small team. big city.
better internet.
Creators own their content, audience, and can get paid from the first view. It's a place to buy and sell attention on fair terms, set by the people who own it.
NextBlock is a US-based new media company reimagining social media for a free and open internet.
Our founders, software and strategy experts, made Flirting with Bitcoin as an ad-free podcast for their friends and family.
When they tried to promote it, they realized today's social media is built on exploitation.
That sparked an idea: using Nostr and Bitcoin to build a decentralized attention marketplace where people own and price their attention.
Right now, social media platforms sell your attention to advertisers. You get the ads. They get the money.
An attention marketplace flips this. You sell your own attention. Promoters pay you directly. You set the price.
It's more ethical because it's honest. You consent. You set the terms. You get paid.
The company that sincerely believes social media can be saved
block
Today's social media gives you a restricted space to tell your story. A tiny bio. A single link.
Your Block is more than just your profile page in NextBlock. It's your address on the internet. Free, and completely customizable. Link out to all the other places you exist online. Your business card, your link in bio, your tip jar, all in one. No platform takes a cut.
billboard
Today, your attention is harvested by platforms. Advertisers pay them billions for it. You give it for free. The platform keeps it all.
Billboard is more than just a way to get discovered. It's NextBlock's attention marketplace. Promoters set their max bid, citizens set their price, and the Billboard matches them where the two meet. Payments flow in Bitcoin, every 10 minutes.
Coming soon.
podcast
In 2022, our founders started a podcast to teach friends and family about Bitcoin.
Trying to promote it online sparked the idea for NextBlock.
book
Reimagined social media takes form in a love story. The tech is real, the love story is (mostly) made up.
code
We think our idea is too good not to share. So the ATTN Protocol is open-source. Anyone can use it to build their own attention marketplace. NextBlock is the first. We hope it's not the only one.
We are users of the world's greatest addiction machine: Social Media.
My fellow addicts,
Algorithms wield great power over our attention. They accelerate the influence of propaganda, wreaking havoc on our perceptions of reality. While they bluntly call us users, we should call them what they are:
Corporations Harvesting Attention On Social Media - The C.H.A.O.S. Cartel.
The C.H.A.O.S. Cartel
This Cartel makes $500 Billion exploiting us and perpetuating chaos around our digital and actual world.
We've been for sale under the lie of 'free'. We are the product. They've been selling us.
With a monopoly on our attention, the Cartel is able to exploit two other groups: Advertisers & Creators.
In a free market, people and businesses should have equal access to attention. But advertisers are limited by the Cartel's high fees, disenfranchising smaller businesses from competition.
Creators are the unpaid, or underpaid, labor force of social media. Their reach and ability to generate revenue from their content is solely at the discretion of the Cartel.
This marketplace controls and exploits the commodity of Attention only for the benefit of the Cartel.
But, with new technology, comes new opportunities.
Powered by Bitcoin and Nostr, NextBlock is the first and only social media company where people set the price of their attention to view advertisements through an opt-in, decentralized Attention Marketplace.
On NextBlock, the C.H.A.O.S. Cartel can't harvest your attention against your will.
You are not a user to be sold. You are a citizen with rights.
Only an opt-in, decentralized Attention Marketplace can free us from exploitation. To prevent abuse, this Marketplace must be made available as a public good, have mutually beneficial incentives for buyers and sellers, and it must fund itself.
We don't need a government to make and maintain this public good. Nor do we need a government to regulate this because it is a consensual marketplace.
NextBlock will build it, test it, and make it available to the public.
With transparent marketplace mechanics, buyers (the advertisers) and the sellers (citizens) are matched to complete a transaction at an agreed upon price. The marketplace also directs the buyer to pay for each facilitating technology contributing to the ad experience. Everyone remains incentivized to devote resources to improve each part of the Attention Marketplace.
The incentive structure for this public good dismantles and prevents future exploitation and monopolies. NextBlock will be the first, but not last, to allow people to control the monetization of their attention.
On NextBlock, we don't own your identity, you do. Leveraging the Nostr Protocol, each citizen controls their own digital identity, social network, and where their data is stored. NextBlock, a Nostr app, is simply a browser for your social media.
On NextBlock, we don't decide who gets paid, you do. Leveraging the Bitcoin Protocol, citizens who earn money selling their attention can pay creators directly when they enjoy their content.
And on NextBlock, we don't decide when the ads are shown, Bitcoin does. Ads will only interrupt your scrolling when a new Bitcoin block is mined, every 10 minutes or so. Get it? Next-Block!
So in short, the master plan is:
Step 1: Create an application that activates the Attention Marketplace, enabling people to pool, price, and sell their attention to advertisers.
Step 2: Use that money to build and improve the social media experience to incentivize more people to opt-in, creating a larger pool of attention to attract more advertisers.
Step 3: Then use that money to build custom hardware, enabling digital sovereignty so people can ultimately own both their social media identity and activity.
Concurrently, support projects like OpenSats to further Bitcoin and Nostr adoption while increasing social media literacy.
Let's discover how much our attention is worth together!
— Ian & Mandana
