Everybody ready for a story? Had enough turkey/ham/chicken/triffle? Stuffed with stuffing? Good. Let’s begin.
Are you a User? Or are you a participant? Have you seen “The Social Dilemma”, if not, I’m going to steal a line.
“Only drug addicts and software companies call their end clients USERS.”
Wow. Seems odd. Social Media firms all talk about “engagement” but the word “User” itself screams “passive” and “without agency”. Really, what you feel when you’re on social media, or what you hope to feel, is to be engaged with a greater community right?
That’s how we feel at GazeTv. So, how do we do that? Well, we made a big list, and we checked it twice. Here’s some of the things from our list;
A desire to keep you there as long as possible (#Engagement —
In the Venture Capital/Private Equity world, those who oversee tech platform investment are always in love with Monthly Active Users “MAU” as a metric. Without every asking “What are they doing? Are they happy? Will they move to the next platform? It’s the tech equivalent of the body count in the Vietnam War, inflating numbers and confusing attendance with value.)
2. No incentive to stay
Other than watching another cat video, trolling, dopamine and flame wa
3. Opaque payments to creators
What is a CPM anyway — and what’s it worth?
4. Deplatforming
Why don’t my favorite content creators ever come up in my feed anymore?
5. Arbitrary Complaints/Customer Service policies
“Hey Twitter, why am I apparently banned? I didn’t actually do anything. Hello? Hello!”
6. Exclusivity
“Hey Twitch, I am getting good at this but lots of my original viewers were in China, can you help with that?”
How do we solve this? Well, some are easy, some are hard. We’ll address each of these in the following.
Engagement and Incentives are easy — what if the biggest fans and most engaged viewers got paid for introduce GOOD content to people?
Example: Tammy finds a cat video that is really funny. She shares it and turns out Tammy has a lot of cat friends. It goes viral. The creator benefits, why not Tammy?
(How does this work? Its called a Reward Pool and I’ll cover it in more detail in a later post — I covered it briefly last week).
Payments was a little harder — If you run ads on your content on Youtube, you get paid, everyone knows that. How much do you get paid? Well, the Unit of Measurement is a CPM (Cost Per Thousand (Yes, that would be CPT - instead we use “Mille” Latin for a Thousand ) — Eg, for every thousand views you get $x). For YouTube, the average CPM is $2. On YT again, you have to consider RPM (RPM per Mille) Why is there a difference? Well, some folks are Youtube Premium guys, so they don’t get ads. Some people use adblockers. Here’s a helpful guide from Youtube’s Help
So, Youtube takes it’s bit (45%!), some people don’t get ads and we are back to
CPM $2 - (YT Revenue)- (No ads people per Mille)=RPM
Got it? Well, where did we get $2 from? According to the “internet” average (here’s a link)CPM on Youtube is $2. (This is determined by Country, Content Type, Audience Type, Niche…it all makes sense but is a bit…boring.)
Well, what is the algorithm for RPM calculation? It’s based projected revenues (for Google) as to what they can sell the ads for. But Google has a giant Campus, Free Food etc and $$$ so I think they are doing ok.
At GazeTV, we decided to go a different way. What about if we take a small piece of the 45% Youtube charges (around 15%) and give it to the viewers who liked shared and commented on the content. (Yes, we thought about SPAM and mindless sharing, or bots — save that for a later post.) The content creator gets incentives, but they are nothing without an audience.
What about Deplatforming, or Arbitrary Policies? This is the hardest part. Internet Businesses, by their very nature, need to scale very quickly with limited staff. Selling ads at around $1 revenue per 1000 for the company needs to sell ALOT of ads (and therefore have a huge audience) to pay for a single staff member. Full time content curators need a lot of views to buy their seat. Even Facebook, with $$$ puts it’s content creators in India to minimise costs, and still they don’t have enough.
We decided that we could create a curation team from really engaged users and pay them from the Reward Pool. If we write these costs in from the beginning, it becomes transaprent from Day 1.
For Policies, we can lean on the blockchain community, with a lot of practice in decentralised voting and staking models (essentially, the amount of value that a user has in the platform, the louder their voice. By value, we mean effort, work or engagement, not cash. Advertisers can make their own decisions.) This makes our community a more important and valuable resource than simply “Users”.
Lastly, Exclusivity. Ever notice how it is becoming harder and harder to post from Dropbox to Gmail? How Facebook loves Instagram (Duh) but doesn’t like sharing stuff with Twitter? What about why my PC keeps telling me Microsoft Teams is awesome and I should use Edge as my browser?
Funny story — A friend of a friend of mine used to work at Microsoft. He used to try and say “just Bing it” instead of “Just Google it”. It was hilarious for the six months he tried.
This is called vertical integration, own the customer, own their data, own the content. At GazeTV, we decided we don’t care. We think that we are unique, and our product will speak for itself. We also are a truly global platform that will work in both China and the West, will promote diversity of content and culture, and we’ll be transparent and fair. Ofc, we’d love you to use us most. But it’s a marketplace, and we are happy to compete. We will grow slowly, and learn from our community, build safeguards and highlight indie bands, strange video gamers and games, online fitness teachers, archers, cobblers, K-Pop fans and cat lovers. We’ll bring you content you won’t see anywhere else, in a format that is easier to find and geared toward bringing you things that you just don’t see on other platforms.
Because Every Second Counts.
