18 Jan What is Web3? And how does it affect your marketing?
Overview of Web3
The term “Web3” was first coined way back in 2014. However, only recently has it begun to percolate into the consciousness of the wider public. There’s a good reason for this. The simple fact of the matter is that Web3 has powerful importance for the near future in many ways, but especially in the world of digital business marketing and service or product delivery.
Here’s an overview of what the term means, and how it’s possibly important for you and your organization.
First of all, what exactly is Web3?
Sure, the term Web3 is starting out with its first major steps into the sunlight, but beyond the VC funding sprees, lobbying efforts and rapid-fire corporate press releases, there is substance behind the flash. In basic terms, Web3 is the next phase of internet connectivity.
Also called web 3.0, this new chain of technological innovations in internet connectivity will hopefully represent a broad decentralized plane of internet connectivity that doesn’t depend on highly centralized players or opaque business practices.
Web3 offers the possibility of a more democratic, transparent internet that allows a much broader range of participants to join in without fear of eroding their privacy or digital security. In the most basic terms possible, Web3 tries to offer an idea of an internet of personal, social, and business activity that doesn’t depend on permission from central authority sources, be they corporate or government-sourced.
Comparing and contrasting Web 2.0 and Web 3.0
Web 2.0 was built on a backbone of interactive social media activity and user-generated social network “engagement” (either paid for or organic) that depends on large centralized repositories. Web3 on the other hand tries to rebuild sovereignty for individual internet users by letting them retake control of their personal data in personally beneficial ways.
The core idea behind the Web3 ecosystem is that internet users can take advantage of blockchain technology and decentralized digital protocols to connect with the wider internet in a way that gives them fundamental control of their digital presence.
To name a simple but essential example: With web 2.0, a creator of digital content would often have to place their creation out there on the internet with the vague hope that it would be organically picked up via social media attention engines and shared virally.
Never mind being paid for the creation of the content, being noticed was and still is often the best that you could hope for. If you want extra, accelerated attention, paying to play with sponsored advertising to massive central players like Google, Facebook or Twitter was your only major option.
With Web3 on the other hand, you as the creator of digital marketing or information content can create structures for immediate benefit from your creations in ways that no central authority can control. This is where the digital marketing angle enters the picture.
Web3 and Your Digital Marketing
Remember the essence of Web3 is the idea of decentralized digital marketplaces and ecosystems in which major corporate players lack fundamental control of what gets shared or supported by internet users. Because of this, your efforts at digitally marketing your business can be based much more purely on the real desires and content needs of your user/follower base instead of kowtowing to the policy guidelines of corporate rulebooks.
If you as a marketer for whatever type of product or service can create perceived value for your reader base while also making them aware of your paid offerings, you’re in business. Most importantly though, you can stay relevant to these followers without worrying about arbitrary content or marketing policy decisions that major players like Amazon, Google, Facebook, Twitter, or others create.
Platforms and applications built on top of the blockchain-based Web3 ecosystem of programming features can be more directly controlled and owned by their creators. They can also invite direct participation from users in ways that let them build a literally profitable stake in what’s being built or offered.
One of Web3’s central tenets is that it depends on a decentralized and even semantic web of devices and programming tools for hosting content among many machines. In other words, instead of your marketing content being hosted and controlled by a key player like Facebook on its own centralized servers, it’s scattered all over the place. This makes what you create essentially indestructible unless you take something cataclysmic like an asteroid impact into consideration.
By having access to this decentralized content/digital creation sourcing, you can offer your users access to services and products that they can have a much more robust stake in holding. You can also promote services and products without worrying about running afoul of central TOC rules that might not align with your business.
In a major way, Web3 marketing is quite a bit like hosting a cryptocurrency. It doesn’t matter if it’s not favored by a major internet corporation. As long as users find it useful for their interests, your online “currency” – even if it’s related to marketing another major product that you’re creating – can be accessible and useful to your network of fans.
Why you should care about Web3?
Every day, numerous online businesses suffer financial catastrophe because something they did or were suspected of doing or were misinterpreted as doing looked negative to a company like Facebook or Google. As a result, these companies can very suddenly lose access to a massive swath of their online marketing audience or users.
With Web3, you can potentially sidestep this centralized control mechanism by delivering value that can’t be blocked off from your target audience. This of course applies to your online marketing efforts, but it can also apply powerfully to your core services and products.
Web3 has the potential to let you deliver highly tailored and enormously flexible marketing via useful services, products and information to a broad range of internet users in ways that previously weren’t at all possible. Most importantly, it lets you do this in a trustless way that doesn’t depend on the whims of digital giants like Facebook or Google. These are crucial features of genuine online independence, whether you’re selling physical products, digital services or simply trying to spread a specific message.