Content Coins may be the only way for Rollups to truly excite creators. But be aware: the house always wins.
Crypto Twitter’s reaction to the launch of $JESSE was not friendly:

(In fact, the tweet above is one of the more rational and down-to-earth criticisms I’ve seen.)
Others have pointed out some issues:
But I don’t agree with these concerns.
The timing issue is indeed a bit unfortunate, but I suspect Jesse had long planned the launch date and chose his own birthday as a special milestone.
The extraction issue also doesn’t hold up. During his birthday livestream, he was able to reinvest the fees into other creators on Base. He also claimed he did not intend to sell these tokens.

Ultimately, Doppler and 11AM had a pretty good discussion about the sniping issue:

We’ll dive deeper into the pros and cons of different auction mechanisms in next week’s content, but Austin’s research on auction mechanisms far exceeds those simply complaining about sniping on X (formerly Twitter).
If it’s not out of malice, then why did Jesse do this?
Most of a Rollup’s sequencer revenue comes from transaction fees.
So far, Base has earned more revenue from meme token trading than from any other activity. The issuance of new tokens and the resulting speculative trading volume are key drivers of transaction fees.

Source: Allium
It’s very likely that Base is spending more than ever on core team, grants, events, proprietary apps (like Base App), and support for founders. But these expenses haven’t significantly increased Base’s contribution as a Rollup to Coinbase’s financial statements.
Creator tokens and content coins are a very clever solution to this problem:
Although users see skyrocketing gas fees as a negative, from the Rollup’s perspective, creating excessive demand for block space is actually a sign of success.

No other form of creator monetization achieves the same effect:
We now understand why creator tokens are a key focus for Base, but are they really the best mechanism for users and creators?

Source: Zora Docs
The flywheel logic of creator tokens is simple:
In some ways, content coins behave similarly to Patreon memberships. If you spend $1,000 to buy a content coin, your opportunity cost is the return you could have earned by investing that $1,000 elsewhere. The foregone return is essentially like paying a creator subscription fee. In return, the creator may reward you for holding these coins. These rewards can be tiered like Patreon, or distributed proportionally or randomly (like a lottery).
However, creators cannot directly receive subscription fees unless they sell their own creator coins. So, even if your cost is paid in the form of a yield subscription, not all of it effectively transfers to the creator you support—unless they “cash out and run” (i.e., “rug”). Jesse also pointed out this issue:

Additionally, content coins have a fan collectible attribute. As an artist’s popularity grows, the rewards they can offer “subscribers” become more valuable. Thus, content coins have a speculative component. Even if you don’t care about supporting the artist or getting rewards, you might buy content coins just to speculate on the potential future value of those rewards (whether tangible or intangible). This is similar to buying a first edition CD from your favorite artist, which you might resell at a higher price in the future.
However, this feature of creator tokens also brings significant drawbacks: they have essentially become financial instruments, and their market may attract institutional participants with more advanced tools than ordinary fans.
Just as true fans need vision, patience, and investment to identify, preserve, and invest in classic CDs or merchandise, the content coin market also needs real fans for support. On the other hand, a savvy trader can profit from content coins simply by sniping or other speculative means.
When exiting “membership,” you need to sell the tokens, which incurs slippage. Ironically, the lower the liquidity of a creator token, or the greater your contribution to the creator, the higher the slippage you face. In some ways, content coins punish the most generous sponsors.
My core issue with the creator token model is that it tries to combine sponsorship and curation to maximize trading volume, but may bring out the worst of both worlds.
The end result is that the underlying blockchain and trading venues (in this case, Uniswap) extract far more revenue than a simple membership payment solution would.
You could argue that curation markets do provide an additional function, but the two (sponsorship and curation) cannot be clearly separated.
As a comparison, we can study Craig Mod’s model. He built his own membership system, focused on keeping the setup as streamlined as possible, and succeeded.
He can proudly say that no one has lost their hard-earned money by supporting him.
What attracts me to Craig’s model is that it focuses on the act of creation itself (such as books), not on content or the creator as a person.
Personally, I believe that a creator economy centered on interaction is inferior to one built around real value exchange. Content should merely be a discovery mechanism and a way to create publicly, not the core product. To some extent, a free basic tier can be provided for users to experience.
I also believe these problems can be solved, and there’s no doubt that the Zora and Base teams are working hard on this.
At the very least, creator tokens represent a brand new attempt at creator monetization. Even if it doesn’t ultimately become the optimal solution, it’s still worth trying.