 Hello, hello. Hi, everybody. This is the best stage that I have ever spoken with, I think. So yeah, so the title of this talk had two versions. One is the question version. And the other is the answer version. The title that is in the schedule is the question. Like why WordPress should care about the creative economy? And the answer is that in the future of the creative economy, the open web is key. And WordPress is a key player in the open web. So that's the question that we're going to be announcing today. I lead small developer relations teams at Google. And we work on projects that are at the intersection of the web platform and the creative economy. And these are my teammates, Western Router and Pascal Birchler, that I'm sure that many of you know them because they are longstanding members of the WordPress community. In order to talk about anything about the creative economy, we need to understand some things about creators. And one way to go about it is to think about the concept of generations. And in an extended version of this talk, I'd like to dig deeper into that area. But because we don't have too much time, let's go to the chase and say that there is one very important thing that we need to understand about content creators. Now, creator is a unique quality that sets us apart as human beings from other species. So we have an intrinsic desire to create whether it being through music, to writing, to inventions, and so on. And we want to share those creations. We want to connect with other humans through them. So basically what this means is that they're always going to be new generations of content creators and consumers. Therefore, any content platform, including the open web, should evolve with time to meet the needs and desires of these new generations. Now, the open web has been a major driving force in shaping the landscape of the creator economy as we know it today. It has enabled creators to reach audiences, build their brand, monetize, and so on. However, there has been a lot of evolution technologically and the emergence of these new generations of content creators and consumers have made the open web to face serious challenges that compromise its future and the role that it can play in the creator economy. So what I would like to achieve by the end of this talk, that was the second part, is for us to understand what these challenges are and see if we could align around a vision for the future of the web that would ensure that it plays a relevant role in the future of the creator economy. And we're going to do this by taking a look at three periods of innovation and economic growth in the era of the internet, what I like to call the internet revolution. The first period started in the 1960s when a bunch of smart people got together to try to create an open communication platform. Now, the internet, as we know it today, has, can be traced to two essential components. The first one is the ARPANET. The ARPANET was the result of a project funded by the Defense Department of the United States when they wanted to connect a bunch of computers that were scattered around the country in research and academic institutions and then they wanted them to communicate and exchange information. So now the ARPANET had two key innovations that are super important for our story. First, it was the first white area packet switching network, which meant that you could take a data transmission, chop it into pieces, and send it independently of each other. That was a key innovation at the time because it allowed to increase the efficiency of the channel and make the network very resilient. And the second component is that the ARPANET was the first communication network that used distributed control, which meant that it was not a single point of administration for the web. That also was a key innovation at the time. And the second component was a open protocol suite called TCPIP. I'm sure that most of you know about it. But it's just basically a mechanism for any two computers to speak to each other, provided that they obey the rules of that protocol. Now, this foundational component has profound implications. First, no one owned the platform. Anybody could just connect to the internet and voila. And any two computers can talk to each other, provided that they abide by the rules of the communication protocol. So this was the scenario there. We have an open communication platform. And then the next step was basically try to expand these capabilities and democratize access to it. So then internet service providers came and they basically exploded the size of the internet by building subnetworks and interconnecting them through the internet backbone, allowing anybody anywhere to communicate with somebody else anywhere else. Around 1989, the next foundational component came about when Tim Berners-Lee started the World Wide Web, which is a proposal of what he called an information management system that allows users to organize information and navigate easily between pieces of content. By the way, Tim Berners-Lee also wrote the first browser and the first web pages. Now, these foundational components trigger a supernova of innovation. So things starting to pop up. Browsers actually play an super important role. This is what we refer to when we talk about the web platform. Everything that we do with the web, we do it through browsers. So therefore, browsers represent what the web platform is. Hosting providers came enabling anybody to come online. It was super important. Then CMSs came. CMSs were super important because they came with the goal of raising the level of abstraction and making content creations in the web easier. Here is when WordPress came in full force around 2003. Then we have cloud services. Right now, if you wanted to be a hosting provider, you didn't have to deal with all the infrastructures each of yourselves. So you could go to a cloud service provider, like Amazon or Azure or Google, and then you could also become a business for hosting providers. And then there were a plethora of services that actually started to pop