Open for business

Businesses are starting to accept payment using funds accumulated on the Tsu social network. Users there get paid based on views, likes and shares. It will take most people some time (years?) to reach $100 when they can take the money out, but they can also use the money to send to other users or to donate to charities. There has recently been a surge of charity donations to aid the people of Nepal who have suffered a terrible earthquake. I estimate that thousands of dollars have been donated already. That shows how much money users have already. I've given away over half the money I've made on Tsu.

There are a couple of similar articles about Denver juice bar Bambucycles accepting Tsu payments. More will follow in areas where the network is big. You can only spend as much as you have earned as you cannot transfer money into Tsu from outside. The service is supposed to be taking 3% from each transfer, but I am unsure if they have started doing this yet. They are not profitable yet, but this could provide an appreciable part of their income in future. For now they still rely on venture funding that will have to be paid back.

I think Tsu needs to add features to make payments more convenient. They could add a barcode scanner to the app so that users can scan a code in a shop to make a payment. Some Bitcoin apps do this already. Users need to be very certain of how much they are transferring and to whom. There should be options of anonymous payments or to have the payers name listed against the transaction. At the moment you get a notification when you receive money that says who sent it, but you can't see this later in the Bank. People who are selling on-line need details of where to send their product.

With all this money floating around the service needs good security. Currently accounts are just protected by a password. I would hope people are using something non-trivial for that. Really they should be using two factor authentication as others do, so users need a code via SMS or other means to confirm they have a specified device. Even this is not perfect, but it reduces the risks. It is very difficult to achieve ideal security in ways an average user can cope with.

I've still only made a few dollars. I have a large network there that could potentially earn me much more, but most of those people are inactive. Keeping people engaged remains a problem. I had one recent 'child' who I estimate was making me several cents per day, but she was mostly posting what I would consider 'click bait'. She gained hundreds of friends in a few days, so people obviously go for that. She's stopped posting for now. If all of my network were that active I would be making several dollars per day. A lot of people still don't seem to understand the value of recruiting children and building a network. At this early stage there is huge potential for that.

Although Tsu is gaining new accounts they are not retaining all those users. Statistics show falling visitor numbers. Articles like those above may help to bring in more people, but they need to have realistic expectations about how much they can make.

I'll be sticking with Tsu for the meantime. I've made some cool friends there. There's Theo of the band E-Mute. I'm hoping to get to one of their gigs in a few weeks. There's also guitarist Elliott Randall who has played on many classic songs (e.g. Steely Dan's Reelin' in the Years). There are also lots of fellow social media enthusiasts.

The value of networking

A common feature of sites that pay users is that you get rewarded for recruiting people. This seems logical as they need to grow in order to make enough to pay the staff. Tsu and 3tags have the same model (spookily, rights-infringingly similar) where you get a portion of what your 'children' and their children make. The site keeps 10% in each case.

I've seen people on Tsu with networks of many thousands of people and this can make them several dollars per day. This only works if they are active. I have built a fairly large network myself, but only a small percentage are still active on the site and so I still only make pennies per day. This may change in time if more people join up or if those who joined before come back. There is definitely an issue with keeping people engaged. I suspect they give up when they don't make anything immediately. I think the two main issues are

1. Setting realistic expectations
2. I also think there is a language barrier. I've reached out to some of my children, but often they do not respond.

I wonder if some people join Tsu when they see a link just to see what it was as the main site is not visible to non-members. This seriously reduces how many will use it. I want my public content to be truly public, where Google etc can find it.

3tags is public and seems to benefit from that as people are making good money even though it has a lot less members than Tsu. I haven't managed to recruit many people and creating a post involves a little more work than Tsu, so I'm not doing much there. It's not really a social site. It's about sharing links and blog posts. I could blog there I suppose, but I prefer to be a little independent. Yes, I know Blogger is not under my control either. I do have my own site, but it's easier to blog here.

There's a new (ish) player at Bitlanders. Their USP is that they pay in Bitcoin. The site looks a little like Google+, but uses cartoon avatars. I think it's actually been around for about 6 months, but it's fairly quiet there. Some people have accumulated thousands of followers and may be making money, but there's not much discussion of that. A lot of the posts I see are about Judo. I think that's because some of the founders are into it. You get 'buzz' for viewing posts and videos. Each day that gets translated into some small amount of Bitcoin. If you recruit people you get a fixed 20% of what they make. I'll keep an eye on it, but I won't be visiting every day.

I've been neglecting things like blogging and pocasting lately. I need to drag myself away from the feeds and get back to that, as well as important things like playing my guitar.