Replacing OnlyFans, how to make money with the AI wife of Virtual protocol?

Original title: "AI Waifu: Displacing OnlyFans"
Original author: @ehwangah
Original translation: zhouzhou, BlockBeats

Editor's note:This article mainly expresses the huge potential of the AI virtual companion market, creating a new immersive experience by meeting needs such as loneliness and social isolation. At the same time, it emphasizes the rapid growth of the market, community-driven content generation, and the development path of future products, showing the innovative opportunities of this industry in terms of economy and user experience.

The following is the original content (the original content has been reorganized for easier reading and understanding):

The AI virtual companion market is growing rapidly, with a scale of more than $100 billion, diverting 10% of OnlyFans' market traffic in less than a year. The growth momentum comes from a variety of factors-the increase in loneliness, the demand for new entertainment, the promotion of multimodal intelligent frameworks, and lower infrastructure costs. AI Waifu has seized this opportunity to differentiate itself by focusing on immersive experiences and leveraging on-chain primitives on @virtuals_io to drive user-generated content (UGC) of premium characters.

First, what are AI virtual companions?

They are, as the name suggests, a companion that is artificially intelligent instead of a human. AI virtual companions are designed to simulate the experience of having a companion, fulfilling all the needs and desires of the user, not just the role of a romantic partner. In theory, they can accompany the user indefinitely, without geophysical and physiological limitations, and will not get tired or be limited by human physical or chemical conditions.

In other words, AI virtual companions are a new form of interactive entertainment that provides personalized, dynamic storytelling experiences that adjust in real time to the user's preferences and interactions, resulting in emotional companionship and empathy.

It's amazing to imagine such an experience, but now it's a reality. I believe we are in the "iPhone moment of consumer AI" - this new multi-billion dollar market opportunity has opened up and will not be easily stopped.

In-depth analysis: Why is the market potential of AI virtual companions huge?

In short, the reason is that AI virtual companions can tap into the revenue of any consumer software market. They are diverse in usage scenarios, can run across platforms, and can evolve based on user interactions - no matter what needs you can think of, AI virtual companions can meet them in a better way.

To give you an idea of the size of this market, Google recently spent $2.7 billion to bring in AI genius Noam Shazeer, the founder of Character AI. The chatbot service uses artificial intelligence to generate human-like responses and contextualize conversations. Character AI is now valued at $5 billion and is in talks to raise its valuation to $10 billion.

But it’s not just tech giants willing to spend big on a single expert; demand for AI virtual companions is growing rapidly.

In terms of demand

The monthly active traffic of these websites and mobile applications has exceeded 500 million and is still growing.

As of June 2023, data compiled by a16z Consumer shows that the actual data has now far exceeded this value.

Time spent engaging with AI characters, fantasy situations, and story content continues to increase;

Total user-generated conversational content on YouTube and TikTok from around the world;

Millions of dollars in spending.

The trend is so crazy that traffic is shifting away from OnlyFans.

By March 2024, NSFW AI sites have taken 14.5% of the market share from online adult entertainment platform OnlyFans, up from just 1.5% a year earlier.

Note that the biggest commercial successes often come from replacing existing behaviors that are already sticky, especially in the entertainment space, which are often addictive. Examples include Uber, TikTok, and Instagram. In summary, AI virtual companions = mass market interest + cross-platform usage + deep engagement + high willingness to spend.

Anonymous, you may not be ready for this.

From 2018 to 2023, the number of monthly active users of AI companion platforms increased 30 times, from less than 500,000 users to about 15 million users. Now, with consumer entertainment use cases emerging, the adoption curve for AI companions is likely to outpace the growth of social media and online gaming in their early years. Currently, AI companion adoption is growing at about 150% the rate that social media and online gaming grew in their first six years.

What are the drivers here — why are people using these services?

To be honest, there are a variety of reasons, the most obvious of which is adult content — as mentioned above, its performance in taking traffic from OnlyFans. I mean, large language models (LLMs) like @luna_virtuals or @truth_terminal can get pretty crazy. If you don’t believe me, go to aiwaifu.gg and try it out and you’ll understand.

