If you don’t know what an OpenVerse Community is, that’s because I just made it up. I was trying to figure out how to describe communities that are untethered by creators, IP holders, pop singers, brands, or whatever force typically holds in, curates, and commercializes groups of impassioned, like-minded people. Communities that don’t even perhaps know they exist until someone puts a finger on them. Another way to say this — they are communities that haven’t yet been captured by creators or, due to their very nature, can’t be.
For example, I wrote about the latter category when I explored The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ potential to create an audience-facing paywall for fanatics of the Oscars rather than only obsessing over TV ratings every year. Don’t just think about 20 million viewers and TV rights—think about the 5 million hard-core fans who would pay a monthly fee to belong to that community. In my company, we’ve actually put our finger on several very specific Op…
