Justin Alanis: Why Hollywood Is Broken and How To Fix It, How To Get Funded In Web3, The Importance Of Networks, Creating Connections With Fans, Building IP, Harnessing Creativity, The Disco Ball, Grass Roots Storytelling, Incremental Involvement, Fandom, The Creator Economy And Much More…

Quotes From Justin Alanis On StoryCo, Storytelling, IP, The Creator Economy, Web3 and Fandom

“Web 3 offers one of the frontier technologies that we’re leveraging at StoryCo that allows for new membership models, new access models, new ownership models that we feel are incredibly important for creators to be able to leverage and fans to be able to leverage as well.”

“We think that the best stories are going to come from this unleashing of creativity where community and fans can coalesce and interact with one another.”

“It was a really incredible way for him to see just how rich the experience can be with creators when you tap into their fandom.”

“The premium content space, in general, is a $500 billion annual revenue space. Yet, you’ve seen this with user-generated content on platforms like TikTok and Instagram and Patreon where fans and content creators want to get closer to one another, want to cut out the middlemen, want to be able to monetize directly from their fans. But with premium content, that’s never really existed. You’ve never had the fans have an opportunity to participate in the content itself, whether it’s through setting the direction or helping the directors or the actors or being part of the creative process.”

“We have a writers’ strike right now where people are fighting for more rights, more ownership, more acknowledgment over their art.”

“You don’t have any connection to the fans who actually consume that content because the streaming platforms own all of the connection to the fans themselves.”

“So, we asked ourselves a question: How do you create a better system? A system that creates this connection with the fans and the community in a way in which fans and creators can enter into that system more seamlessly. It becomes more egalitarian in its approach where anybody can come in, contribute creative ideas to that production, and get ownership in that production as well.”

“It starts as a piece of IP, but the extensions of the IP are really where all the money comes from. It’s the merch, the games, maybe laddering into TV and movie.”

“Fans become creators, creators then bring more fans in, and it creates this really beautiful flywheel effect with these user-generated content platforms.”

“There’s the passive consumption, but then there’s the interactive super fan consumer that wants to engage a little bit more deeply in the content. There are the people who want to influence the content, people who want to support the creators, people who want to co-create, and people who want to co-own.”

“The reason is they want to tightly control their intellectual property. They’re scared that regular fans will bastardize this IP. We take the opposite approach: we believe that fans are the ones who should be helping grow this IP.”

“We’re really interested in what StoryCo looks like in 10, 20, 30 years, not in six months. For us, our barometer is always, “How do we create long-term value and deep and embedded engagement, and deep fandom?” We believe that having a thousand amazing super fans is way more valuable than having 10,000 speculators.”

“If you want to come here and just make a dollar, like, that’s… We’re not your place. But if you want to come in and you want to think about long-term value and how you can contribute to this ecosystem and how you can be a creator, hopefully a multi-multi-multi-billion dollar franchise and platform with us over a 20-year period, we’re your place.”