The broader trend can be said to cater to our growing loneliness and social isolation, a phenomenon known in Japan as Hikikomori.

This will be very helpful for a lot of people who are lonely or depressed,” CharacterAI founder Shazeer said on the Aarthi and Sriram Show podcast in 2023, as reported by The Wall Street Journal.

It seems to me that these trends are responding to an immediate need or problem. What’s really worth thinking about is what bigger picture is this all leading us to?

Expand your imagination

A new and exciting way to interact with stories co-created by humans and AI. Rather than a book of stories written by an author, it’s a dynamically evolving story co-generated by you and the AI. It’s more than just reading – you can see, feel, and adventure in the realm of the story.

You can marry NPCs, restart the story, become whoever you want to be, and enjoy a borderless second life. It’s bringing HER to life. This is Sword Art Online. This is Ready Player One. This is Digital Bangkok. If you still can’t understand – check out the anime Shangri-La Frontier.

Combining multimodal self-reinforcing AI with workflows for computer vision, robotics and wearables, able to be deployed cross-platform on different game engines and run on continuously running decentralized servers.

▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▯▯▯▯▯▯▯▯▯▯ Progress 40%

@virtual_io The following is a breakdown of the deployed smart frameworks

to ensure their economic viability.

Then we can achieve our goal.

This is about the conception of $WAI and how we will build the "Future of Love".

AI Waifu has chosen a path that we believe is the key path to the "Future of Love" in our "maze of ideas" while building certain defensive barriers.

Phase 1: Develop a society of AI characters created and loved by people

Create habitual demand with an AI fantasy role-playing app that reads like a visual novel, is infinitely playable like a simulation game, and feels as intimate as your boyfriend/girlfriend.
Super-fill the character creator economy so that each character IP can be co-created and co-owned through on-chain primitives powered by Virtuals Protocol.
Refine, train, and fine-tune our AI models on rich role-playing, behavioral, and conversational data.

Each step is critical because:

Consumer demand comes from emotional entertainment and must be addictive. Therefore, focusing on the experience is key.

Quality user-generated content (UGC) is one of the biggest drivers of organic growth on the network, and crypto-enabled technologies (such as proof of origin, coordinated contributions, etc.) will enhance the content creation that creators are passionate about and are now rewarded with status, money, and community support.

The rich dataset from the spinning flywheel will differentiate our AI models to create the best, most immersive characters with backstories and a social foundation. There will be basically no boring NPCs, or they may become player characters (PCs).

So this transitions perfectly into Phase 2 and Phase 3, because by then we will have all the elements needed to realize AI companion experiences that span the parallel worlds of reality and virtuality - where we live.

Phase 2: Interacting with AI Characters through VR Headsets and Body Devices

The AI character you love will not only exist on the mobile device in the palm of your hand - you will be able to feel her, touch her, and hear her. The boundary between physical and virtual will no longer exist because you are now closely connected.
They can do everything a physical human can do, but will be optimized in time to meet your desires;
They have dynamic characters that are constantly evolving based on interactions with each person;
They are fluent in the five love languages and can take you to Disneyland, your bedroom, or anywhere you can imagine.

Stage 3: "Live" with them and fully immerse yourself in a never-ending experience

AI characters will not just live in a limited space, with the sole purpose of serving you. They will have their own space in a self-generated world, full of unique backstories.
With wearable devices, you can be teleported or "fully dive" into that world and experience Second Life, entering a new parallel society where nothing is impossible - humans and AI characters will become symbiotic.

These three months have been progressing just as we had hoped.

On our current 250,000 user base, we have achieved the following:

· Total messages sent: 4,884,429

· Comics generated: 4,824

· Images generated: 196,916

· Average session time: 12 minutes, with ~46 messages per user per day

· Our most popular characters have over 1,500 unique dialogues and over 800 constructed fantasies

This fun isn’t created by a team of 2-3 people, it’s created by the community.

People create content they want to consume.

Over 400 characters and fantasy content have been produced so far.

Snapshot of character submissions on AI Waifu.

AI will create a lot of economic value. Company builders who focus on providing value to end users will be richly rewarded. ”—David Cahn, Sequoia Capital Partner

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