YUMON: The Creator Fantasy League to build the next content creators’ fuel

14 min readJan 27, 2022

The Creator Economy is the next big shift for our digital economy.

We are experiencing two layers of shift here. Where — once upon a time — creators needed the gigantic audiences of major platforms to get started, the tables have turned and now these platforms need the loyal communities centered around creators to grow and beat the ever-growing competition.

It should then be easy for Internet creators of all sizes, in both niche and mainstream content categories, to access a clean, recurrent and growing revenue stream, without sacrificing their creative universe by having to advertise insipid brands which put creators in a position where they become billboards, “selling eyeballs at scale”. But it’s not.

The major obstacle is the dominant Attention Economy led by the today’s internet economic fuel: advertising. 98% of the revenues generated by creators fall into the category of advertising, coming from either programmatic ads or sponsorship deals on platforms. These incentivize viral, attention-grabbing, click-baity and aspirational content, while disincentivizing niche and in-depth content.

In line with what has been initiated, the power and the dollars are shifting from the Attention Economy to the Creator Economy, from the audience to the community. The time has come to create a new type of fuel which is not based on advertising. It is time to showcase creators who couldn’t previously exist and their creations that never saw the light of day, simply because they had no viable business model.

Combining Blockchain, Gaming and the Creator Economy, Yumon is creating a new monetization enabler for Creators through a Fantasy League in which they are the Heroes. Yumon improves monetization, retention and user acquisition potentials for the channels of tomorrow’s digital artisans.

Inspired by the best deck-building games and sports fantasy leagues, we are the pioneers in ad-less monetization, and by doing so we’re taking digital ownership mainstream.

Moving away from attention economy

In the early days of BigTech, advertising wasn’t the initial goal. After the explosion of the .com bubble, Google and other nascent tech companies bet on targeted ads to reinforce their search engine and finance their tech projects. 15 years later, the model used to consolidate this bet has become the project itself, so much so that more than 60% of US ad revenue is generated by BigTech and 98% of Facebook revenue is from targeted ads.

In the past decade, social media platforms have replaced regular media outlets. They refuse to be referred to as such — to avoid the associated regulatory framework — yet have adopted the same economic behaviors as the more traditional media. Yesterday’s TV stations are today’s Youtube channels and Twitch streams, podcasts are the new radio broadcasts.

In the same period of time, we have seen:

the lowering of the barriers to entry for micro-entrepreneurship;
the diversification of content, where people with niche interests around the globe have been able to encounter kindred spirits, uniting against the so-called mainstream;
an increased competition between existing platforms and the emergence of new ones, often run by BigTech, hence their use of the identical sacred monetization model: programmatic advertising.

This last point allowed big creators to take back the control and impose their rules with the right to natively sponsor their content. The era of influence marketing then began on platforms which initially (for a few of them) only shared a portion of the programmatic ad-revenue with creators.

This platform-centric, ad-powered economy, which drives platforms to squeeze as much time as possible out of their users, is detrimental to the vast majority of creators and to the durability of content diversification itself. It drives platforms to find the content that maximises ad revenue, thus causing content homogenization, which brings into question the very existence of small creators or niche content.

Creators are excluded from the algorithms which dictate what is mainstream and — as a result — they can’t reach the critical mass they need to make a living from their passion and the content they love creating. In the process, the attention economy became the mainstream or “nothing-creator” economy.

Other factors are amplifying that phenomenon: for 10 years the Creator Economy has been growing exponentially and, in the the digital space, advertising opportunities remain unlimited. Hence, there is a consistent trend towards price reduction and Creators have been forced to prioritise quantity over quality, mainstream over niche.

Platforms could welcome tons of verticals and sub-verticals of very rich and well-produced content that could find strong interest within small communities. This would see them create a diversity of content far richer than today’s, and participate in the conception of a world where everyone could delve deeper into the topics that matter to them. We are both close to and far from this world at the same time. Close because the creators and the topics exist. Far because they can’t sustain or reach the audiences they need.

