This episode reveals how Bitcast is building an AI-verified, decentralized creator economy to capture the $500 billion shift from traditional pay-per-click advertising to influencer-led marketing.
The End of an Era: From PPC to Creator-Led Marketing
- The market is shifting to where the highest return on investment (ROI) is: creator-led marketing. Brands are seeing up to 11 times the ROI compared to traditional digital ads.
- This trend is driving massive capital flows, with spending on creator content projected to double to $500 billion annually within the next two years.
- Tom positions Bitcast as the next-generation advertising platform built for this new era, describing it as "storytelling verified by AI."
Breaking the Agency Model: The Problem with Creator Marketing
- The current creator marketing process is manual, inefficient, and broken. Tom explains that brands engage creators on a one-to-one basis, a process bogged down by outreach, rate negotiations, and contract management.
- Performance metrics are often unverified and easily manipulated, relying on screenshots of views and likes, which Tom calls "vanity metrics."
- The system is dominated by fixed fees, meaning creator incentives are not tied to actual performance.
- This inefficiency forces brands to focus on a small number of macro-influencers, leaving the most valuable segment—micro and nano creators—untapped. These smaller creators have significantly higher engagement rates (up to four times higher) due to the trust and authenticity they share with their communities.
- Tom highlights the scale of the opportunity with a quote from Unilever's CEO, Fernando Fernandez: "We want at least one influencer in each of India's 19,000 zip codes maybe even a hundred in certain areas."
Bitcast's Solution: A Decentralized, AI-Powered Toolkit
- The YouTube Solution: Brands provide a content brief (e.g., "talk about X, Y, and Z"). Creators on the Bitcast network produce videos, which are then validated by AI.
- AI Validation: The system first verifies that the video's transcript and description match the brand's brief.
- Scoring: It then measures genuine engagement using a key metric tied to YouTube's own financial payout data, which is directly linked to watch time and audience value (CPM, or cost per thousand impressions). This avoids rewarding fake views or likes.
- Incentive Mechanism: Bitcast uses a Player vs. Environment model. This means creators are rewarded based on the genuine attention they generate, rather than competing against each other for a fixed pool of rewards. This provides predictable, dollar-denominated earnings in TAO, aligning with industry norms.
- Tokenomics: Excess daily TAO emissions (currently around 90%) are burned. All revenue generated from brands is used to buy back and burn the subnet's native token, creating a direct value accrual model.
Overcoming Key Challenges: The No-Code Miner and Scalable Revenue
- The No-Code Miner: Now operational, this tool allows non-technical creators to join the network and start earning with just an email address. It removes the need for coding knowledge, a major friction point. This service is optional and permissionless, with a 5% fee on emissions to fund subnet development.
- Sustainable Pricing: Bitcast is moving from fixed fees to a scalable model with its "Ad Reads" product. Brands load a budget, and creators draw from it based on verified performance. When the budget is depleted, emissions for that campaign stop. This model has already been successfully tested with the Tact subnet.
Expanding to X (Twitter): A New Mechanism for a New Platform
- The Core Problem: Engagement on X is for sale, making it nearly impossible for brands to trust metrics. Poorly aligned incentives have led to an explosion of low-quality, inauthentic content.
- Bitcast's Approach: The X mechanism is built on three pillars:
- Corruption-Resistant Metric: Anchoring incentives to a decentralized social consensus.
- Quality Over Quantity: Rewarding high-quality accounts and limiting the number of tweets that can be mined.
- Targeted Influence: Delivering quality messaging directly to specific, high-value niche communities.
Mapping Influence with PageRank
- PageRank Algorithm: Originally developed by Google to rank websites, this algorithm is used to calculate an "influence score" for each account based on public endorsements like retweets and mentions from other influential accounts. An endorsement from a highly trusted account carries more weight.
- A Living Whitelist: The system generates a ranked list of the top 150 accounts in a niche (starting with Bit Tensor). To mine, an account must be on this list. The list is recalibrated weekly, meaning influence must be continuously earned.
- Mining on X: A whitelisted account fulfills a brand's brief by creating a tweet. The tweet's score is determined by the cumulative influence score of other whitelisted accounts that endorse it (retweet or quote). This ensures rewards are tied to both long-term influence and the quality of individual posts.
Upcoming Upgrades and Future Vision
- TikTok Integration: The team has already begun building an incentive mechanism for TikTok, a platform where viral content can be created without a pre-existing large audience.
- Advertisers Portal: This self-service portal will allow brands to log in, create their own briefs, and allocate budgets directly, removing Bitcast as a bottleneck and enabling true scale.
Conclusion
- Bitcast is building the foundational, AI-verified infrastructure for the creator economy. By solving the core problems of inefficiency and mistrust in influencer marketing, it unlocks scalable access to authentic, high-engagement creators. Investors should monitor the adoption of its no-code tools and multi-platform expansion as key growth catalysts.
