The ability to create content that reaches the right people shapes reality.

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The Wild-Spark blog presents the journey of creating a new content-marketing system. The marketing of content over the internet has come to rely almost exclusively on media platforms serving as huge data silos that control the distribution and monetization of user-generated content. 

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When engaging with content online, we create, search, distribute and interact in many ways that generate data about our interests and identity. This data is being collected by corporations and serves as the driving force of their main business model - targeted advertising. In this model, online platforms provide “free” tools that allow to produce and consume content -> their users generate content and interact with it -> engagements are monitored by the platforms and thus data is being collected about users -> advertisers pay the platforms in order to use this data and present ads to users.

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This process creates a centralized marketing system that holds all the information in a ‘walled garden’ preventing individuals to exert direct ownership over their data and utilizing it. As users, we get “free” access to services that allow us to interact with content, but at the same time we give away the data that represents our personalities and desires.

This marketing structure is based on services that are increasingly trying to extract users' information, rather than providing tools that allow them to collect and use it. In light of this, online users and advertisers (individuals and businesses), cannot reach people directly by paying them for their data and attention, but instead they have to distribute their content through platforms who own all the data and charge them for presenting their content to potential-relevant users.

The users, who generate the data, are not compensated when it is used by the platforms and they have no control over the type or scope of the sponsored content that is presented to them. Therefore, their privacy is regularly violated and they are frequently bombarded with irrelevant content that in a certain way functions as a sponsored spam that is managed by platforms. This content distribution method is good for increasing user-awareness but its intrusiveness and indirectness lead to an ineffective low user experience that lacks trust.

Beyond its evident effect on the distribution of content, the exclusive control of data by corporations has a significant impact on creators’ ability to monetize their content; The propagation of online content is heavily influenced by consumers’ contributions as digital word-of-mouth marketers, but given the dominance of the existing marketing system they have no ability to keep track of the traction they bring nor on the value they generate to creators. This deficiency prevents consumer-creator collaborations on the basis of their content distribution. In addition, a reality in which consumers own their data and can track the traction and value they bring to creators, will lead to the establishment of a new economic incentive; not one that is created by the need to access and consume content, but rather an incentive that derives from consumers’ desire to own the value they can bring to the content.

A new marketing system should allow online users (consumers, creators and advertisers) to form a direct-economic connection in which data is a transferable resource that produces attention. In such a connection, all participants own and monetize their data; consumers are able to pay creators in order to extract data from their content and be accredited for the value they bring; and advertisers (individuals and businesses) can send content directly to consumers by paying them for their data.

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The basic flow of the economic relations:

Online businesses build consumer-based data management tools that allow users to browse the web and exert direct ownership over their data -> These tools allow to transfer micropayments and to share data between users -> Content creators monetize their content directly from consumers who pay them in order to track the traction they bring and for building their marketing reputation -> Consumers utilize their data and digital reputation by sharing their data and enabling advertisers to reach them directly -> Advertisers distribute targeted content directly to consumers and pay them for their attention based on the data and reputation they’ve acquired -> The online businesses who provide the data management tools charge users for managing and storing their data on a monthly basis.

The Wild-Spark website presentes the journey of establishing the marketing system explained in this document. Over the past five years, I have conceived, designed and created three products that are an evolutionary process towards finding the right fit for wide user adoption. During these years, I have gained extensive knowledge, capabilities, insights and conclusions that accompany the process of creating the products and the vision. This page is designed to share the story and knowledge in order to enrich others and to gain feedback, ideas and collaborations.

The Blog's strip contains two feeds:

• Posts - which shows posts and articles in chronological order (I try to distribute a new post every week).
• Watch List - In which I share curated relevant content from the fields of Technology, Economics, Data, Philosophy and Media that serve as a source of enrichment and inspiration along the way.

I believe that as a data-based economy takes place in the future, the distribution of resources and value will be based on the production and contribution of each individual, thus creating a stronger self-contained trust that will enable ongoing collaborations between people and businesses. Such a reality will allow more and more people to generate income from the things they love to do and to live a much better life. 

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In order to bring this into being, we need to establish the presented direct-economic connection between creators, consumers and advertisers - a connection which I refer to as the wild spark.