Frequently Asked Questions
What is Lyrak?
Lyrak is a photo-centric social platform that is designed to help photographers and creatives showcase their work and connect with like-minded individuals.
What are some of the unique features Lyrak offers for creators to monetize their work?
We are building several unique monetization features for creators and photographers:
Subscriptions - Fans can pay a monthly subscription fee to support their favorite creators.
Freelance work - Creators can offer their services for professional projects and get hired by their audience within the app.
Bookings - Creators can offer services like portfolio reviews that their audience can book and purchase within the app.
Digital products - Creators can sell digital products like photo editing presets directly through the app.
Print-on-demand - Creators can sell their artwork, and Lyrak will print and ship the products to customers.
Sell prints - Creators can sell physical prints of their artwork through the app and handle printing & shipping themselves.
Paid posts and tips - Lyrak already has a tipping feature and option for creators to share paid posts.
What inspired the creation of Lyrak?
Lyrak was created out of frustration with several ongoing problems and shortcomings of current major social media platforms:
The prioritization of short-form video content over photography, forcing photographers to adapt to a video-centric model to remain relevant.
The lack of fair compensation for creators, despite platforms profiting immensely from user-generated content.
The lack of effective tools and support from platforms to help creators monetize their work through brand deals and partnerships.
Platforms promoting aggregated accounts and content plagiarists over original creators.
Making it increasingly difficult for creators to reach and grow their existing audiences organically.
Social media platforms are using content creators' work to train their AI systems.
In essence, Lyrak was inspired by the desire to build a dedicated platform that truly puts the needs and fair compensation of photographers and visual artists first.
How does Lyrak's approach to AI differ from traditional social media platforms?
Traditional platforms are using content created by artists and creators to train their own AI models. The goal is for the platforms to eventually be able to generate content independently without relying on human creators. As long as creators keep uploading to these platforms, they are contributing data to train the AI systems that could make them obsolete.
On the other hand, we at Lyrak believe in using the power of AI to support and assist creators, not replace them. Lyrak aims to provide AI tools that can help creators analyze, refine, and better monetize their work more effectively, while still keeping full control and ownership over their content.
In short, we want to use AI to help creators. This approach is different from traditional platforms that seem to be using AI to make human creators unnecessary over time.
How does Lyrak aim to support photographers and visual artists?
Providing a dedicated platform focused on photography and visual art, rather than prioritizing other content formats like short videos.
Offering unique monetization features, such as subscriptions, selling digital products/prints,services, and bookings, all within our app. This allows creators to directly earn from their audience.
A revenue sharing model where creators receive 50% of the ad revenue generated from ads shown alongside their content.
Developing AI tools intended to assist creators in analyzing, refining and better monetizing their work, as opposed to exploiting creator content to train AI replacements.
Taking steps to prioritize original creator content over AI-generated content on main discovery pages and feeds.
Giving creators more control through customizable feeds, muting, and blocking to curate their experience.
What steps is Lyrak taking to prioritize original creator content over AI-generated content?
Not featuring AI-generated content on the Discover page: We will not showcase AI-generated content on our Discover page, which is dedicated to highlighting popular and trending posts.
Allowing users to hide all AI-generated content: Lyrak will add an option for users to completely hide any AI-generated content from their For You and Following feed if they prefer not to see it.
Creating a separate feed for AI content: Posts identified as created by AI tools will have their own dedicated feed, which users can choose to view or hide.
Requiring labels on AI-assisted posts: Soon, Lyrak will make it mandatory for users to clearly label any posts created using AI tools.
By doing this, we want to create a space where human creators can thrive and have their original work showcased without being overshadowed by AI-generated content.
Why is it important for creators to maintain their audience across multiple platforms?
Having an audience on just one platform puts creators at risk if that platform changes policies, algorithms or priorities in a way that negatively impacts the creator's reach or income potential.
As creators, your livelihood depends on your audience. It's smart not to put all our eggs in one basket.
Platforms might take you for granted if you don't have other options. Having an audience elsewhere gives you power and choices.