From Anthony Padilla and Ian Hecox singing the Pokémon theme song, to creating the comedy channel Smosh or Ryan Higa from making "How to be Ninja" to being one of the highest subscribed Youtubers. In the 21st century, with more social media platforms being introduced, one could argue that becoming a YouTuber/content creator could be a legitimate career.

Fast forward to 2019, it seems like everyone is trying their hand at content creation, posting on Facebook and YouTube to generate income from advertisements, or posting on Instagram in hopes of becoming an "influencer".

It’s refreshing to see that the internet has opened many new ways for people a living, especially through self-expression and creation. However, as more revenue is generated through the content creation space, the platforms are taking notice and they are starting to have more of an active role in what gets published, and how much revenue the creator gets.

These platforms act like middlemen, they take the creator's content (for example a video) and publish it on another person’s feed. And the frequency at which this content is seen or recommended to viewers is based on the platform's algorithms.

This leaves the viewership of the content more in the control of the platform rather than the quality of the content itself. Also, when a video seen, the creator gets revenue through the ads viewed in the video.

However, they do not get all the revenue as the platform takes a portion of the pay (Anecdotally, I have heard that the platform takes a huge percentage of the ad revenue). The algorithms and limited revenue introduced by these platforms are counter intuitive to what a creator would look for when they want to monetize their content.

A platform with no middlemen, where they receive full compensation of their works, and a place where algorithms aren't arbitrarily limiting their visibility.

Justin Sun, a protege of Jack Ma, founder of Alibaba, saw an opportunity with blockchain technology and created the TRON network. Justin's goal with TRON is to have a decentralized network for content creation.

Decentralization means that everything is shared person to person (in internet terms: peer to peer), this allows content creators the freedom to monetize their content without relying on companies like Facebook, Google or YouTube.

Without relying on a separate platform, TRON gives creators the freedom to create whatever they like without any fear of demonetization. There were several instances where videos on YouTube would become demonetized or even taken down due to breaking Youtube’s AdSense guidelines.

However, creators noticed videos that did follow the guidelines were also being demonetized or taken down.

This sparked a lot of discussion on how much power YouTube has over what gets shown on their platform, and it put into perspective how limited true creative freedom is on these monitored platforms.

The TRON Network is an interesting take on blockchain technology because the expressive freedom it provides not only applies to creative ventures, but also with the spread of information.

Since there is no company regulating the distribution of content, a future can be seen where civil discourse and protesting can be even more effective. With the average person being more aware of local and global political events, TRON allows everyone to participate without fear of being censored, giving the power of the internet to the users.

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