Background

We have done the technical and design work to make the Atlas codebase customizable when deployed as a running instance, as described here: #2512

There is however one major outstanding question: what about the instance that Jsgenesis operates?

The specific questions are

1. what should be the instance name and logo mark?
2. what should be the domain at which it is served?
3. what sort of content and category space should be used?

Right now, it is just called Atlas, which is the same name as the primary codebase, it has a logo mark pretty similar to the Joystream mark, it is most recently planned to be served from www.atlasplay.io and it has no explicit content focus and a corresponding very generic set of content categories

• Pets
• Music
• Nonprofits
• Travel
• Entertainment
• Comedy
• Autos
• Science
• People
• Education
• Gaming
• Film
• News
• Howto
• Sports

Proposal

Premise

The reason Jsgenesis should operate a gateway at all boils down to a timing issue: right now, the technical and operational team is very well organised and informed, and the DAO will just be getting started. By running it's own gateway, three strategically valuable goals can be supported

a. it becomes easier to focus on building in a way that serves third party gateways that will be launching later.
b. it becomes easier to rollout and test totally new features with being exposed to the uncertainty around the precise timeline at which new and well organised gateways will operate.
c. it becomes easier to much earlier attract the initial set of creators and consumers, which itself is valuable to do early because

• c.1. it assist in prioritising further development on Atlas on the basis of real user input.
• c.2. it generates realistic load/abuse on key infrastructure like faucet, YPP, Orion, QN, storage and distributors.
• c.3. it generates more awareness of the project in the crypto space overall

The first two are achieved regardless of the exact brand used, at least to a significant extent, but I believe the last one is very sensitive to the

Brand: The Mirror of Video

Case Study: Mirror

Mirror billed itself as "Medium on the Blockchain", so to speak, where the content and author index lived on Ethereum and assets lived on Areweave, and it differentiated itself from Medium most clearly through the bundling of innovative NFT tools around monetising and fundraising written works. They very quickly, either by user demand or deliberately, became very focused on building out a curated pool of authors from the Web3 space, which they built through something they called the "$WRITE Race", which was a combined token incentivised writing and status competition. They have been very successful at establishing themselves as the de-facto writing platform in Web3 itself, and publishing there is now considered a positive signal of authenticity and status, and while they still have a way to go branch into the mainstream that Medium is able to serve, it seems quite clear that they have done very well by focusing on the Web3 authorship space as a beachhead.

Thesis

The best way to achieve goals c.{1,2,3} is to focus on the creator on a vertical where we have the greatest tailwinds: blockchain. If we during the next year can serve the video creator community in our space anywhere close to how well Mirror has, it will have been a great step forward for the project in a multitude of ways, and an excellent foundation upon which future growth can be built.

Specifics

The way specifically execute on this focus based thesis is firstly to adopt a creator acquisition strategy which is aligned with this focus, but also to have a distinct set of categories used to only surface content related to this focus. The name itself, like Mirror, need not be very narrow or descriptive, it just needs a decent presence online. A name is just a name, and e.g. YouTube & TikTok are ridiculous names all the way up until the moment they aren't.

• Name: Gleev.
• Domain: gleev.xyz (available 20 NOK)
• Categories:
  • Investing
  • Podcasts
  • Conferences
  • Reviews
  • Tutorials
  • News
  • Memes
  • Interviews
  • Analysis
  • Predictions
  • Trading

Rationale

There are two categories of reasons why this thesis is an effective approach for reaching our goals

1. Focusing on a vertical rather than being generic:
   • It's easier to capture new creators when you can reference others they may know as already being onboarded.
   • It's easier for creators to effectively refer their peers.
   • It's easier for new creators to understand why the offering is particularly relevant to them and their audience.
   • It's easier to focus communication, marketing, tutorials and campaigns around a more homogenous pool of users, as they have a more uniform set of references, expectations, requirements and understanding.
   • It's easier to build a pool of content that starts to become interesting to the consumer side.
2. Focusing on blockchain specifically:
   • Both the creator and consumer side is already more aligned aspirational.
   • Many creators are already subject to serious publishing and monetization constraints around their content.
   • Both the creator and consumer side already has, in relative terms, a greater understanding of a large number of the UX concepts that are new to a more general audience (wallets, transactions, assets, fees, etc.), and is also much more patient with the immaturity of the tech and products.
   • Both the creator and consumer side is disproportionately on desktop, which is where we are strongest right now, compared ot general content audience.
   • Automatically generates awareness precisely in the community where we would like to generate more awareness (c3).
   • Like Mirror, publishing and using a web3 native platform for content can become sign of authenticity, further encouraging adoption and use.

Implications

• Website: Right now, the website has a few key CTAs saying Claim your channel, talking directly to creators, primarily because the whole site speaks very directly to creators, not because we were expecting that creators were going to land on the main project website as part of the natural signup flow, they were not. It may however be more prudent now to clarify things by either replacing this CTA, or having it send you to a section or new page which shows an overview of apps/gateways which you can get onto. This should also explain how these are different apps built on one platform. The Jsgenesis app would merely be one of these.
• Curation problem: Its unclear how fast this becomes an issue, but at some point someone may end up publishing something under a gateway which does not actually fall under the topic scope of that gateway, e.g. uploading a cooking video under the trading category of the Jsgenesis gateway. This is a curation problem that can be solved both at public and gateway layer, but I suspect the public resolution of such mistakes is needed as well - so everyone automatically benefits from the error correction. Thus some extra message would be needed where a category owner can evict a video.
• YPP: YPP running on the Jsgenesis gateway will need to explain that the content has to fall into one of the appropriate categories, and we indeed already have an open question relating to exactly this, namely which content category videos from youtube should be replicated into by default.