Platforms set the conditions for a piece of content’s success through their algorithms. Suppliers have to adapt to these rules, thus commoditizing themselves. By cutting out the middlemen, the big internet platforms became the middlemen.

The New Gatekeepers (Rex Woodbury/Digital Native)

While the internet has given the illusion of allowing creators to reach their communities directly, the platforms have just become the new gatekeepers. Misaligned incentives are baked into their DNA: the platforms are built for advertisers, not for creators and communities. Instagram, for instance, has a 100% take rate — in other words, Instagram has never bothered to build tools for its creators to make money.¹

Ads aren’t always bad; they can be an important part of a company’s or creator’s arsenal of monetization tools. But ad-centric business models are at the root of many of today’s problems.

Advertising on the Internet is a transitional model² which doesn’t allow all creators to exist and achieve sustainability, nor does it allow big creators to remain authentic.

The next era of the web is bringing with it a shift away from ads — away from attention as the product — towards digital commerce with native currencies for both individuals and communities. Digital ownership will underpin this new digital economy.

Small communities are the future, they need to be sustainable

It seems that the future of digital capitalism is in the hands of many micro-entrepreneurs who are closer, more connected, and by virtue of being niche, understand their patrons better than the big brands — whether selling content, products, or knowledge.

A creative space where ads are not the only way to fuel creative production translates into stronger content diversification, thanks to small but super-engaged communities, which could in the long-run be sustainable and open to even more diversification, branching into new concepts as they grow.

The longtail of smaller communities is arguably more valuable, if considered in aggregate, in the sense that niche communities tend to have more hardcore fans resulting in higher engagement, retention and conversion. The longtail has thus far been underserved and — as a result of lacking infrastructure to support them and misaligned business models — undervalued and ultimately underpaid.

When considered along the fact that around 30% of kids in the US and UK want to be a Youtuber and that 70% of Americans say they would like to have their own business, it seems there is a lot of value to be captured in aggregating and empowering smaller passion pockets.

A good illustration of this is Patreon (surpassed $1BN valuation in 2021; enabling individual creators to collect payments directly from fans) which allowed many digital artists, niche content producers or borderline editorial content creators to live and grow. Creators have adopted the tool as a new monetization enabler, adding a new line to their revenue mix.

According to creators the biggest barrier to using Patreon is that it requires putting additional time and effort into content creation for the 1% of their fans, in addition to the content they already produce for the 99%. Patreon becomes a good additional revenue stream when creators are big enough to create twice as much content or if they manage to provide smart rewards which don’t require extra content creation. The holy engagement grail remains the number 1 option, making Patreon the go-to monetization option when you have no other choices than monetizing through it.

Yumon fills this gap, the value generated through Creators’ assets in our Fantasy League provides the means to monetize at a high pace, without requiring big efforts from creators. These efforts are outsourced to our platforms. It comes with the game to play & earn and the marketplace to acquire/trade the digital items you need in order to create your deck, which translates your fan’s identity. The deep knowledge that fans have from their favorite youtubers and streamers is not valued anywhere today, we come suggesting a revenge for users who devoted their time, leveraging hours of watchtime.

Making digital ownership accessible to escape the tyranny of the critical audience

The long story and evolution of cryptography brought us to the ultra-democratization of these advanced techniques. Today, any smartphone owner can benefit from them and, in the era of decentralization, anyone can put in place strong digital security without requiring any help. Digital ownership has been made possible and web3 is gradually becoming the new standard.

However barriers to entry are still high, mainly because of the uncomfortable user journeys but also because of the non-accomodating lexical. Helping creators to escape from the “mainstream-only” model thanks to digital ownership will — out of necessity — pass through consumable experiences.

The virtual goods market is already on track to reach $190 billion by 2025³, with most of that volume residing in digital currencies — Minecoins in Minecraft, V-Bucks in Fortnite, and so on. Virtual goods are already mainstream. Taking digital assets onto the blockchain simply unlocks scarcity, which unlocks incremental value.

