A New Metaverse Platform Arrives to Help Fans Support Virtual Influencers

Steve Huff
Steve Huff is an Editor and Reporter at dot.LA. Steve was previously managing editor for The Metaverse Post and before that deputy digital editor for Maxim magazine. He has written for Inside Hook, Observer and New York Mag. Steve is the author of two official tie-ins books for AMC’s hit “Breaking Bad” prequel, “Better Call Saul.” He’s also a classically-trained tenor and has performed with opera companies and orchestras all over the Eastern U.S. He lives in the greater Boston metro area with his wife, educator Dr. Dana Huff.
A New Metaverse Platform Arrives to Help Fans Support Virtual Influencers
Photo courtesy of Brud

If you’ve fallen down the virtual influencer rabbit hole and have a fave computer-created, made-up digital human — like Lil Miquela or Nobody Sausage — struggling to feed itself with digital food, you can help it out with VIM.

VIM, according to the company’s website, stands for “Virtual Influencer Mining.” The creators call it “a Create to Earn (C2E) system.” Players don’t just support virtual characters in the metaverse but also earn from supporting them.


So — what is C2E, and how does it work? It’s as simple as creating new digital content: think avatars, skins, digital art, or perhaps music, then minting it and selling it as an NFT. Decentraland, a virtual world with its own blockchain-enabled currency, represents just one notable example of C2E.

Once you own a parcel there, you can build anything you want using the Decentraland builder. It allows the creation of anything from buildings to animation, wearables for characters and artwork. All such creations can be traded away, put up for sale or otherwise monetized.

Via email, a company spokesperson told dot.LA that VIM is, first of all, “a marketing platform” that facilitates connections between humans and “virtual humans.” Here, the focus is on users and virtual personas rather than creating specialized spaces as in Decentraland.

The rep wrote that people who join the platform get rewards from “marketing activity, not gas fee(s) generated from computing power.”

Participants, according to VIM, can earn profits by supporting virtual influencers with subscriptions and interacting with and promoting them. In addition, the project’s creators say they are seeking to “solve the problems caused by” other X2E projects. Primarily, VIM hopes to shed the reputation that X2E projects are merely Ponzi schemes.

X2E, which stands for “X to Earn,” is a Web3 growth model that rewards users for referring friends to a platform with digital goods like NFTs or cryptocurrencies. X2E's goal is to have people take part in a hype exchange of interests and rights. It’s a tricky model, and VIM indicated as much to dot.LA. Theoretically speaking, the difference between X2E and a Ponzi scheme is the former accrues interest and buy-ins gradually, using hype and FOMO. The latter moves fast, forcing creators to tap into early adopter funding to keep attracting interest. But again, both models rely on hype and FOMO driving usership.

VIM’s creators say the service links to the blockchain to form an ecosystem of games, shopping, virtual performance and social networking services. VIM users will be able to boost their favorite influencers through activities that earn VIM TOKENS. Using NFTs called “Vanters,” users negotiate with virtual influencers to pick up profit-making Daily Quests. Though the way said quests will work hasn’t been specified by VIM’s creators, they will require an additional NFT, “Rainbow Goggles,” to complete. In addition, Vanter owners can earn unique user grades, levels and statuses—similar to boosting character abilities in video games with power-ups.

VIM comes at an interesting time for the virtual influencer space, a category of entertainer that wasn’t that widely known until “virtual rapper” FN Meka exploded onto the scene. Meka even secured a recording deal with Capitol Records. The deal went south, however, when Meka went viral in the worst way, slammed on social media for propagating negative stereotypes and exploiting real-world musicians. And Lil Miquela, perhaps the most famous virtual influencer, doesn’t need financial help if it’s true that, as The Hollywood Reporter claimed, the character could make as much as $10,000 for a single sponsored post.

Not helping matters is that VIM enters this space at a time when the metaverse isn’t thriving. Coindesk recently reported that Decentraland has just 650 daily active users. Meta’s own Horizon Worlds currently has just under 200,000 active users, according to documents seen by the Wall Street Journal.

Nonetheless, virtual Influencers aren’t going away any time soon and are likely to grow more sophisticated as AI improves. This is to say, even as a character like Lil Miquela becomes a fashion star, VIM’s challenge will be that the metaverse still seems resistant to widespread adoption and expansion.

steve@dot.la

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How the 'Thrift Haul' Boosted Secondhand Ecommerce Platforms

Lon Harris
Lon Harris is a contributor to dot.LA. His work has also appeared on ScreenJunkies, RottenTomatoes and Inside Streaming.
How the 'Thrift Haul' Boosted Secondhand Ecommerce Platforms
Evan Xie

If you can believe it, it’s been more than a decade since rapper Macklemore extolled the virtues of thrift shopping in a viral music video. But while scouring the ranks of vintage clothing stores looking for the ultimate come-up may have waned in popularity since 2012, the online version of this activity is apparently thriving.

According to a new trend story from CNBC, interest in “reselling” platforms like Etsy-owned Depop and Poshmark has exploded in the years since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdown. In an article that spends a frankly surprising amount of time focused on sellers receiving death threats before concluding that they’re “not the norm,” the network cites the usual belt-tightening ecommerce suspects – housebound individuals doing more of their shopping online coupled with inflation woes and recession fears – as the causes behind the uptick.

