The Cost of Centralised Ownership
The pattern is not unique to tech. Music labels capture 80 to 90 percent of revenue. Amazon's marketplace fees take their cut before anything reaches creators. Uber takes 25 to 30 percent while the driver provides the asset, the labor, and the risk. In every case, a centralised platform sits between value creator and customer, extracts margin, and calls it the cost of doing business. The language has shifted over time. "Curation." "Discovery." "Network effects." These are polite words for rent extraction.
Rasmus Risager Lindegaard, the product manager overseeing crypto and decentralised platforms at Lunar bank, puts it plainly when describing how YouTube currently works. A content creator uploads a video. YouTube's algorithm decides where to place ads. YouTube keeps all the revenue, handles the expenses, pockets profit for shareholders, and then decides what the creator gets to keep. You are what economists call a price taker in this exchange. You cannot dictate terms. You get what the platform allows.
This would be fine if the platform were not also your only viable path to distribution. YouTube does not have a meaningful competitor at scale. Instagram has crushed alternative photo platforms. TikTok and Instagram have done the same to video. Once a centralised platform achieves network effects, the creator is trapped. Move to a smaller, cheaper competitor and your audience does not follow. The network effects that drew you to the platform in the first place become a cage.
Why Centralised Platforms Cannot Compete on Price
The interesting question is not whether this arrangement is unfair. It clearly is. The interesting question is whether it can be disrupted. The answer, Lindegaard suggests, comes down to a thing most business discussions ignore completely. Profit expectations.
A traditional centralised platform has shareholders. Those shareholders expect returns. Apple expects profit on the app store. Facebook expects profit on ad revenue. That expectation is not optional. It is baked into the business model. Because of it, these platforms cannot afford to operate at cost, or near-cost, the way a decentralised platform managed by the creators themselves could.
Imagine instead a video platform owned collectively by its content creators. Not by a corporation. Not by shareholders. By the creators themselves. Revenue flows in from advertisers who still want to reach viewers. Costs are deducted. Profit does not need to exist as a separate line item, because there is no corporation demanding returns. The surplus gets distributed to the creators themselves, either as direct payment or as reinvestment in platform features.
Lindegaard describes this mechanism in detail. When you own the platform collectively, you do not need to pay for profit on top of operations. You vote on how much server cost needs to be covered. You vote on what features to build next. You can contract with independent developers to build features, paying them directly from the pool of remaining capital. What you have eliminated is the entire category of shareholder profit.
This is not theoretical. It is happening. MakerDAO and other decentralised finance platforms operate precisely this way. The difference is profound. Traditional platforms cannot reduce their take-rate below a certain threshold without disappointing shareholders. Decentralised platforms have no such constraint. They can operate at margins that look impossible to centralised competitors because their fundamental economics are different.
How Disruption Actually Works
At this point, the scepticism lands predictably. Network effects. Existing platforms have all the users. Switching to a smaller, competing platform means starting over. For any individual creator, this is true. But Lindegaard points to Clayton Christensen's theory of disruptive innovation. New platforms do not dethrone incumbents by competing head-to-head. They start by serving a niche exceptionally well. A platform built specifically for spear fishing content, for example. Or for independent musicians. It does not need to be YouTube immediately. It needs to be better than YouTube at something, for someone.
The other objection is that centralised platforms might lower their rates voluntarily to compete. This is where the math becomes clear. Lindegaard notes that platforms with shareholder expectations simply cannot. A platform that tried to match the economics of a decentralised alternative would need to operate with profit margins that would trigger shareholder revolt. The structure prevents the flexibility needed to compete.
What Gets Possible When the Tax Goes Away
This matters not because cryptocurrency is fashionable. It matters because the creator economy cannot mature under the current structure. When 30 to 100 percent of your revenue is extracted before you see it, long-term planning becomes impossible. You cannot invest in better equipment, hire collaborators, or build a sustainable operation. You exist at the mercy of algorithmic changes you cannot control and terms you cannot negotiate.
Remove that tax, and something shifts fundamentally. The difference between operating at a 30 percent margin and operating at near-zero margin is the difference between sustainability and precarity. Artists who could not survive on YouTube revenue become viable. Independent creators can invest in their work. The economics of creative work normalise toward the economics of other industries.
Lindegaard makes this point about traditional banking as well. The decision-making in mortgage approval is already algorithmic. Ninety percent of the work is done by a system, not a person. That system can be written into code and executed on a blockchain just as easily as it can be executed on a bank's servers. The only reason it is not already happening is that we have not reorganised how we think about the ownership and profit structure of financial institutions. The same is true for content platforms. The technology is ready. The will is not.
The creator economy will not mature until the platform tax is eliminated. Centralised platforms cannot eliminate it without disappointing shareholders. Decentralised platforms face no such constraint. That is not hype. That is mathematics.