To participate in digital economies, people won’t need to understand what “fungible” or “on chain” mean — they will just need to understand that there are only X digital items in existence, or that a creator has Y digital items in circulation. Technical terms used such as “gas”, “minting”, “floor price”, “seed phrase”, “private key”, “ledger”, etc. need to be removed or abstracted by design to bring more people in.

Games are a wonderful way to do so and Yumon is tackling this challenge: you will rarely see the words (social) token, blockchain, or even NFT in our game. Instead we think that the commoditization process of these technologies passes through their total abstraction thanks to a higher degree of design efforts. Likewise, user journeys on Yumon are shaped in a way that makes digital ownership the next commodity, enabling everyone to start building their digital wealth through games.

Building a mainstream game to support creators implicitly involves allowing all fans to be able to be the next patrons with benefits. It can’t be only reserved for those who understand how the engine works. Today’s critical audience requirement and the dominant all-ads model put everybody in the same boat and dissolve the heterogeneous fan’s desire to engage. Yumon solves that.

Creating a powerful monetization enabler while helping Creators to take the leap into their digital future

Speaking with many creators while building Yumon, we have figured out that 95% of them don’t know how to tackle the advent of their digital futures. From the increasing adoption of XR to the emergence of persistent worlds or gaming universes, they all aspire to offer their communities the chance to be part of them, while also exercising rigorous control over them.

There are various reasons why they are disempowered on these topics and the two main ones are:

This space evolves quickly: every week a new big player announces their new web3 and m̶e̶t̶a̶v̶e̶r̶s̶e̶ digital realm ambitions. Creators struggle to comprehend how their communities are reacting to this new announcement. Opinions differ and evolve fast and there are no unanimous views about whether or not it’s a good thing for them, and whether or not their community is subscribing to it.
They are video creators: they master video editing and flat-screen content, they almost never work with 3D assets. Most of them have no 3D or fully-virtual existence. This privilege is reserved to the very top creators who are working with expensive agencies to build their 3D selves and have started interacting with their community in a brand new way. On the other end, a new class of creators has emerged: vtubers. They are creators who natively subscribe to 3D and whose identity is only digital.

Over the next decade, we’ll spend more time in these digital realms — both professionally and personally — exerting greater control over our digital representations. Why couldn’t we find a way to embrace this challenge for creators and their communities, while associating them with a powerful monetization stream, making it sustainable and free to opt-in? Yumon aims to help creators enter these worlds with their community, while keeping everyone safe, well-informed and always in a super fun and accessible way.

Super-fans become investors, fund creators and make the communities they belong to more powerful

Web3 is all about tilting the scales of power and ownership back toward creators and users.

Content creators no longer need millions of fans to make a living from their creations, but can survive on the contributions of a passionate few⁴⁻⁵.

Creating a revenue stream on altruism in hard, donations only can’t be a sustainable business model and represents a very small portion of creators’ earnings. However the premises of web3 have shown that supporting creators can be an act of investment.

The economic model which successfully mixes digital scarcity, earnings, social value and entertainment — and therefore gives the ability to creators to derive meaningful income from their creations — has a bright future.

Playing and collecting on Yumon is akin to collecting real-world merchandise with more excitement and derived value than you could have with a rare Pokemon card over time. From the purchasing act to the durability and the value fans will extract from them in the game, the investment benefits all parties.

Yumon aims at setting a new market standard for patronage where super-fans become owners and investors. Jesse Walden introduced the concept of “patronage+”⁶ as patronage with the possibility of profit. This possibility amplified fans’ incentive to support a creator and can be aligned with the creator’s success, giving an extra incentive to help amplify the creator’s work.

Yumon is one answer

We are in the early innings of the creator economy, this economy will continue to dramatically grow in the coming years. The social media giants will continue to invest in creators, in an effort to keep them engaged on their platforms to support their multi-billion dollar advertising businesses.⁷

It was William James, the fount of American Pragmatism who, having lived and died before the flowering of the attention industry, held that our life experience would ultimately amount to whatever we had paid attention to. At stake, then, is something akin to how one’s life is lived.⁸

It now matters to be able to increase our capacity to choose and to choose we need to have the choice.

