Bittensor Novelty Search :: SN93 Bitcast :: The Decentralized Creators Economy built on Bittensor

This episode reveals how Bitcast is building the decentralized infrastructure for the $500 billion creator economy, using AI-verified metrics to replace outdated advertising models and unlock scalable influence for brands on Bittensor and beyond.

The Inevitable Shift from PPC to Creator-Led Marketing

• Tom opens by framing the evolution of advertising, from newspapers to the rise of Google's Pay-Per-Click (PPC) model, which dominated digital marketing for two decades. However, he argues that rising competition and costs are diminishing PPC's return on investment, mirroring the decline of print advertising.
• The new frontier is creator-led marketing, which is delivering brands up to 11 times the return on investment compared to traditional digital ads.
• This market is expanding rapidly, with spending on creator content projected to double to $500 billion annually within the next two years.
• Tom highlights that the market always follows ROI, positioning creator marketing as the successor to PPC's dominance.

Deconstructing the Broken Creator Marketing Industry

• The current process for brands to engage creators is manual, inefficient, and plagued by unreliable metrics. Tom explains that this broken system prevents brands from scaling their efforts effectively.
• Manual Process: Brands engage in a time-consuming, one-to-one process of outreach, rate negotiation, contracts, and content reviews.
• Vanity Metrics: The industry relies on easily manipulated metrics like views, likes, and subscribers, making it difficult to measure genuine engagement. Creators often provide unverified performance data, such as screenshots, which are open to manipulation.
• Misaligned Incentives: Fixed-fee models don't tie creator rewards to performance, allowing for minimal effort to secure payment.
• Agency Inefficiencies: Marketing agencies face the same manual bottlenecks and charge significant fees, offering little improvement in scalability.

Unlocking the Power of Micro and Nano Creators

• Because of these inefficiencies, brands tend to focus on macro-influencers, overlooking the most valuable segment: smaller creators. Tom presents data showing that this is a massive missed opportunity.
• Nano and micro-creators, who make up 95% of the YouTube creator base, have significantly higher engagement rates—nearly four times that of macro-creators.
• This higher engagement stems from greater trust and authenticity, as followers feel a stronger connection to smaller communities where interaction is more personal.
• Strategic Implication: The core challenge, and Bitcast's primary goal, is to build a system that unlocks access to this long tail of high-engagement creators at scale.

Bitcast: The AI-Powered Toolkit for a New Ad Era

• Tom clarifies a common misconception: Bitcast is not a marketing agency. Instead, it is building the foundational, trustless technology layer for brands and agencies to execute creator marketing campaigns, similar to how Google and Meta provide ad tools.
• "We're building a trustless tech layer for creator marketers and brands to use for marketing." - Tom
• The Bitcast YouTube Solution:
  1. A brand submits a content brief (e.g., "talk about X, Y, and Z").
  2. Creators on the network produce and publish content based on the brief.
  3. AI validates that the video transcript and description meet the brief's requirements.
  4. The system then measures and rewards genuine engagement, paying creators in "alpha tokens."
• Technical Foundation:
  • Miners grant read-only access to their official YouTube APIs, ensuring data integrity.
  • The primary scoring metric is tied to YouTube's internal financial value, which is directly linked to watch time and audience CPM (Cost Per Mille)—the cost an advertiser pays for one thousand views or clicks. This metric is highly vetted by YouTube, allowing Bitcast to reward real attention.
  • The incentive mechanism is "player vs. environment," meaning creators compete for audience attention, not against each other. This provides predictable, dollar-pegged rewards.
  • On average, 90% of excess daily miner emissions are burned, creating a deflationary pressure on the token.

Overcoming Growth Hurdles: The No-Code Miner and Ad Reads

• To accelerate growth, Bitcast is addressing two key challenges: the technical barrier for new creators and the need for a scalable revenue model.
• The No-Code Miner: This newly operational tool allows non-technical creators to join and start mining on the Bitcast network with just an email address. This is a crucial step for mass adoption, as most creators are not coders. A 5% fee on emissions from this service will be reinvested into subnet development.
• Sustainable Revenue with Ad Reads: Bitcast is moving away from fixed fees to a scalable, sustainable model. The first product is "Ad Reads," where creators talk about a brand for 30 seconds in their videos. Brands load a budget, and creators draw from it based on performance until the budget is depleted.
• Actionable Insight: The success of the no-code miner and the ad reads model are critical milestones for investors to watch. They represent the keys to scaling both the supply (creators) and demand (revenue) sides of the platform.

Introducing the X (Twitter) Integration

• Will takes over to introduce Bitcast's expansion to X, a platform with fundamentally different dynamics than YouTube. He outlines a new incentive mechanism designed to combat the platform's core problems: signal decay and a loss of authenticity.
• The Problem on X: The platform is overrun with bots and easily manipulated engagement metrics. This has led to an explosion of low-quality, inauthentic content, degrading brand value.
• Bitcast's Three-Pillar Solution:
  1. Corruption-Resistant Metric: Incentives are anchored to a decentralized social consensus that is exploit-resistant.
  2. Quality Over Quantity: The system is highly selective about which accounts can mine and limits the number of tweets they can submit, encouraging high-quality content.
  3. Targeted Influence: The mechanism allows brands to deliver quality messaging directly to specific, high-value niche communities.

The X Subnet Mechanism: PageRank and Whitelisted Mining

• The X integration uses a novel approach to identify and reward genuine influence, starting with the Bittensor ecosystem.
• Mapping Influence with PageRank: Bitcast uses the PageRank algorithm, a system originally developed by Google to rank webpages by importance, to map the Bittensor community on X. By analyzing public endorsements (retweets, quotes, mentions), it identifies and ranks the top 150 most influential accounts.
• A Living Whitelist: This list of 150 accounts acts as a "living, breathing whitelist" for mining. To enter, an account must earn endorsements from those already on the list, creating a high, merit-based barrier to entry.
• How Mining Works on X:
  1. An influential account (from the top 150) posts a tweet that fulfills a brand's brief.
  2. The tweet's score is calculated based on the sum of the influence scores of other top-150 accounts that endorse it (retweet or quote).
  3. Rewards from the brief's prize pool are distributed proportionally based on these scores.
• Strategic Implication: This model allows Bitcast to offer brands access to the core of any niche community on X. The plan is to expand this network mapping to other high-value ecosystems like AI, finance, and tech.

Future Roadmap: TikTok and the Advertiser's Portal

• Bitcast's expansion plans include another major social platform and a key piece of infrastructure to fully decentralize its operations.
• TikTok Integration: The team has already begun building an incentive mechanism for TikTok, a platform where viral potential is less dependent on an existing audience and more on creative, high-engagement video content.
• Advertiser's Portal: This upcoming feature will allow brands to self-serve—setting up briefs, allocating funds, and managing campaigns directly through an interface. This removes Bitcast as a bottleneck and is the final piece needed to achieve massive scale.

Conclusion

• Bitcast is building the decentralized tools to power the future of creator marketing, moving beyond broken, manual systems. By leveraging AI for verification and novel incentive mechanisms tailored to each platform, it offers brands scalable, authentic, and high-ROI advertising. Investors should monitor the adoption of its no-code tools and new revenue models as key indicators of its potential to capture a significant share of the creator economy.