in up. Email, storage, search, you name it. So the web grew exponentially very, very quickly. Now, the projected value of this first period of innovation is trillions of dollars in enterprise value and also billions of users reach. And the interesting thing, for context, when you think about WordPress, is that the open web enabled this new form of creation and sharing that we call blocks. And then the blogosphere emerged basically as a social network powered by blocks and their interconnections. A stat that I'd like to remember is that by 2007, the blogosphere had exploded and there were something like 60 millions blocks and there were 175,000 blocks popping up every day. That is one block every two seconds. So I was not part of the WordPress community at the time, but I can only imagine how exciting those times were for WordPress. By the way, I want to mention that the blogosphere was the original creator economy. So we can say that the blogosphere is the creator economy 1.0, if you will. Now, by this time, there was a competitive tussle between native platforms like iOS and Android and the open web. And that gave rise to the second period of innovation that we need to look at. Around 2010, the perception was that the web was dying. And that perception was captured by a famous article in Y Magazine where they analyzed the proportion of web traffic the amount of web traffic as a proportion of the whole internet. And the conclusion was that the web was dying. That's what they call it. The web is dead, long live the internet. So there was a strong sense of urgency at the time. We felt that the web was actually dying. And so the web community got together to see if we can do something about it. And then the web picked up the pace of innovation. It was an amazing time when browsers let the charge to bring a myriad of capabilities to the platform, such like USB, camera controls, media recording, offline access, PWAs, you name it. All these capabilities made it possible for the open web to offer capabilities that were before exclusive domain of native applications. Now, basically what happened is that we turned the open web into a general computation platform. So anything can go, and then an app's ecosystem emerged. This second period of innovation also resulted in trillions of dollars in enterprise value and also billions of users' reach. Now, many of the apps that were developed started to appear close content platforms, right? YouTube, TikTok, Instagram. And these platforms actually seized an opportunity that was there, and they started innovating in three key areas. Ease of content creation, making it very easy to create content, non-intent discovery algorithm, basically allow you to consume content without having to search for it, and audience engagement. Like, how do you basically facilitate creators to engage with their audience? So on top of these platforms, a new generation of successful content creators emerged, and each of them had their own very large followership or audience. So the way that I like to see is that these creators join our friends in the blogosphere to form what we know today as the creative economy 2.0 if you want. So now, these individual brands connected very well to new generation of content consumers that actually like to consume content through individual people. They like to consume content that they can relate to specific human. They design emotional connection, and they can relate to it. So there was a good match between the new content consumers and the new era of individual brands. Now, here it's important that by evolving the open web from a content web to everything web, basically we pass from a single monolithic web to a web that could be seen from three different pillars. On one hand, we have the app's web. Today, you can virtually not run anything in the browser. You can even run full WordPress on a browser. So the application web is pretty healthy, especially on desktop. One thing that I noticed is how easy it is for me to switch laptops today. So I throw it away. I have the other one. Almost everything that I do runs in the browser. So this is very. The challenge here is the mobile, the media to form factors, but that is a topic for another talk, and there is a lot of work being done there. The second area is the e-commerce web. E-commerce on the web is vibrant and growing. So I don't think that it's also very healthy. The only threat that I personally feel is the threat of monopolization by platforms like Amazon. But we have also other alternatives like Shopify and WooCommerce that are actually fighting the Goodfider. So I'm not worried about the e-commerce web either. Now, the last part is the content web. And this is what I believe the problem is. So if we look at the trends of content creation and consumption on the web, we can see that at this content creation on the web is stagnating. And I would say that we are going to see a decrease of content if we don't do anything about it. Now, to see why this is happening, we can look at an example. There is this guy that is called Hunza Deas. He's a photographer that basically just a guy like you and me that he lives in New York and he wanted to take pictures and then basically share it with the world. And he had actually been very successful. He had established partnership with the New Yorker magazine. And he has brand deals with Adidas, BMW, the New York Knicks. You name it. So a very successful creator. He has both an Instagram presence and a web presence. In Instagram, the flows that he has to follow are very simple. It's easy to get started and easy to keep creating on Instagram. The platform gives you modern content formats like stories and reels. And you can compose different of these formats. And it provides you effective distribution algorithm, actually one effective distribution algorithm that allows you to basically your content to be seen quickly. And it also provides effective audience engagement capabilities like likes and comments. All that comes out of the box. And he doesn't have to worry about performance, SSL, domain