500 * .02 * 5 = $750
Add those together: $948.75/week from Tweets!!
That brings us to roughly: $45,000/year!
*annual numbers assumes 48 weeks of the year :)
Blogs
Blogs are a lot more content to read, so let’s assume you'll get a lower read count, but similar diamond percentages.
We’ll also add in Zirkels-specific rewards with the average being $1.00.
Aaannnd we'll also say that 1% of your followers are blog sponsors.
So let’s look at the numbers…you have 10,000 followers. Only 3% read your blogs, so 300 people.
Of those, we’ll say everyone gives a diamond engagement, but only 10% give a reward on Zirkels.
We'll also say 100 of your followers are blog sponsors with the smallest sponsorship of $0.25/day.
Ok, so with 1 blog a week, we're looking at:
1 * 300 readers = 300 diamond interactions per week
1 Diamond: 300 * .9 * 0.01 = $2.70
3 Diamonds: 300 X .05 X 0.05 = $0.75
4 Diamonds: 300 X .03 X 0.5 = $4.50
5 Diamonds: 300 X .02 X 5 = $30
Zirkels Reward: 300 X .1 X 1 = $30
Sponsors: 100 * 0.25 * 7 = $175
Add those together: $242.95/week or almost $68/blog + sponsors! That's more than I've made on Medium in 4 years! All in 1 week!
That brings us to roughly: $12,000/year!
Books
Next, you take your most popular blogs and compile them into a book.
Again, you have 10,000 followers. Let’s say 10% buys your book.
That might be ambitious, but we're having fun so let's go with it.
You list your book at $20 because after all the content is worth 15-20 blogs (number of blogs compiling into a book) * $68 (amount earned per blog) or ~$1100!
That gets you: 10,000 * .1 * 20 = $20,000 / book.
Twice a year gets you $40,000/year!
Course
But books can be more interesting than that thanks to Spatium Stories :)
Let’s say the first book you put out was a MOD book at $20 and you cashed in your nice $20K paycheck. Now you have some breathing room.
But let’s say the second book for the year is more unique.
You publish a RARE edition of the book that comes with a live course on the book’s content, plus lifetime access to that content as long as you own the book.
Remember, 1,000 people bought your book the first time, so let’s stick with those numbers.
But this time, you first put out a RARE copy. You have a limited 100 copies for sale at $100 apiece. This is still a great deal and comes with live lectures!
After the initial 100, you also put the same book up as a MOD copy for $20 and 900 people buy it, but don’t get the course.
Let’s make it even more fun!
After the course, let’s say 70% keep the book forever to look at the content.
But 30% resell it. They learned and grew, and want others to have the same opportunity. You’re fine with this because you get a 10% royalty on all resells.
Let’s say the course content was super valuable to these people and they are able to resell the book at $250!!
Let’s add these all together:
MOD copies: 900 * $20 = $18,000
RARE copies primary sale: 100 * $100 = $10,000
RARE copies secondary sale: 100 * .30 * $250 * .1 = $750
Add those together and your second book actually got you: $28,750!
An extra $8,750 for a course is awesome! Plus you probably got more followers, more book sales, and a nice passive income from secondary sales!
Grand Total: $105,750!
If we add up all those numbers, we get a grand total of $105,750/year from writing online!
That’s incredible!
By the way, tweeting every day, blogging once a week, compiling 2 ebooks a year, and sharing your knowledge with others?
I don’t think that’s 40 hours of work per week.
Time for Negative Nellie’s Negative Opinions…
Now, I know these were rough numbers and that DeSo doesn’t have this capacity yet.
But I wanted to paint a picture of the potential of web3. Notice that this 6-figure income came from fans…not ads! How awesome is that!
It's also censorship-free and will last forever.
And the hustle of building this business is in the actual writing. Not sleek ways to build followers on 5 different platforms.
I'm sure there are also tons of online writing gurus who could add to this strategy and hit 7-figures of income easy.
Now, to add to the negativity, the reality is that on Twitter, only 2% of users have 10K or more followers. So that might be hard to achieve. But it’s not impossible either.
Many online writers have 10 times that number on their email lists.
Final Thoughts
This was a very fun experiment to play out. I’ll be honest, though. When I did the math, there was 1 big surprise in particular.
The majority of that income came from our Tweets, not our blogs.
I thought that was interesting.
All in all, my numbers were probably unrealistic right now. But if you pursue an online writing career in web3, I really believe this could be achievable one day!
Plus you own your followers like you own your email list, it’s all censorship free, and no more ads!
The more content you give away for free from blogs and tweets, the more you earn from diamonds, and the higher payouts you can get from ebooks and courses.
Rinse and repeat.
I told you the web2 strategy is not a bad one. But implementing that strategy in web3? Even better!