During the lockdown due to pandemic, I discovered Gunhild Carling in YouTube. She, an amazing multi-talented musician, posts her jazz sessions with her family and friends. Some posts are from her archives, and some live sessions. She has a strong presence online with around a thousand videos in YouTube. She has found a way to engage her audience in the digital world. And she is not the only one. There are many YouTubers who are excellent musicians, engaging the audience through creative covers, serious music lessons, detailed critiques, gear reviews and humorous takes. Entertainment and show business seem to quickly adapt digital channels compared to other businesses. And YouTube saves all their performances as digital content for search and discovery.

This month Netflix entered Decentraland, a metaverse platform, with an interactive experience based on one of their latest movies. It will not be too long before others followed the suit, where art, media, entertainment, and live shows will be available in metaverse. It is an experiment with an exclusive set of people, with those who are active in these metaverses. Internet was like this in early days – a suboptimal experience with an exclusive community, as compared to today. We come a long way from 2005 when the YouTube was launched. Those days, even if YouTube servers could serve the media fast, the experience was not great for many, due to constraints on consumption - bandwidth, cost of connectivity, access to devices and availability of content.

We often characterize Gen-Z by overuse of screens and mobile devices. Recently I was in India for a vacation and observed a common pattern across my parents’ generation. After dinner, they retire with their smartphones and watch YouTube videos for hours, instead of television shows. YouTube has taken it over from televisions and the older generated accepted it and adapted. It has passed the “mom-test.”

There are a couple of reasons why this shift is happening. First it is the content. YouTube has the largest and most varied content, which engages and satisfies audience from across countries, culture, languages, and interests. The second important reason is that technology and devices became accessible, simpler, easier to use, and cheaper. This could happen as the web advances into metaverse as well. As we have more content available in the metaverse, innovatively presented, with rich and immersive experiences, generations will shift their behaviour.

Web grew exponentially with content publishing and sharing. Metaverse also need content to create demand and engagement. If you consider metaverse as a channel, think how your content can be presented in the meta worlds. If the experience is not digital in nature, think how it can be redefined and converted into digital content. Retail industry did it well in the Web 2.0 wave, by translating the stores into sites and products & inventory into content. When we look at eCommerce sites, we see the digital content describing the physical goods - images, descriptions, attributes, available quantity etc. In metaverse, in the short term, fashion brands are leveraging their brand power by attaching it to digital products to engage users and monetize in the metaverse. Soon they need to build content-first products to suit the user journeys and experiences native to metaverse.

Migrating content to a newer “channel” does not justify the metaverse completely. eCommerce business changed the behaviour of buyers to discover products digitally and then buy. Also from a transaction perspective, there was no explicit order workflow. We used to pick up the product in store and invoice at the billing counter. In eCommerce model, the customer order document is important. Picking became a fulfilment activity of the retailer. As we move to metaverse, one could pick from a digital catalogue and buy, own, and retain goods digitally. The physical goods need to be created only at the time of consumption, and could be personalized for size, fit, name and other attributes. Metaverse creates new business models along with new experiences.

Just like order management become essential to eCommerce, smart contracts fill in the gap of facilitating transactions and managing ownership in metaverse. Transactions would be ledger entries on a decentralized platform and smart contracts could enforce the nature and rules of transactions. Smart contracts are configurable code - small programs that describe and dictate transactions on a blockchain. These pieces code executes every time we need to perform a transaction or run a workflow, effectively describing how businesses run on metaverse. Just as the content evolves over multiple iterations of a product, contracts also evolve through multiple versions or releases.

Once the content is available in the digital worlds, contracts guide how the content is consumed, shared, transacted, transformed and eventually destroyed. With a rough analogy from ERP systems where there are “master data” and “transactions”, in metaverse we would have “content” and “contract”. Creators create the content and coders code the contracts. Creators and coders become two important roles in building the metaverse.

Can you describe your business as content and contracts? If it is not present, can you reimagine your business as digital content and smart contracts? The answer to these will qualify your business to be compatible with metaverse and new ways of doing business in future.