When Content Becomes Currency

I’m passionate about what we’re building at BrandPay, so when people ask about my work, I tend to launch into the whole explanation — how we connect brands to customers, reward those customers, and drive them to spend back with the brand.

Every time I do this, I notice three things:

1. It takes a couple of minutes and several follow-up questions to get there. “Is it influencer management? Is it loyalty? What is it exactly?” People have an inherent need to categorise what they’re hearing.
2. Once people get through the explanation, they immediately understand it and wonder why no one has done this before.
3. This one is obvious — it’s clear the category we’re describing simply doesn’t exist yet.

We’re doing something genuinely new in a world oversaturated with platforms, players, and concepts. There’s space for this category — it just hasn’t been defined. Which is why I’m on a quest to answer: What is BrandPay? What does it do? And what category does it fall into?

The goal is simple: the next time I meet someone at a networking event, I can say “We’re a leading XYZ platform” and they get it immediately.

Part 1: The Input

A brand creates a content reward with guidelines. Customers create posts that mention the brand and meet those guidelines. That’s the input.

Right now, there are a bunch of players in this space. Platforms like Bazaarvoice, TrueLoyal, and Nosto work with creators and influencers to generate content. Yotpo combines reviews with UGC collection. But “UGC” has become a bastardised term. Today, UGC often means a creator who doesn’t want to post on their own profile but is happy to give you product content for a fee. That’s not what UGC was traditionally.

Historically, UGC meant actual genuine user-generated (and distributed) content — organic posts from real customers to their own followers, that drive real conversation. But today, everybody is a creator, so all content gets labelled as creator content.

We know for a fact that less than 2% of people on social platforms are active creators being compensated for content. That means there’s a massive untapped pool — 98% of people who haven’t discovered that their content is valuable.

The creator economy monetises ~1–2% of users, but engagement is far more broadly distributed. 80% of likes and engagement happens on content that earns nothing.

None of the existing platforms truly help brands get organic content from real consumers — content that can be repurposed as authentic UGC. There are players in the review space, but they’re focused on recommendations, not visual content that can fuel ads, emails, and friends’ social feeds.

And people assume customers won’t bother posting for small amounts of credit. But customers are already posting for $0. We’re not asking for new behaviour — we’re monetising existing behaviour. If you were going to post about that coffee shop anyway, why not get $5 to use on your next visit?

Part 2: The Processing

So what does BrandPay actually do?

We translate two very different currency systems and connect them in a way that makes sense for the brand, makes sense for the customer, and gives everybody something valuable.

The currency for success on Instagram is likes. The currency for success on Shopify is money. There’s no bridge between them.

Unless you’re a creator, there’s no direct way to connect your likes to money. It doesn’t really mean anything. It’s abstract. It’s potentially random. But it is an important part of the e-commerce ecosystem.

“Customer content creates value, but brands don’t capture it”

So we got thinking about why and how we could fix this detached system. That’s where BrandPay comes in.

BrandPay takes the reward from the brand and the content from the consumer, and based on the guidelines the brand has set, we generate a value for each piece of content. The brand approves the post. The customer earns store credit into a virtual wallet.

The brand might pay per like, pay per post, or use some other metric. We monitor those numbers and convert them into actual money.

So the currency of success in an arbitrary ecosystem like Instagram gets converted into the BrandPay system where you’re earning money, perhaps daily, in exchange for your content.

This is where content-generated commerce diverges from affiliate marketing. Affiliates are middlemen who drive new sales for a commission. We reward existing customers for content that drives their own repeat purchases. Affiliates don’t generate usable content — they just drive traffic. We generate both content and retention.

This is also different from traditional loyalty platforms like Smile.io or LoyaltyLion. Those platforms reward past purchases with points or discounts. They don’t generate new content or turn customers into marketers. Content-generated commerce does both.

Apart from the obvious — “oh my God, my content actually made money” — it also starts converting into an e-commerce funnel because now there’s money involved.

Once the money is involved, you start wondering what to do with it. And that’s when the retention loop kicks in.

Once a customer has earned money, they can go back and spend it with the same brand. And because they’ve earned a certain amount, they tend to spend a little more. In our experience, that number usually averages at 2–3x the amount earned.

“BrandPay turns content into a financial and loyalty rail, not a marketing channel.”

Part 3: The Output

Three is, of course, the one we care about the most. It’s commerce. We got the content, BrandPay converted it. What’s next?

BrandPay has integrated deeply with Shopify checkout as a starting platform, as well as physical store payments, with plans to integrate across other platforms and payment systems.

Now this leads to a couple of things:

1. There’s a top-of-mind recall for the brand because they’ve rewarded the customer, into a virtual wallet they open daily (e.g. for their next coffee), and created a moment of delight by giving them a reason to come back sooner rather than later.
2. Customers tend to upgrade or upsell without the brand having to push because psychologically speaking, the customer already had a certain amount of money they were planning to spend, but they now have an additional amount they’ve earned and therefore they can spend more.

