Blockchains are making data open, and AI is making content cheaper and faster to create. Media engaging an audience must be more authentic and come from a defined point-of-view — a taste. This is the notion behind the "Taste Economy," a concept redefining the role of creators, media, and communities.

Meet the visionary behind this thesis who practices what she preaches – Daisy Alioto, the CEO of Dirt Media. Dirt is a new kind of media company where consumers can become tastemakers.

With a decade-long journey in the media space under her belt, Daisy's insights have been cultivated through her experiences in audience development for media giants like Time, and startups like Air Mail and First Look Media. Drawing from the full spectrum of media evolution from print to digital, she has built a media venture leveraging NFTs to form a content community.

In this interview, we'll delve into Daisy, the Taste Economy thesis, and uncover the secrets of Dirt‘s curation-focused governance model.We promise you — this will reshape the way you think about the media's role in our rapidly evolving digital landscape.

You have this thesis called the Taste Economy. What's that all about?

People are recognizing the power of media and brand as a moat. Which is what the Taste Economy Thesis is. You have three fundamental business models in the world. One relies on having technology nobody else has. One relies on having supply chain access or raw materials that nobody else has. The third is just media and branding. We're entering an era where most companies will not have proprietary technology. They all want to be a media brand.

The paradox is there actually isn't that much capital flowing into media, but there's a ton of capital flowing into consumer companies. Think Mr. Beast, Emma Chamberlain. They are the professional class of creators. The number of people who can do that on an individual basis is pretty small. But the amount of people who can do it as a part of a bigger brand that can share some economies of scale across creation, whether it's fashion or gaming or music or editorial, is a lot bigger. So that's really what the Taste Economy is about, saying that taste will be the new moat. A lot of that came out of narratives that I was having to set to even have a conversation with investors where we could be on the same page. But it turned into a much bigger idea. So it'll be interesting to see it play out.

So does this simply mean Media Brands will get into CPG and CPG will get into Media?

If you have the community and you have the IP, you can really do anything. It could go in so many different directions and one of my favorite examples is Complex.

Complex was operating at the same time as Vice and Buzzfeed when there was a lot of pressure to get into bed with Facebook and start creating content that was directed toward a specific algorithm. Rich Antoniello has talked about how he was too paranoid to do this. He did not want to lose control of his distribution, but the network that he did want to embrace was YouTube. Because if you made something for YouTube, you could use it somewhere else. If you made something for Facebook and its algorithm, it really only made sense as part of the algorithm, the clickbait, the frameworks. The type of content that that algorithm was prioritizing at any given time. Of that relationship between Complex and YouTube, Hot Ones was born. Hot Ones has now become essentially a CPG play. They sell hot sauce. They make millions of dollars a year selling hot sauce.

To me, that's a really fantastic example of somebody who resisted what everyone else was doing. Took something that was entertainment with an audience and ultimately a community around it and turned it into a product line. That can now act as a flywheel between the entertainment tent pole and the product. And in many ways, that's what we're trying to do as well.

Why are Zines becoming so popular again?

The reason why I think magazines are in a position to make a comeback, if not as an entity but as a concept, is that they're really powerful containers for a point of view and a sense of taste. With AI accelerating the amount of stuff being created for every action, you have to have an equal and opposite reaction, right? And the more stuff that AI creates, the more we will need these very strong brand containers. To identify not only strong points of view that are human-driven and high-end because the human point of view is the luxury in this scenario, but they can also create communities around them.From my perspective, consumer social as a framework for smaller community networks and media, or the creator economy, are converging on like a new category of businesses that is accelerated by AI, and that category of businesses I'm sort of loosely calling “community-driven entertainment.”

I don't know what they'll ultimately be called, but I think we're observing these dynamics already - with Friends with Benefits, Poolsuite and Vacation, Dirt, Blackbird, and TYB. All of the consumer success stories in web3 are successful because they're reaching people who aren't even interested in NFTs — they're interested in the community and entertainment.

Can you tell us about the different media lines at Dirt Media and the different audiences?

We have a few different subject areas that we're looking at. We have sub-channels for design, and we have sub-channels for perfume. We recently created a sub-channel for gardening at the request of our community.

So anything that you see in Discord as a sub-channel, you're looking at R&D for a future newsletter vertical, and it's an easy way for us to gauge community interests and also to start commissioning content around those topics to make sure that we have the audience to support separate sub-brands.

I know that we've been an on-ramp for a lot of people into web3. Demographic-wise, I'll just say that they're like tastemakers, we have done some internal surveys, but some of these people are still anonymous to me. I know them as a Discord handle and they have a great reputation at that Discord handle, but, our community manager does outreach and tries to pair Twitter and email addresses with their Discord handle because we do have a separate newsletter that just goes to the founders.

How does the governance model of Dirt Newsletter encourage reader engagement and input?

Our form of governance is more around curation. We haven't attracted people interested in making micro decisions around Dirt. They like to be able to choose from a pre-curated set of ideas once or twice a month. The thing that binds the original founders' group together across demographics is this idea of being a tastemaker. Some people feel that their taste is influenced by reading Dirt, but they want to see their taste reflected in the newsletter in turn.

The ideal way for them to do that is to participate in votes that are curated. It's select moments of community input that drive that relationship. For the people we've attracted, that's the right balance for them, and it's still given them so much more input than they've ever been able to give before to a publication they read or an entertainment company they interact with. The DAO is not replacing top-down taste-making, but we are creating more of a two-way street between the audience and the editor, and people are really responding to that.

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Dirt is leveraging the collective power of its community to create unique content that readers want to read. Join their community by minting an NFT subscription. Become a card-carrying member of the Taste Economy.

Lore is the ownership platform. Lore helps groups spin up a shared vault, pool resources, co-purchase NFTs, and use them together in a simple, safe, one-stop-shop platform. With co-ownership, collectives can access NFTs they couldn’t before, crowdfund creative projects and even play web3 games together.

If you’d like to share community-building insights with us, reach out on Twitter to join the Shared Stakes show.