Canvas Space allows you to micro-monetise your content in fiat, cryptocurrencies

In late 2021, engineer-turned-media explorer Vignesh R and lyricist and screenwriter Dr Madhan Karky travelled from West Coast to East Coast to learn about the creative industry in the US.

They interacted with some of the finest creative minds and organisations, including David Aaker (the creator of the Aaker marketing model) and actor-comedian TJ Miller. These meetings helped the duo understand the challenges faced by the creatives industry which included subscriber fatigue and declining customer attention spans. They realised that these challenges could be addressed using advanced technologies.

“We identified the gap of independence and ownership, including the avenues for monetisation for creative individuals and organisations. We discussed this in detail and arrived at the idea of Canvas Space,” Vignesh recounts the story to e27.

A creator-centric platform

Incorporated in the US, Canvas Space is a SaaS-based micro content monetisation engine for creative individuals and organisations. According to Vignesh, it is the “world’s first creator-centric platform” that allows creatives to choose how they wish to monetise their work and build sustainable revenue channels.

The monetisation engine enables micro-transactions for any small parts (seconds, pixels, minutes, and paragraphs) of users’ content in the currency of their choice — fiat, crypto, or even ad inventories.

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“Canvas solves a unique monetisation problem for creatives as an augmentation to the declining subscriptions and advertising model,” he says.

As per research, our attention span has markedly decreased over the past two decades; it shrank by 25 per cent between 2000 and 2015. It means customers disengage with anything that is too time-consuming or complicated at first glance. If you make them wait, you risk losing them.

“Canvas Space with its micro technologies addresses those business and user challenges,” he adds. “Our USP is our easy-to-use templates and the future forward content technology that can be installed seamlessly through simple API and SDK integrations.”

Canvas Space’s key target audience includes:

1) Individual creators (creating across media, including text, audio, video, and images.

• text may include writers, storytellers, researchers, bloggers, etc.),
• image may include photographers, digital artists, doodlers, artists, etc.)
• audio may include podcasters, independent artists, musicians, storytellers, etc.)
• video may include vloggers, YouTubers, and independent filmmakers).

2) Creator collectives (like journalism schools, publishing houses, filmmaking schools, music schools, small medium creator collectives or creator communities with a sizeable audience and number of creators within their purview)

3) Creative enterprises (content and creative enterprises like Warner Brothers, Disney/Hotstar, and CNBC Network 18).

How Canvas Space works

The interface allows users to build a profile and either use its in-built editor (for text) or upload their content in text, audio, video, and image formats. Any creative entrepreneur or individual creating content can use it irrespective of their geography or follower/audience count.

They can use the platform to find novel ways of interacting with their audiences and build a sustainable revenue channel for their creative business through the ‘payblock’ feature while selling their content in full or in part with their audiences. This way, the micro-monetisation feature gives creatives the freedom to choose when what and how they wish to monetise their work in any currency.

“For example, there is a popular writers’ community of over 1,200 members from across Malaysia and India on our platform. It thrives on showcasing the prowess of poets, novelists, bloggers, and authors. While this community aspires to spread awareness and inculcate a passion for writers, bloggers, poets, and authors, it also aims to invent and enhance methods of helping them build a sustainable income source and find monetisation opportunities,” explains Vignesh.

“As a collective of some of the finest subculture-defining writers, the community discovered the micro way of innovative interactions for the audiences. Enthusiasm and passion blended with opportunity and as it experimented with locking micro content through the Canvas-powered technology, its world changed and the perspective of building sustainable creative businesses evolved multifold,” he claims.

The current revenue models for this writers’ community on Canvas Space included donations, author collaborations or sponsorships, author royalties, ads, workshops, and seminars.

The market size

The Creator Economy market is US$105 billion as of 2020, and with the onset of AI and other tech development, everyone is a creator today.

“There were 50 million global content creators and 200 million people globally contributing to the creator economy in 2022. According to Adobe, the creator economy has increased by 119 per cent in the last two years. The next creator economy influencers might emerge straight out of high school, as 29 per cent of high schoolers in America selected content creators as part of their preferred career choice as per a recent report by Antler,” he says.

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Canvas Space claims that it already has US$110,000 in its revenue pipeline, over 25 collectives and 14 letters of intent with B2B media houses, and 5,000+ creatives experimenting with it.

However, Canvas Space as a novel concept in the market faces a challenge: making a behavioural shift for creators to understand that they can have complete control and power to monetise anything without any third-party involvement and with zero dependencies on platforms. Vignesh and the team hope to overcome the challenge as it scales.

In early 2022, the startup raised an undisclosed amount in a pre-seed round from a number of individuals, including Neelamani Muthu Kumar (CFO of OLAM Singapore), Gagan Gupta (CEO, Arise), Anil Advani (Director, Inventus), Gunjan Aggarwal(CPO, Confluent), Jaya Kumar (ex-RingCentral, Capital Group). Suriyanarayanan (CFO, Aujas), Jayanth Narayanan (Professor, NUS), Saibaba Talluri (Co-Founder, Disruptrs), Anuj Jain (Founder, Startup O), Amit Jain (Co-Founder, Mednet Labs), Dee Mc Laughlin (ex-MTV, Virgin, Capital Group), Ipsita Agarwal (General Counsel, Olam), and Ram (Sony Playstation) are also among its backers.

With the company achieving multiple milestones since early 2022, Canvas Space will look to expand and for that, it plans to raise Series A in the US.

“Canvas Space is an original idea from India for the world, empowering creatives with the tools they need to monetise their content, their way,” Vignesh concludes.

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