Throughout the evolution people have developed a number of senses to help them in observation of the environment: sight, hearing, touch, smell and taste. In fact there more than five, like sense of space and others but the big five is the most important.
The most important of those five by far is the sense of sight. We perceive up to 80% of all impressions by means of our sight hence our brain is hardwired to process the visual information most efficiently and in shortest time to make a decision or to build an impression.
That is probably why people first learned to draw and only then writing was invented. First drawings are dated to be roughly 40000 years old and first writing emerged in Mesopotamia only 35000 years later.
While writing was a predominant form of communication for nearly 5000 years, technological progress resulted in devices that allowed people to capture images and share them instantly around the world in a blink of an eye as a way of exchanging information. Information that also holds emotional load to be instantly released after engaging with it.
Coupled with the shortening attention spans and constantly increasing information consumption, photography became one of the most important mediums to capture one’s attention that is driving engagement. All social media is powered by nearly 657 billion photos a year, or 1.8 billion digital images everyday and is highly dependent on it. Nearly 93% of human communication is non verbal, which can be surprising having in mind how much we text, type and talk. It seems we are wasting our time and would be better snapping a picture that tells the story much better and takes much less time. That is probably why even Twitter, a text based social platform pivoted and allowed to add images to the tweets.
From a business perspective images are even more important. It adds viral options, improves understanding, influences emotion, increases engagement, creates favorable perception, solicits action and drives sales.
95% of all visual content in gig economy is created by freelancers. But at the same time freelancers are the ones who earn from this the least. People creating unprecedented amounts of content for Facebook with nearly 500 billion dollars evaluation and get nothing back in return. The same goes for other platforms. Stock image websites take majority of profits from image licensing, modeling and casting agencies take a lion’s cut from talent earnings, portfolio hosting websites up-sell contributors with different memberships despite the fact that it is those contributors that create the value for the platform.
Probably it is not the fault of the services itself, maybe we can blame faulty business models and old technology that only allowed capturing that value in the form of profits. The way financing of those companies worked involved selling company’s shares to investors, that would later sit on board and put pressure on founders to monetize users as much as possible to assure highest returns on investment for the shareholders. Or maybe that is greedy human nature and desire for power. Whatever the reason is we can clearly see who is benefiting the most from artistic community, driving all this economy and earning the least of all most of the time.
But there is a beam of hope that can put an end to this unfairness. Still young but fast developing blockchain technology that may change the internet and how people interact forever. It is still terra incognita for an average user and what can it do to his benefit often remains unclear. But the majority of us do not understand how cellular data or internet works and that does not prohibit us from using it.
Blockchain empowered solutions allow to capture the value shared by content creators in a form of tokens through distribution of recurring reward pool. In simple human language, content creators are receiving tokens in exchange for the content that they share. Of course, in very early stages those tokens hold little value, but as the platform grows and it’s adoption increases so does the value of such a token because that token may be used in variety of ways on the platform and outside of it since it has utility and intrinsic value .
For example there is no more need to buy memberships, as different tiers of memberships are unlocked depending on the amount of tokens a user has earned on the platform. The better the content that member is sharing, the more votes he is getting hence the more tokens he is earning. There are no board members that are pushing for profits, because all the funding can be done by the community itself through and ICO(initial coin offering).
Or lets say a third party that wants to advertise on the platform has to use these tokens to pay for an advertisement and has to buy those tokens from the community. At the same time community members are receiving a portion of those very same tokens for viewing those adds. And the loop closes in perpetuity for the benefit of the community that is creating the content and value returns to them instead of ending back in the pockets of rich shareholders.
That is why we at BeScouted set ourselves on a mission to build such a platform and have build a working MVP to test the concept even before raising any money in an ICO from the community. There is a working product www.bescouted.com where content creators are getting paid in STEEM tokens while utilizing steem protocol for value capture and distribution back to the community.
In order to implement multiple additional features we will be creating our own infrastructure with our own token that will be used to create a new economy where freelancers, visual content creators and numerous talent will cooperate and interact in creation of new visual content through convenient tools and will receive all the value that they have created back for doing so instantly and with no middlemen.
If you like the idea and the concept you can follow us here and on telegram 
Originally posted on Medium by BeScouted
David