As for data, there’s a survey from Depop themselves, finding that 53% of respondents in the UK are more inclined to shop secondhand as living costs continue to rise. Additional research from Advance Market Analytics confirms the trend, citing not just increased demand for cheap clothes but the pressing need for a sustainable alternative to recycling clothing materials at its core.

The major popularity of “thrift haul” videos across social media platforms like YouTube and TikTok has also boosted the visibility of vintage clothes shopping and hunting for buried treasures. Teenage TikToker Jacklyn Wells scores millions of views on her thrift haul videos, only to get routinely mass-accused of greed for ratching up the Depop resell prices for her coolest finds and discoveries. Nonetheless, viral clips like Wells’ have helped to embed secondhand shopping apps more generally within online fashion culture. Fashion and beauty magazine Hunger now features a regular list of the hottest items on the re-sale market, with a focus on how to use them to recreate hot runway looks.

As with a lot of consumer and technology trends, the sudden surge of interest in second-hand clothing retailers was only partly organic. According to The Drum, ecommerce apps Vinted, eBay, and Depop have collectively spent around $120 million on advertising throughout the last few years, promoting the recent vintage shopping boom and helping to normalize second-hand shopping. This includes conventional advertising, of course, but also deals with online influencers to post content like “thrift haul” videos, along with shoutouts for where to track down the best finds.

Reselling platforms have naturally responded to the increase in visibility with new features (as well as a predictable hike in transaction fees). Poshmark recently introduced livestreamed “Posh Shows” during which sellers can host auctions or provide deeper insight into their inventory. Depop, meanwhile, has introduced a “Make Offer” option to fully integrate the bartering and negotiation process into the app, rather than forcing buyers and sellers to text or Direct Message one another elsewhere. (The platform formerly had a comments section on product pages, but shut this option down after finding that it led to arguments, and wasn’t particularly helpful in making purchase decisions.)

Now that it’s clear there’s money to be made in online thrift stores, larger and more established brands and retailers are also pushing their way into the space. H&M and Target have both partnered with online thrift store ThredUp on featured collections of previously-worn clothing. A new “curated” resale collection from Tommy Hilfiger – featuring minorly damaged items that were returned to its retail stores – was developed and promoted through a partnership with Depop, which has also teamed with Kellogg’s on a line of Pop-Tarts-inspired wear. J.Crew is even bringing back its classic ‘80s Rollneck Sweater in a nod to the renewed interest in all things vintage.

Still, with any surge of popularity and visibility, there must also come an accompanying backlash. In a sharp editorial this week for Arizona University’s Daily Wildcat, thrift shopping enthusiast Luke Lawson makes the case that sites like Depop are “gentrifying fashion,” stripping communities of local thrift stores that provide a valuable public service, particularly for members of low-income communities. As well, UK tabloids are routinely filled with secondhand shopping horror stories these days, another evidence point as to their increased visibility among British consumers specifically, not to mention the general dangers of buying personal items from strangers you met over the internet.

How to Startup: Mission Acquisition

Spencer Rascoff

Spencer Rascoff serves as executive chairman of dot.LA. He is an entrepreneur and company leader who co-founded Zillow, Hotwire, dot.LA, Pacaso and Supernova, and who served as Zillow's CEO for a decade. During Spencer's time as CEO, Zillow won dozens of "best places to work" awards as it grew to over 4,500 employees, $3 billion in revenue, and $10 billion in market capitalization. Prior to Zillow, Spencer co-founded and was VP Corporate Development of Hotwire, which was sold to Expedia for $685 million in 2003. Through his startup studio and venture capital firm, 75 & Sunny, Spencer is an active angel investor in over 100 companies and is incubating several more.

How to Startup: Mission Acquisition

Numbers don’t lie, but often they don’t tell the whole story. If you look at the facts and figures alone, launching a startup seems like a daunting enterprise. It seems like a miracle anyone makes it out the other side.

  • 90% of startups around the world fail.
  • On average, it takes startups 2-3 years to turn a profit. (Venture funded startups take far longer.)
  • Post-seed round, fewer than 10% of startups go on to successfully raise a Series A investment.
  • Less than 1% of startups go public.
  • A startup only has a .00006% chance of becoming a unicorn.

Ouch.

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From The Vault: VC Legend Bill Gurley On Startups, Venture Capital and Scaling

Spencer Rascoff

Spencer Rascoff serves as executive chairman of dot.LA. He is an entrepreneur and company leader who co-founded Zillow, Hotwire, dot.LA, Pacaso and Supernova, and who served as Zillow's CEO for a decade. During Spencer's time as CEO, Zillow won dozens of "best places to work" awards as it grew to over 4,500 employees, $3 billion in revenue, and $10 billion in market capitalization. Prior to Zillow, Spencer co-founded and was VP Corporate Development of Hotwire, which was sold to Expedia for $685 million in 2003. Through his startup studio and venture capital firm, 75 & Sunny, Spencer is an active angel investor in over 100 companies and is incubating several more.

Bill Gurley in a blue suit
Bill Gurley

This interview was originally published on December of 2020, and was recorded at the inaugural dot.LA Summit held October 27th & 28th.

One of my longtime favorite episodes of Office Hours was a few years ago when famed venture capitalist Bill Gurley and I talked about marketplace-based companies, how work-from-home will continue to accelerate business opportunities and his thoughts on big tech and antitrust.

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