Fortunately, there are new developments on the horizon that represent a shift in the balance of power towards creators, with an emerging creator economy middle class which answers to different criteria and have strong aspirations. To be able to fund their favorite creators, in a way which allows them to be fully dedicated to content creation they are passionate about, is a path to follow.

New solutions and games like Yumon will help this new class emerge to add a layer of entertainment and discovery on top of an already successful medium.

Funding

To support our work building Yumon, we have raised $2 million from business angels who are aligned with our vision and mission. We’re thrilled to be working with some of the best minds in Blockchain, Gaming and the Creator Economy.

Alban Denoyel (Sketchfab/Epic Games), Antoine Le conte (Cheerz), Arthur Perticoz (Majelan), Baptiste Manin (Verso wallet), Benoît Portoleau Balloy (Alkemics), Caroline Duret (Webedia), Cédric Sadai (Powerspace), Fabrice Baeli (PiXYZ/Unity), Francois Lagunas (Stupeflix), François Portoleau Balloy (Leeto), Frédéric Montagnon (Arianee), Grégoire Mercier (Addict), Guillaume Cavaroc (Meta), Guillaume Lestrade (Tropee), Guillaume Luccisano (Triplebyte), Guillaume Monteux (Gadsme), Jérémie Bordier (Instant Gaming), Julie Pellet (Meta), Julien Romanetto (Arianee), Laurent Guérin (Alan), Matthieu Delecourt (Meta), Matthieu Esprit (Slack), Matthieu Magnin (WeDoProduct), Mélissa Simoni (Twitch), Nagib Beydoun (Yeeld), Nicolas Pouard (Ubisoft), Owen & William Simonin (Just Mining), Paul Albou (Ubu), Pierre-Alexis Bizot (Domingo), Pierre-Edouard Sterin (Otium Capital), Raoul Liebel (Webedia), Raphael Guillet (Startup Flow), Rémi Rousseau (Mimesys), Romain Mahot (MA Partners), Salomon Aiach & Ilan Abehassera (Origins), Sébastien Borget (The Sandbox), Thibault Viort (Is Cool Entertainment), Thomas Girard (Startup Flow), Victoire Mine (Meta), Wilfried Hary (Ubisoft) have all participated in our early round of funding.

Yumon plans to decentralize over time, and we’re grateful to have a group of investors that will support Yumon on our path towards community ownership.

What’s Next

We will continue to build Yumon, hand-in-hand with the Yumon community and creators.

Here are a few of the more major features we’ll be rolling out over the coming months:

Alpha test of the platform with creators we have partnered with (white listing is coming soon!)
Progressive roll out of our game (alpha + beta)
Official launch

We’re always looking for talented humans who are interested in shaping the future of the Creator Economy alongside us. We’re hiring for a number of roles:

Growth manager
Content & Community Coordinator
UI Designer
3D Artist
Unity Developer
Full-Stack Developer (React, Rails)

Find all of our active jobs and more about them here.

About

Yumon is a player-owned creator fantasy world.

A mass entertainment solution to unmainstream content production and free the creators from the tyranny of the critical audience.

Yumon creates a whole new revenue stream for Creators, while giving them innovative ways to interact with their Fans as well as giving a solid alternative to their ad-only revenue model.

Fans can take advantage of their digital ownership trading the items, enjoying exclusive experiences and play a Fantasy game through which they can earn money and prizes.

From the attention economy to the creator economy: a paradigm shift, Clara Lindh Bergendorff, Forbes, 2021
Most of the Hal Finney’s public work
For Creators, Everything Is for Sale, Taylor Lorenz, NYTimes, 2021
The Web3 Renaissance: A Golden Age for Content, Li Jin, 2021
The new rules of the creator economy, The Economist, 2021
Full-time fan by Blake Robbins (Ludlow Ventures), 2021
Creator Economics (Youtube channel)
Stay for Who You Can Be: Avatars in the Metaverse, Rex Woodbury, Digital Native, 2021
Books and research papers about the Attention economy, Creative industries, Game design, Theory of Games, Economic Behaviours, Psychology and Philosophy.

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