The more I've played with various ways to share revenue with or create economic opportunity for users, the more I've realized that people just don't care about the money. There are of course some notable exceptions to this (Uber, eBay etc), but generally users have jobs and a few extra dollars just isn't enough to motivate them to change a single behavior.
People had jobs before doing youtube videos for a living.
I don't think Tsu should be seen as a way to make money (at least not in a near future) but as a way to get rewarded for the content you produce. The same content which makes the value of Tsu.
Take Instagram for example, talented people post beautiful pictures which add value to Instagram. And yet they only are rewarded with likes/comments. Tsu tries to fix this.
> Take Instagram for example, talented people post beautiful pictures which add value to Instagram. And yet they only are rewarded with likes/comments. Tsu tries to fix this.
They get rewarded with feedback, and if they produce good art they can license it through other means. Supposedly the latter should bring much more substantial money than earning a percentage on ads displayed behind a sign-up wall (why not do like YouTube and serve both content and ads to everyone?).
On the other hand, there do exist people who produce good art but choose to not monetize it. I can understand the attitude: unless I'm sure my art is great and will be widely appreciated, any resources I spend on monetization attempts will likely go to waste, only lowering morale. How do I tell my art is great? Well, fame.
On yet another hand, there's the YouTube crowd that makes money on their art without spending any resources on monetization or waiting to validate whether their art is good first. (Maybe this is due to specifics of video production? It's more engaging to consume and the barrier to entry is a little higher than with photography or text content.)
All in all, Tsu sure seems like an interesting initiative, it gives some food for thought and it'll be interesting to see what comes out of it.
I fully agree. Social networks have the chicken and egg problem of users only using already established networks, though. Tsu.co's way of incentivizing content production could be a way to solve that.
Ads are a sneaky and dishonest way to get at your end users' money. It's a lie that with ads you give your content for free:
1. The advertisers who pay you get their money from us, added to the prices of the things we buy. There is no free lunch.
2. The overhead cost of advertising is huge and we pay for that too.
3. We pay the opportunity cost of a product that cannot put users first because you live or die by giving advertisers what they want (and what we want indirectly and secondarily). This includes both the cost of lost privacy as well as business, editorial and design decisions that optimize for advertising revenue. As has been said, you are using us as products more than treating us as your paying customers. Let me restate to be extra clear: WE are the paying customer, but we don't look like that to your finance department.
4. We pay for all the collateral damage of advertising, such as the tremendous amount of link-bait and other garbage that advertising perversely incentivizes.
5. We pay the social costs. Democracy and the free market assume people make voting and purchasing decisions based on facts and reason. Advertising undermines democracy[1] and the free market[2]. Advertising is predominantly about manipulation and deceit. I believe this is the most expensive cost of content that relies on advertising revenue.
Added together, we end users are paying a lot more for "free" product than if we could just straight up pay you. And even we non-users are paying the social costs and collateral damage.
[1] Do you really need a link for this one? We all know that money often overwhelmingly decides who gets to run in an election, plays a big part in who wins, and influences what legislation they introduce, support or fight.
I may be wrong but a 'real' pyramid scheme works a little different.
A pyramid scheme is an unsustainable business model that
involves promising participants payment or services,
primarily for enrolling other people into the scheme,
rather than supplying any real investment or sale of
products or services to the public. (wiki)
So by getting more users they are getting more value (ad revenue). A real pyramid scheme works like this:
* User 1 sells good G for $n to User 2.
* User 2 sells good G for $n+1 to User 3.
* User 3 sells good G for $n+2 to User 4...
* User 1 pays $20 to join the program with the promise of getting money back for their 'investment'
* User 0 gets paid $20
* User 1 refers user 2 to the program
* User 2 pays $20 to join the program with the promise of getting money back for their 'investment'
* User 1 gets paid $15 and user 0 gets $5
* User 2 refers user 3 to the program
* User 3 pays $20 to join the program with the promise of getting money back for their 'investment'
* User 2 gets paid $15, user 1 gets $4, and user 0 gets $1
And so on. Users make money by referring more users to pay in to the program. The people at the top of the pyramid make a lot of money, and the rest of the people lose more of their 'investment'. No goods or services are exchanged, nothing of value is created. As soon as people stop joining, the flow of money stops.