name, nothing. He just wants to create them. In the open web, the scenario is a little bit more complicated. I'm not going to be going over all these steps because you know them very well. But the truth of the matter is that the level of friction in the open web to a creator like Hunza is very, very, very high. So now, don't take me wrong. We have made a lot of progress in making, getting started on the web, much easier hosting providers that are making, you know, contributing here. Thing makers like Astra are contributed a lot here. But there is still a lot of weight that we have to go to match the easiness of a closed platform. Now, creators like all of us, we are always going to choose the least friction path to anything that we do. And the level of friction on the web is so high that new generation of content creators have been flocking away from the open web. Now, this means that we are at the crossroads, right? So we know that the content web is in danger. And we have the choice of taking action to basically make sure that we address the challenges and move it to the future in the right way. Now, the timing for doing this is excellent because the creative economy is at an inflection point. And we are witnessing the emergence and the development of a third area of innovation in the creative economy. That is the period of creator-centric economic model. And essentially what has happened is two things. There has been a very, very interesting evolution of tracking technologies on the web which has made it more difficult for brands to actually find audiences. And it's going to get more difficult because we want to protect the privacy of users. Then brands are going to be screwed. At the same time, we have the emergencies of these individual brands that have actually ownership of the audience. There are people that want to see them. So this is a very good combination because as a consequence, creator influences have become very, very valuable for brands and that has made them very profitable businesses. Now, the projected opportunity of this third period of innovation is also trillions of dollars, but now not only on enterprise value, but also on creator value. I heard things like Mr. Beast that is, you know, this guy, people are talking, is Mr. Beast going to be the first YouTube billionaire? A YouTuber that is a billionaire is kind of actually blows my mind, but it kind of tells you the kind of revolution that we are in now. So basically, this power shift from platforms to creators, what it's actually doing is that we want to move from platform-centric economic models to creative-centric economic models. In a platform-centric economic model, the platform owns the audience, the tooling, the distribution, the revenue mechanisms. In a creator-centric economic model, the creator owns the audience and has the ability to diversify the revenue streams, the tooling that they use, the distribution algorithm, and the revenue stream. So there are two very different worlds. Interestingly, the closed platforms that emerged during the second period of innovation and basically provided the needs that these creators needed are actually designed to optimize platform-centric economic models and, therefore, are getting in the way of individual brands getting what they want. That is a creator-centric economic model. So world gardens became gatekeepers, and they became gatekeepers in three major ways. First is lack of ownership and control. So when publishing content on a world garden platform, creators basically give control and ownership of that content to the platform. And that automatically limits the ability for the creator to reuse the content, to monetize it in different ways that he wants, and also access data about their audience. That is not possible in this closed platform. The second gatekeeping aspect of world gardens is basically when you rely on a world garden platform, you become vulnerable to a loss of audience. If the platform shuts down, or the terms of services change, that could be very detrimental for you as a creator. And also, it creates fragmentation. It's very difficult for a creator to maintain and unify identity across these platforms because they are just fragmented. You have an Instagram identity and a YouTube identity and so on. And the last one is algorithm dependence. So one of the things that world gardens have done very well is on innovating in the area of non-intent-based discovery algorithms, which actually makes it easy for your content to be seen. However, that makes creators vulnerable to censorship and suppression. So anytime your content can be just shut down because the platform didn't like something. The terms of service tells you something. Or even worse, you could be shadow banned. Basically, your content is not shown to anybody and you have no idea. And you think that your content sucks because nobody's saying it. No, the algorithm is not showing it. How do you know when is that happening? So these are serious problems. And what creators want is I want to exercise my desire of create and self-expression. But at the same time, I want to keep ownership of my content. I don't want to be dependent on any platform specifically. And I want to be subject to the censorship and suppression of discovery algorithms. Now, this is very good news for the open web because these things are exactly the things that make the web strong. So we can basically, in principle, bring value propositions that are creative-centric on the platform. However, in order to do that, we need to first address serious challenges that the open web faces. Specifically, I like to think about the challenges in two buckets. The first bucket is what I like to call the course of complexity. So if we contrast the evolution of content creation in the open web versus content creation on closed platform, we can see that the open web has not innovated properly when it comes to creating solutions at the right level of abstraction. Performance is a clear example of this. We have been four years trying to solve the performance problem in the web, and still