Tsu take 10% of the money to pay for running the site. The remaining 90% is shared amongst the users according to their algorithm. It works according to the views a user's posts get, with some adjustments to take account of comments and like. If it's decided that my post earned a dollar then I gets 45c. The rest is passed on to the people who recruited users. The person who recruited me gets some money and so does the person who recruited them gets a little less and so on. This is the network effect.
So the way to make money is to get lots of views by getting lots of people to follow you and/or to recruit lots of people who write popular posts.
Some people assume that Tsu is a multi-level marketing scam (aka pyramid scheme), but I do not consider it to be one as nobody has to pay anything to use it. All you commit is your time. The advertisers are the only ones paying.
The average person is unlikely to get rich on Tsu, but you can make a little extra money doing what you would anyway. The top people with many thousands of followers are making anything from a few dollars to hundreds of dollars per day. Those who got in really early and built a massive network are probably making the most, especially if they recruited celebrities who would have a large following. I make a few cents per day after building a network of several hundred and have a similar number of followers, but then my network is not particularly active. I post a few times each day and participate in any discussions that interest me. The money is not enough to keep me coming back, so it has to be fun.
A lot of people joined up in the hope of making money and were disappointed when they did not do so immediately. To start with I was making a cent every few days, but that has improved. It takes time and effort to build a following. Some people followed and befriended everyone in sight, but I wanted to make my feed manageable, so I only follow interesting people.
Some people are posting things like pretty pictures and 'inspirational' quotes in a quest for views. This may work, but there could be issues if they do not have the right to post those. Tsu have said they are working on ways to detect copyright violation and those people may find that they do not get paid. Those same people will also like every post they see or post meaningless comments (e.g. 'nice') in the hope that people will follow them, but that doesn't work with me.
You have to earn $100 before you can be paid. Many people have been sent cheques and in the early days they would post pictures as proof. There is also an option to be paid via Paypal. Even if you have not reached the threshold you can donate to the various charities on Tsu or send money to another user. People are offering goods and services that can be paid for that way.
Tsu is by no means perfect. These are some of the things I think could be improved:
- You can only view the site once you have registered and logged in. I think that public posts should be viewable by anyone on the web. This would include search engines and it would allow people to check it out before joining as well as giving lots more views.
- The only privacy levels are Public and Friends Only. Other sites offer more options.
- There should be ways to group people (lists/circles/whatever) so that you can filter the feed.
- Tsu needs some ways to keep new users engaged. It could offer tips and make better suggestions for people to follow. Currently you can just see a list of verified users and I've not heard of many of them and some are not active.
- Related to the above, the site views are decreasing, despite new people joining. They need some mix of marketing and exclusive content to build the site.
- Tsu needs ways to automate posting so that people who syndicate their content across multiple social networks can post there without extra effort. You can make Tsu posts appear on your Facebook and Twitter feeds, but many people will use something else as their main feed. IFTTT integration would help.
- The site needs to be multi-lingual. People are joining from all over the world and posting in all languages. Some of them may not understand how it works if the FAQ is not available in their native language.
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