The similarity with tsu is in the pyramid-shaped referral payout scheme, but it is not a pyramid scheme because it doesn't depend on new users 'paying in' to generate money. I don't think this kind of referral payout scheme is uncommon.
That's a pretty big difference. Using referral fees to bring in new business for a product with a different revenue stream is sustainable, provided the core product is a sustainable business. There is no way for a pyramid scheme to not collapse.
A lot of for-profit companies have referral programs (which is what this amounts to), and many of them have a similar multilevel marketing component. So this isn't really anything new or novel.
What I would love to see is an social-media site that is willing to take the concept of sharing profits with its members to the next level and organize itself as a cooperative.
Co-ops, unlike for-profit companies, are entirely owned by their members, and thus any profits they make eventually go back to their members, either in the form of greater investment in the site (which benefits the members) or in the form of rebates (where the profits get divided up and distributed to the member-owners, similar to dividends in the for-profit world).
Of course, the problem with organizing as a co-op is that it's harder to come up with capital, because you can't accept outside investment. But with Kickstarter and Indiegogo and the era of fundraiser-driven product development, I don't think that's as much an issue nowadays.
An added bonus of a social network organized as a co-op is that each member-owner gets a vote -- a genuine say in how things are done -- which is often absent in for-profit companies.
I don't see how that's at all relevant to what I was talking about. Favorsome doesn't appear to be a co-op, or anything like one. By the way, I see your only other HN activity is also plugging Favorsome. Kinda spammy?
sorry, I'm new to HN, trying to surf and learn about social networks. my very first post was about Favorsome because I found it interesting.
You're right, Favorsome is not a co-op, but since you're talking about a network reinvesting its profits back into the users, I see that Favorsome is doing the same and thought you'd find it interesting, that's all
From all its (future) advertising revenues, Tsū will keep 10% and give back to its users the remaining 90%:
* 50% goes back to you directly
* 50% goes back to the people who have invited you, such as the person who invited him gets 33%, the person who invited him/her gets 33% of 33% (~ 11%), the one after that 33% of 33% of 33%, etc...
So anybody who has your "secret" URL can access all of your content? No friend request or anything?
So if I understand correctly the model is that the artists/content creators would create a tsu account to post their stuff and consumers would be forced to make a tsu account to access said content (as I just did to access your page)?
But then you wouldn't use your tsu account to post personal stuff for fear of your tsu URL leaking somewhere and giving anybody access to your vacation pictures?
That sounds like a lot of friction to me. I guess if the content creators can really make more money on this platform than on the alternatives it can be enough to drive adoption.
They launched the invitation system less than 24 hours ago.
I agree with the two issues you mentioned but I think the main issue here is the invitation system : you have to share your profile URL to invite people. They should let people invite strangers with a specific invitation URL.
I suppose they made Tsu profiles accessible to Tsu users only to drive adoption. Once they have enough users, it will make no sense to keep it this way.
EDIT:
> But then you wouldn't use your tsu account to post personal stuff for fear of your tsu URL leaking somewhere and giving anybody access to your vacation pictures?
You can share private content to your friends & family (requires you to add users as friends) and public stuff to your followers / Tsu community
How do you plan on controlling fake profiles ?
For instance, if I create a bunch of fake profiles linked to a real profile and I post randomly on some fake profiles, access posts from fake profiles from the others, what could be preventing me from doing this (and keep all the advertising money to myself) ?
You basically just described what everybody does with Google Ads: Click bots to click their own ads. So if Tsu displays Google ads, it will be Google's problem (or better: the advertisers' problem). (I don't work at Tsu.)
I don't plan anything since I'm not affiliated with Tsu =)
I don't know if they thought about it but since their goal is to give back advertising money to users, doing so won't harm anyone other than the user who referred you.
On tsū, users own their content and own their network, therefore they own the royalties generated from advertising, sponsorship and partnership dollars wrapped around their content.
Additionally if any users came to the platform via a user’s short code or invitation, then that user will in perpetuity earn a portion of the economics of the newly invited individual and their social network on tsū.
