Without a shadow of doubt, the rise of social media in the 21st Century has taken up a huge part of our daily lives. Both businesses and individuals alike use social media for important tasks and utility such as sharing ideas or information, preserving memories, building relationships and communities, running campaigns and advertisements, enhancing marketing, and so much more.
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More than 4.7 billion people use social media, equal to roughly 60% of the world’s population, with user-generated content and engagements being a cornerstone in the rise of social media. Expectedly, many creators and influencers depend on social media engagements to help monetize their platforms with advertisement programs targeted at their audiences.
However, as crazy or outlandish as it may sound, AttyMedia, an emergent Nigerian platform for rewarding creators, may be conducting operations that could completely freeze certain users’ social media engagements across all their social platforms. This is possible due to the business model the platform adopts, which is the application of a novel philosophy on copyright that thrives on engagements
Onuorah Joachim, the 27-year-old techie behind the idea, said, “The start-up is designed for sketch artists and their audiences as its user base. Artists must design characters with unique aesthetics like superhero characters in their fancy costumes, and upload them to the platform where users can access these characters behind a paywall to support the creators.”
“The idea is simple; an artist’s character possesses the potential to evolve, making its way into comic books, animated series, and live-action adaptations, as with popular characters like Spiderman, Superman, or Batman. A fandom culture around these characters tends to evolve as well, with users creating and uploading content online like fan art, fan fiction, or cosplays around a particular design or story arc of a character’s development, or the fan base engaging with different variations of this type of content whether official or fan-made, through basic online interactions such as leaving likes and comments.”
The AttyMedia CEO disclosed further that the platform intends to keep this culture localized to legitimate patrons, and is therefore designed specifically to track the official characters or official adaptations that a user patronizes, and grants them access to the relevant culture or otherwise block access.
Acknowledged as possessing the potential to change the landscape of online social networking in the way users interact with content, and how creators benefit from their work, AttyMedia’s mission is to implement the most harmonious and morally acceptable dynamics between creator and consumer concerning the creation, dissemination and monetization of creative content. Its vision, on the other hand, is to scale to prominence and satisfy the cultural demands of the patrons and fans of artistic content published by creators whilst effectively blocking out the snubs.
The platform claims to have a strong mantra advocating the freedom of expression and agency of the patrons to artistic content and completely rejects any form of censorship like traditional copyright strikes.
AttyMedia, Joachim said, leverages copyright to enforce exclusive access to the culture and engagements around its characters. The business model is to work in collaboration with other social platforms possessing capabilities to replicate a character fandom culture, and enforce a copyright policy demanding scrutiny of all media uploaded on these platforms to disable the user engagements around media appropriating character designs belonging to the AttyMedia platform.
Then, any user or fan of a character and its franchise that craves participation in the fandom culture surrounding that character must patronize the creators and engage on the AttyMedia platform. All other forms of engagement are considered alien and illegal as it would pose great difficulty for AttyMedia to track, and so will be barred altogether.
27-year-old Joachim began his programming career in 2019, taking courses in web development, software development, and database administration at Globalstar Innovative Information Technologies (GIIT), an IT training institute in Lagos, Nigeria. He would eventually go on to study advanced concepts in modern web application architecture, server development and deployment, and mobile application development in his spare time. By June 2023, he would completely formulate the business model for the AttyMedia website. However, the actual work on the site only began in January 2024.
Joachim says that the principles backing AttyMedia were borne out of the search for a better representation of copyright laws, details of which have been presented in an e-book published on Amazon Books titled “Copyright Fix: An Aesthetic and Ethical Viewpoint”. The book, he claims, contains a collection of comprehensive ideas, some of which AttyMedia has adopted, and others which he hopes the start-up and certain other businesses or companies can also adopt in the future to help serve a better version of copyright for everyone.
The CEO announced that in terms of early business investments and support, they are currently exploring various start-up funding options like crowd-funding, accelerators, incubators, or business loans to help scale better services.
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