And people ask: won’t this just create fake, incentivised content? This is the opposite of fake. BrandPay requires plentiful social account history and normal behaviour to join. We’re rewarding genuine customers who actually bought and used the product (and want to buy again). Compare that to influencers who’ve never used your product, the rife market of fake reviews (we all know this), stock photos from Shutterstock, or AI-generated images. The content is more authentic, not less. And brands control the guidelines — they can ensure quality.

What BrandPay Enables

It’s running a translation engine that converts:

• Attention into currency
• Content into currency
• Currency into actual transactions
• One-time buyers into repeat customers
• Marketing spend into recyclable growth

For Customers:

• They earn from their content — a great moment of delight for brands they love
• They get additional money they can spend on products they want

For Brands:

• Higher repeat purchases
• New customer acquisition through organic reach
• UGC banks they can repurpose
• An automatic loop that compounds in value with time

And this is where content-generated commerce differs from retention marketing tools like Klaviyo. Email platforms help you communicate with customers. We give customers a reason to come back and create more content in the process.

The Creator Economy Proved the Model — and Left 98% Behind

Over the past five years, platforms like Patreon, Substack, and TikTok’s Creator Fund proved content can be monetised. An entire generation learned that if you create something valuable, you should get paid for it.

But these platforms only work for the top 2% who can build audiences, post consistently, and treat content creation as a job.

The other 98% post because they genuinely love a product. They’re not trying to be influencers. They’re just sharing their lives. And until now, there was no way to capture that value.

“Discovery has moved from ads to people”

People now understand that content equals currency. We’re just making that equation work for everyone, not just professional creators.

Influencer Marketing Hit a Wall

Brands spent the last decade pouring money into influencers, but the ROI is increasingly questionable.

A brand pays $500–1K for an influencer post. That influencer has 100K followers. Maybe 3% engage. Of those, maybe 1% convert. And few of them come back.

It’s expensive. It’s one-and-done. And customers can smell a paid partnership from a mile away.

Brands need authentic content that drives retention, not just awareness. They need customers who post because they actually love the product, not because they got paid $1K.

AI Made Fake Content Infinite — and Worthless

Two years ago, you could hire a designer to create product images for $500 per image. Today, you can generate 100 images with Midjourney for $10.

In a world where AI can create perfect images, real customers using real products in their real lives became the most valuable content. You can’t fake authenticity. People question everything now, and authenticity from a friendly source is the only thing that cuts through.

“AI scales content. Authenticity drives commerce.”

CPMs on ad platforms have increased 23% year on year. iOS privacy changes killed pixel tracking. Brands are spending more and getting less.

At the same time, customer acquisition costs are through the roof. The average CAC for DTC brands is now $150–$300, growing 17% year on year. And retention rates are abysmal.

Brands can’t afford to keep playing the ad platform game. They need owned distribution channels. They need customers who come back. And they need marketing that pays for itself.

Five Separate Forces Converged

1. Brands want authenticity more than polish
2. Influencer fatigue has hit consumers
3. AI made mass content worthless
4. The paid ad model is becoming less sustainable
5. People want more fun money

Any one of these alone wouldn’t have been enough. Together, they created the opening for content-generated commerce to exist.

The infrastructure is here. The behaviour is here. The demand is here. We’re not forcing a new model. We’re building the bridge that should have always existed.

Content-Generated Commerce

If content-generated commerce becomes the dominant model, here’s what shifts.

Brands own their audience again. Right now, brands rent access to customers through various ad platforms. $200B+ spent annually on ads that disappear the moment you stop paying. With content-generated commerce, brands build owned distribution through their customer base.

Brands that build communities of customer-creators early will stand out, daily, in a sea of inauthentic AI media.

Marketing stops being a cost centre and starts behaving like growth capital. The loop of content earnings into commerce means the flywheel is limitless. More content → more rewards → more commerce → repeat.

If this doesn’t happen, brands keep haemorrhaging money to ad platforms. Customers keep creating free content for billion-dollar companies and the disconnect between social currency and real currency stays broken.

I’m not saying advertising is dead. Top of funnel conversion will always be there — however more authentic content into social feeds means more room for ads, and everyone wins. Platform, brands, and users.

Connecting the Pieces

Platforms like Bazaarvoice and TINT stop at content creation. They give brands posts, but those posts don’t drive revenue.

Programs like Smile.io and LoyaltyLion reward past purchases. They don’t generate content or turn customers into advocates.

Influencer marketing pays for one-off posts. No retention loop, no repeat cycle.

Content-generated commerce does all three. Customers create content. That content has monetary value. That value drives repeat purchase. That purchase generates more content. The cycle compounds.

We’re not just moving money around. We’re not just collecting posts. We’re creating a closed-loop system where content spend becomes revenue, where customers become both marketers and repeat buyers, where marketing budgets don’t disappear into ad platforms but recycle back into the business.

“We are not expanding the creator economy. We are creating a new content-to-commerce economy.”

So when people ask me what BrandPay does, I finally have an answer.

Content-generated commerce. Where every post pays you back. Where customers become distribution. Where marketing spend becomes growth capital.

That’s what we’re building. And now you know exactly what that means.