Right now you need an invite to join this up and coming social network. I just found a generic user like http://www.tsu.co/FunnyImages and created a profile. Hopefully this catches on, then anyone in on the ground floor will have a nice passive income to build on for simply posting.
So the network has definitely potential but I think that the pay will be very very minimal, as the number of users but greatly increase the revenue through advertising can not even begin to keep up.
The first impressions were very good, it is nice designed simply and clearly. For this, just not quite as many features. You can not create groups or other but perhaps Tsu has also not at all before.
We certainly have a page on Tsu created where we post extraordinary art and designs. Since we have many followers, you will receive automatically by us money if you do register on our Tsulink. Conversely, of course, just as :)
IF the ones who are popular 50 cents etc gets majority of the money, what is the incentive for the lay person. The average Joe. I mean the work involved is time consuming. Take for example i spent alot of my time hiting likes, and posting random stuff on line. Some good quotes some good poems, and a few pictures. However, 5 hrs have gone by and i don't even see a penny generated. Google has the browser market and i don't get paid from them but i get excellent service and find what i need. So i asked again for the little man why switch over to tsu?
Good idea, I am surprised Google Plus is not working that way. As far as I know Youtube is doing similar thing to Tsu: those who upload movies get part of the ads revenue.
Every new initiative is good if it brings new ideas.
But sadly, most new social networks we see try to convince people that Facebook is bad (ads, privacy concerns, etc) instead of convincing them that the new thing is good. IMO, this is backwards. I have never heard someone tell me "Facebook should share revenue with us". I mean come on: Facebook hosts servers, creates tons of jobs and they should now start paying users?
Sure thing Facebook has nice servers architecture and most brilliant engineers, but does FB creates any content? That's just a website, an empty shell where people upload content. And FB gets 100% of ads revenue, generated by others' content. Look at content creators like The New York Times's website, they get money through ads by attracting people thanks to their article. Plus you give up all of your rights and privacy, in exchange of a free service. I think the idea is not to "start paying users", but creating a fair platform.
Facebook is way more than "just" a website:
- the only platform that has managed to make people share this much content
- a way for businesses to advertise and thus make more money
- the maintainer of amazing open source projects such as HHVM or React.JS
I don't think Facebook is perfect. But focusing on the privacy concerns to say Facebook sucks is just wrong. If you're concerned with your privacy, simply don't sign up on Facebook or don't share private content.
According to Wikipedia [1], Facebook makes 7.8$B and has a net profit of 1.5$B. If Facebook gave 90% back to its user base, no way it could survive with the level of quality they provide (accessibility, technical reliabilty, etc).
The content so far has been fantastic, and the folks who have signed on include 50 cent, Carmelo Anthony, Le Ann Rimes, Miss Universe, former Olympians, etc. Feel free to check it out at http://www.tsu.co/invited
One issue could be that the $ argument won't work with 99% of users b/c they don't generate enough traffic (i.e. who really cares about, say, $5/month of revenue).
One way to solve it could be to pool the revenue and to position Tsu like this: "90% of revenue goes to a good cause of your choice (climate, humanitarian, etc.), not to 1 huge corporation"
Edit: Every profile would then get a "I Donated $x today" badge (visible publicly) as a feel-good engine. You could then convert the amount to real things like "I paid 2 meals in a 3rd World country today" or "planted 3 trees", depending on your choice of the cause.
I don't care about $5 / month, but a lot of users would.
But think about content creators (musicians, artists, athletes, etc.) even with a small fan base, they get rewarded few hundred dolla per month. If they stick to the concept, then the regular poor users will follow them.
> One issue could be that the $ argument won't work with 99% of users b/c they don't generate enough traffic (i.e. who really cares about, say, $5/month of revenue).
Thats $60 a year? A nice discount on most gadgets. Am I wrong?
I think many would care about $5/month, it certainly is better than nothing, but there is no way that the average user will get even one tenth of that per month.
Looks like content is only visible to users. I can understand gating the sign up to require an invite, but hiding the content as well will just kill ad revenue.
I agree, and the blurry image weight approximately 678KB (~88% of the size in bytes of the whole page). I'm sure there are less costly ways to create a fake page or to show that you are not allowed to view the page.
