If you look at streaming it’s the most obvious product market fit for crypto.
Just consider…
- It’s the fastest-growing major media vertical
- Its audience is 80% Gen Z and younger millennials.
- In Q2 2024 alone, viewers watched 8.5 billion hours of live-stream content
This isn’t a narrative like crypto gaming, where the core demographic passionately hates blockchain. Gen Z and younger millennials are the biggest users of crypto, and both industries have an overlapping 70-80% male user base.
Moreover, when you consider the economic reality for younger generations - stagnant wages, unaffordable housing, automation, rising costs - streaming make a lot of sense as a way to earn a living. Traditionally, whenever something moves from counterculture into 'mainstream thought', as this is trending to do so, the money printer goes brrr.
On top of that, the world is becoming more isolated/doomer pilled, which increases demand for persistent, interactive digital spaces. Streaming supplies them, and crypto turns them from places you 'just visit' into co-owned/shared virtual economies.
We saw this concept play out, to a degree, with NFTs in 2021/22. In a post-pandemic world, digital identity and community were big movers of the industry. They didn’t stick, but the psychology behind what made that movement ‘sticky’ is also what is making streaming a dominant form of new media.
Simply put, in a world that progressively becomes more unstable and unfair, people will turn inward looking for digital communities and economies - streaming provides the social layer; crypto provides the economic layer.
This won’t happen overnight, but it’s clear that the vision of
@a1lon9 et al in this industry isn’t larp. There’s real demand, a real need, and clear product-market fit for this vertical. It's quite literally ‘just getting started’ and, IMO, will become the dominant vertical in crypto outside of DeFi.