today, we are not doing it. It's very, very, very difficult. Now, a consequence of not having the right level of abstraction is that as the technology has evolved, the complexity has grown more and more. Now, when we talk about complexity, we basically mean three levels of complexity. The first one is onboarding complexity. And it impacts how easy it is to get started as a content creator on the web. It has to do with aspects like infrastructure, maintenance, and building effective websites that are directly addressing the needs of the creator, right? Not features. Give me a use case. The other one is creation complexity. It impacts how easy it is for creators to create quality content in a variety of modern formats and also has to do with aspects of ability of those modern content formats, creation toolings, and effective asset handling. For example, the percentage of Instagram users that worry about the quality of the video that they are uploading is zero, right? So zero. They don't worry about the performance. They just throw the video there, and Instagram will deal with it. And the last one is distribution complexity. And it has this area impact how much time does it take for creators to start seeing a positive ROI for their investment, right? So even if you have the best SEO in the world, you are friends with Yono, and then you know all the tricks of yours, still getting views on the web is extremely hard. If you compare the amount of time that it takes you to get 1,000 views in TikTok, you know, you have to basically wait quite a bit on the web. And we call this the call-start problem. It happened at the beginning and also in every time that you publish content. The second bucket of complexity is what I like to call the double-edged sword of openness. One of the things that we like most about the open web is that it's open, right? However, openness is just like democracy. You know, it's vulnerable to certain things. Specifically, it's vulnerable to authoritarianism and corporate influence on one end of the spectrum and decision paralysis on the other spectrum, right? So the only way that we're gonna move the open web forward is that we have to find a balance between individual and collective action so that we move together somewhere. Otherwise, we are gonna be basically like the US Congress. I should not have said that, but... So how are we gonna do this? So one way to achieve such a balance is aligning on a strategic vision to guide our decision-making, both individually and collectively. Now, specifically, the goal is to position the open web as a platform that, number one, fully enables the development of creator-centric economic models and remove the gatekeeping features of the closed platforms that we don't want. Now, specifically, I put here on the bottom is the reality of a world garden in a way, and on the top is the future that we want for the open web. We want a platform where there is little or no friction for getting started and succeeding on the web. We want a platform where modern content can be created in a variety of ways and in a way that is at least as easy and as expressive as what we can do in closed platforms. We want a platform that there are infinite ways to distribute content. There is options for creators to reach their audience in many ways, and we want a platform in which you, as a creator, can drive value of your audience in your own terms. You want to remove the intermediaries between you and your audience. So now, this is the vision that we want. Every decision that we wanna make has to meet this kind of directionality that we are setting here. Now, in terms of execution, then we can map this strategic vision into four areas of execution. One is onboarding. We need to innovate on solutions for enabling frictionless journeys to go from zero to successful ROI. Like, that should be, like, how long does it take for me to start seeing little likes in my content? The second area is creation. We need to innovate on modern content formats. I'm gonna go a little bit on detail on each of these areas in a little bit, but creation, we need to innovate in the area of modern content formats for the web. For example, stories shown from videos, shop of the images, live shopping, and so on, and also effective creation tools that creators have access to a variety of them to create with this modern format. The third area is distribution. We need to innovate on non-intent-based discovery algorithms for the open web that actually can compete with the wall-garden's equivalence. And finally, we need to innovate on mechanism for enabling creators to directly engage with the audience and removing the boundaries between being a creator and being an online mention, you know, that actually is something that happens in the cross-platform. Now, let's see a little bit, some ideas about each of these areas. The area of onboarding, there are three principles that actually we could follow to guide our decisions regarding where to invest. First, don't make creators think. We want to build onboarding solutions that remove all the complexity that creators don't need to know. SSL certificates, no way. Domain and systems, server sizes, QPS, none of that should be even close to a creator's radar. So we have gone, as I said before, a long wait in this area, but there's plenty to do here. The second area is don't make creators wait. So we need to reduce the time that it takes for content in the web to be seen, engaged, and actually spread. That is a serious problem. That means that we need to improve search. You know, if anybody from Google here listen to us, basically it takes, you know, search the way that is built. It penalizes new content. You need time in the web to become a trusted content member. But what happens is you have 150 million followers in YouTube and you create a website. You have to wait for a year to become mature. That doesn't make sense. Now we need to, that's what I like to call status transfer. Can we have a mechanism that I can basically be recognized if I am already recognized somewhere else? And also we need to