Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn may be profiting from all that user-generated content users post on their networks daily — but are you? Yes, they have all provided us with some fun and engaging ecosystems to strut our stuff, and ofcourse there are cost factors attached to all that development. But at the end of the day, do our images, bon mots, intellectual property and reputations hold no value at all?
MLM at first glance
Tsu advertises itself as the first combined social network and payment platform that lets users maintain ownership of the content they post. It appears as an MLM scheme, but since users pay nothing to obtain a stake, I debunked that theory in my last blog posting.
Ello, Good-bye
Like Ello, another recently launched innovative "anti-Facebook" type of network, it’s free and by invite-only. However, dissimilar to this competitor — Tsu appears to have a more sustainable premise and business model than the slightly more utopian no-advertising-Ello — which may have sealed its own fate by allowing Tsu the time and space to ride roughshod over this terrain.
New Business Model
Tsu founder, Sebastian Sobczak would rather play in the financial arena working on the services of Sebastian Sobczakpeer-to-peer payments, merchant services and credit offerings. According to Sobczak, these markets — which Tsu’s core monetization model is based — are 10 times larger than the digital and mobile advertising space which Facebook and Twitter have built their entire business models. The content creation game is admittingly not for Sobczak. Instead, he feels its appropriate to give credit where credit is due. And as such, his site has committed to giving 90% of all of the site’s advertising dollars back to the users.
“Established social networks have built amazing business models prospering on the total monetization of free user-generated content,” says tsu founder Sebastian Sobczak. “Why should anyone commercially benefit from someone else’s image, likeness and work giving no financial return to the owner? The markets we participate in are enormous, growing and can materially compensate each user — we’re simply and uniquely rewarding the users who are doing all the work. This is the way the world should work.”
Playing for Charity vs Content-Generation Game. . .
This scheme allows Sobczak to play in the financial markets. However, dissimilar to Paypal, Tsu has chosen not to start with bill paying as a service at the onset, but rather with donations given to charities, such as Environmental Media Association, Charity Water, Food for the Hungry. All of these charitable foundations can earn donations as their brand messaging gets churned through the Tsu system.
Tsu’s peer-to-peer payment processing is actually more similar to Venmo, the system that handles payments for companies such as Uber, Airbnb and Living Social. Users, as well can also donate anything in their bank account to a charity that is also on the network, like George Michael’s arts nonprofit, the Goss-Michael Foundation.
And if you think these charities won’t be able to raise the kind of funding they can receive in the open markets, think again – as most of the celebrities that have signed up on Tsu as early adopters will become the major benefactors for a lot of these foundations. Based on the Fox interview featured in the above video, someone like Taylor Swift, for instance is estimated to make as much as $2.8 million dollars in a year’s time. Whether or not you think her content is worth that kind of return, the point is in the months and years ahead, you’re going see a lot of these use cases proving out Sobczak’s proposition that while the ‘content game’ will satisfy his users- his company’s personal endgame is to knock it out of the park in the financial markets.
