Sources:
http://op-talk.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/10/27/the-social-network-that-pays-you-to-friend/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0
Asked about the inspiration for Tsu, the social network
he’s just launched, Sebastian Sobczak doesn’t immediately
mention Facebook or Twitter. Instead, he talks about Ed O’Bannon. Mr. O’Bannon, a former U.C.L.A. basketball player, sued to
challenge N.C.A.A. rules banning athletes from making money from their
own images — in August, the Supreme Court
decided
in his favor. And for Mr. Sobczak, he’s a sort of personification of
Tsu’s ethos:
People should get paid for the content they produce.
While Facebook and Twitter have been criticized for
failing to share their profits with those who post on their platforms,
Tsu pledges to do just that: It will give 90 percent of its ad revenue
back to users. Tsu’s philosophy is that “all content creators, which is
basically every social user, should receive royalties for the commercial
use of their image, likeness and work,” Mr. Sobczak told
Op-Talk. “They essentially do all the work, they should get rewarded
with the lion’s share.”
“What people don’t realize is how much value is created by
these platforms on the backs of basically everybody’s networking,” he
said. “It’s the exact analogy to the N.C.A.A. If the N.C.A.A.’s
going to be paid hundreds of millions of dollars by gaming companies
using Tim Tebow or Ed O’Bannon,” he added, then “you gotta pay the
guys!” Tsu plans to pay users not only for its content, but also
for its ability to bring in more people. Each user gets a unique code
that allows him or her to invite others to the site. And after Tsu takes
its 10 percent cut, it gives half of each post’s revenue to the user
who posted it — the remainder gets divided up among the users that
person invited, the users
those users invited, and so on, the
share diminishing with each remove from the original poster. So even if
your posts aren’t generating much revenue, or if you’re not posting
much, you can still make some money from the posts of the people you
know. “If you brought value to the system” by inviting someone whose
posts get a lot of attention, said Mr. Sobczak, “you’re actually
rewarded for that.”
He believes paying users will benefit Tsu as well: “We’re
everybody’s kind of de facto payment platform that is giving them
purchasing power for their data, their content and their network. That’s
very powerful.” Becoming a payment platform would allow the company to
go beyond merely selling ads, he added. “I would rather play in the
peer-to-peer credit and merchant services markets, because that’s
10 times a larger market than just digital advertising and mobile
advertising markets.” He imagines Tsu potentially becoming “the people’s
global banker.”
It’s not the first time a social network has paid users. At ReCode, Kurt Wagner notes that “Bubblews,
a social network founded in 2012 with a similar mindset, pays users
when the content they share generates engagement like comments or
Likes.”
But such revenue-sharing is by no means mainstream, and
some have taken the major social networks to task for what they say is
exploitation of users’ time and energy. The artist Laurel Ptak
writes in her
much-discussed
piece, “Wages for Facebook”: “They say it’s friendship. We say it’s
unwaged work. With every like, chat, tag or poke our subjectivity turns
them a profit.” And on her website, she
asks:
“In 2012 Facebook reached more than 1 billion users and
generated a revenue of 5.1 billion dollars. It is the first social-media
website to be traded on the stock exchange wherein all content on its
site is created by its users
. Is what we do on Facebook work? How
would we calculate our value? What could an alternate form of social
media, based on an idea of the commons or a feminist praxis, look like?”
Astra Taylor describes a similar concern in her book “
The People’s Platform.”
“A frustrated minority,” she writes, “have complained that we are
living in a world of ‘digital feudalism,’ where sites like Facebook and
Tumblr offer up land for content providers to work while platform owners
expropriate value with impunity and, if you read the fine print, stake
unprecedented claim over users’ creations.”
“We, the armies of digital peasants, scramble for
subsistence in digital manor economies, lucky to receive scraps of ad
dollars here and there, but mostly getting by, sometimes happily, on
social rewards — fun, social connections, online reputations. But when
the commons are sold or traded on Wall Street, the vast disparities
between us, the peasants, and them, the lords, become more obvious and
more objectionable.”
Can Tsu be the more communal social network critics are
looking for? Brooke Duffy, a professor of media and communication who
has studied women’s digital-media behavior, has doubts. “I understand
the appeal and I certainly understand the buzz of it,” she told Op-Talk.
“I think the problem is, if it gets a critical mass — and I think
that’s a big if — who’s actually going to be benefitting?”
Her prediction: “I think what we’ll end up seeing is the
same kind of social media influencers that are already getting
compensated for their work are the ones that are ultimately going to
benefit from this.” Those who have already amassed large followings on
other social-media platforms, she argued, may have the easiest time
earning money on Tsu. Some may be able to use Tsu to gain lots of followers from
scratch: “There’s always the handful who rise to the top,” she said.
“But is this going to radically redefine the compensation model of
social network content creation? I’m pretty skeptical of it.”
“There’s a great deal of enthusiasm for whatever the next
big social network is,” she added, “and there’s always these hopes that
we can identify the next big thing. But I think in all of these cases it
tends to be a very small number of people that actually benefit from
the contributions of the many.” Those who benefit are those who get in
early, but “also people who have the time and income to actually work to
grow this audience base.”
“Something that gets swept aside,” she said, “is the level of economic and social capital people need to even get started.”
Mr. Sobczak is more optimistic about users’ chances of
making significant money on Tsu. “The monetization is for everybody,” he
said, “that’s the beauty of it.” “Talk to some of these kids out there, they have 5,000
Facebook friends,” he said. He estimated that bringing in 100 friends
could make a user thousands of dollars annually. And, he said, “It’s not
a zero-sum game: the more people that join, the more ad revenue, and
the higher the rate.”
He said the user base was growing rapidly — “we’ve been in
the several thousands of requests per second.”
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