enable creators to leverage the open web as their headquarters, but at the same time tap into their audience and in other platforms that I like to call federated content strategies. And the last guiding principle is don't ignore my goals. You know, we need to build websites around use cases, not features. This is an area that generative AI is very interesting. Imagine that we could tell chat GPT or BART, listen, I want a website to create pictures and sell them and engage with my audience. And you press Enter and you get Instagram. That should be the level. So I should not care about nothing. Just that level of abstraction would be amazing. Now in terms of content creation, there are basically three areas as well. One of the things that closed platforms did very well is that they innovated in the area of new content formats. They came up with the idea of stories, ephemeral content, live shopping. All these formats were innovated in this area. So in a way, the open web was out-innovated in each of these areas. At Google, I don't have too much time to go into this, but my team has been involved in the last seven years. In this particular area, we work on AMP. That is an example of a modern content format that it was very good in certain ways and it failed for other reasons. WebTorys is another one. And in the WordPress, Gutenberg Blocks is sort of like a content format that also is very important. So we need to continue investing in those areas. And then the second part is the area of creation tool. That's another part that closed platforms did very well. They actually make it very easy for you to create a story and publish it, and TikTok blows my mind how powerful that platform is to create content. So in the open way, we need to double down here. The Gutenberg editor is a great place to actually expand and double down. And also, editors like the Google WebTorys editor is another example. And the last thing that I would like to mention is in closed platform, it's very easy to go from being a content consumer to being a content creator. So you have Instagram, and you have a little plus sign button there, and you say, oh, I have been consuming content, but I want to put a picture now. And then you press the plus button. Imagine that we have a plus button in the browser. So you are browsing, browsing, browsing, browsing. And then you click that button, and then you can publish something that goes to your website, that goes to Instagram. So that would be an amazing thing to do. So in the area of distribution, basically, the area of distribution has to do with enabling creators to be seen quickly and effectively. And for content consumers also to be able to get content without having to search for it. So that's what I call the difference between search, intent-based, content consumption, and discover non-intense content consumption. Now, although it isn't clear that you can search things on closed platforms. You can go to TikTok and search for things. And also, there are discovery algorithms in the open web. However, it's fair to say that in terms of non-intent-based discovery, closed platforms are key. And in the area of search, the web is key. Now, if we want to make the web a platform where being seen is very easy, search base is not enough. So we want, basically, to bring the open web to the open right corner of the graph by developing discovery algorithms that actually can't fulfill the promise that discovery algorithms in closed platforms bring. Now, in terms of ROI, I'm speeding up a little bit because I think that I'm going to be ejected from the stage. But in the ROI area, it's one of the strongest areas of the open web. I think that, basically, because of the success of the e-commerce web. So it's very solid, all the things that have to do with monetization. But there are three things that I would like to mention. One, enable diversification. So we need to enable creators to diversify their monetization approaches or the revenue streams. Actually, this is one weak point of closed platforms because monetization in closed platforms is not fair at all. But beyond the world of these platforms, basically, creators have access to a plethora of payment solutions. They can get paid in many, many ways. But this is a very good, strong area for the open web. The second part is, don't get in the way between the creator and the audience. In world gardens, you cannot get data about your audience even if you want, in most of them. But the web provides an open marketplace where we can actually get access to a variety of solutions like newsletters, teams, communities, discussion forums, you name, that all those things can be available for creators to engage with their audience. And the last thing that is interesting is, in closed platforms, often it's very easy to switch between being a content creator and an online manager. You can sell things very easy on Facebook. In the web, it's like, oh my God, I have to basically switch to become an online merchant. So we need to blur that differentiation there. So I'm gonna go down here and I'm gonna close by saying that a vision like this is very useful to guide our decision making. So if you work for Google, well, try to get involved in projects in Google that actually advance this, that's what we do. So what are the options that, how can we help or influence Google to go in the direction that we think? If you are part of the WordPress community, well, you can focus on part of the WordPress project that actually move the WordPress project and the open web together in the direction that you want. If you are a developer, you can join companies that will give you the opportunity to work on projects that have an impact in this area. If you are an entrepreneur, you could decide to invest on innovating in certain areas that you think that it's gonna be profitable. And as I said, the projected value of this area of the creative economy is trillions in economic value. So it's a good idea to think about investment there and so on. So with that, I will close. Thank you. By the way, this is me. What perform?