When payments become content

I’ve written before how Stripe, the fintech phenomenon aiming to be the Internet’s secret underground payment network, was also a very inventive content company.

While writing that I started to wonder: Do other companies that move money around the Internet also make content with similar ingenuity?

Thus began my next tumble down the payments and content rabbit hole, where payments and content combine to make new social networks as well as other, much grander, storytelling illusions. 🕳🐇

Content + payments = social networks

First, social media came to your computer. Then, social media came to your smartphone. Now, social media is coming for your wallet.

At the end of the 2000s, some stable geniuses realised that all the notes, in-jokes and references people added to their payments to each other on platforms like PayPal and online banking were an untapped gold mine of compelling content. They devised a new kind of payments app that was mobile-first, had enhanced user-generated content tools and displayed real-time payments data in a Facebook-like newsfeed.

And lo, the era of social payments was thrust upon us, enabling both outrageous fortune (attractive Instagrammers getting payments from thirsty followers) and sweet sorrow (local heroes making drug references in their payments to friends and being denied home loans).

Popular products in this category include:

Content + payments = magical illusions

Adding social media to a payments app is a great way to differentiate it with content. But user-generated content is unpredictable, requires network effects, and will probably need content moderation and a strong PR team when the trolls arrive.

Fortunately there’s another, much more Wizard of Oz-like content game you can play: use content and storytelling to create the illusion that your payments service is something other than it is.

That’s right. You can transform your humble payments service into something else entirely using only words and the power of imagination.

Companies in this category include:

Takeaways

1. Tying content to other value is golden

Layering content over a payments platform reminds me of the days when currencies were pegged to gold reserves. Your content is more powerful and consequential because the words are directly tied to another stockpile of value (even if that value is constantly moving from one party to another). Can the same be done with content experiences and storytelling that’s connected to other kinds of stored value? Does your content business need to build stockpile of its own?

2. Money becoming social media is a megatrend

As Lana Swartz points out in her amazing book New Money: How Payments became Social Media, money is merely information socially guaranteed to be valuable. Put another way, money has always been social media, it’s just been mostly offline social media until the invention of the smartphone. With that as a first principle, it was sorta inevitable that payment networks and social networks would merge, and I think they’ll likely keep merging and co-evolving well into the 2020s.

3. There may be more chances to pair content with payments

Given that Buy Me a Coffee was only founded in 2018 but has hundreds of thousands of creators on it already, I can’t shake the idea that there are other opportunities to layer more content and storytelling types over payments. Maybe starting with other IRL cultural norms, like the cards containing cash you used to get from your grandparents?

Counterpoints

“Pffft. Patreon and Kickstarter do much more than just payments.”

I agree! But their main reason for existing is to help one party get paid by another. Also, all payments companies do more than just payments. Credit card companies do a whole bunch of stuff for their cardholders. Stripe does business registration. PayPal paid US$4 billion for a web browser plugin that harvests coupon codes.

“What about crypto?”

A lot of what I wrote here could probably apply to crypto. Crypto Kitties, for example, is a clever use of gameified content on top of Ethereum. I’ll be interested to see what other content types get experimented with here too (a recent attempt to do it for journalism didn’t work out so well).

“I’m done reading about this kind of stuff. Can you write about another topic next?”

Yep, I promise I’m done with content and payments (for now).

Connections

A very short history of adding social media to other things

Coffee-themed donations have actually been around for a while

SmallPDF, a Swiss document conversion service, had a coffee donation button for much of the 2010s before switching to a subscription pricing model. When the time came to retire the button, they’d racked up tens of thousands of donated virtual cups.

Stripe continues to power everything

It provides underlying payment tech to Patreon, Kickstarter, and Buy Me A Coffee. It’s good to be the king!

References

  1. New Money: How Payments Became Social Media, by Lana Swartz