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.

Tag, you're it

They imitation is a form of flattery. Well, Tsu should be flattered that another new site called 3tags has a practically identical network revenue model.

Like Tsu you earn from views and from those of people you recruit. Unlike Tsu you don't actually need a referral link to join, but I think it's fair to reward whoever let you know about the site.

3tags is not really a social network. You follow tags instead of people, so it's more of a link sharing site than somewhere to post personal updates. You can up vote and comment on posts. I really like that the site is public, so people do not have to join to browse it and posts can be found by the search engines. This is something Tsu does wrongly in my opinion. Walled gardens are a bad thing.

You can include up to 3 tags on each post (hence the name) and people following those tags will see it. I assume up votes will make a post more visible and this will become more important as the site grows. I think this is something like reddit, but I've not used that much.

People will use sites for no financial reward. When there is one they may think it's a scam. I know people are getting paid on Tsu and you don't have to pay to use it, so I don't see a problem.

I've written a few posts that have gained some views and earned me 9c in 3 days. That's a lot more than I got in the early days of Tsu. You can take money out when you reach $25, which seems more achievable than the $100 on Tsu.

Of course I wanted to post my thoughts about this new site on Tsu. It appears they are not fans as any links or mention of the name got me an error message saying this was spam. That looks like censorship to me and that is not good. I'm a little wary as I don't want to get banned. People are discussing this elsewhere, including on a new Facebook group.

From what I've heard both Tsu and 3tags were working on their businesses for several years before they went public, so perhaps the similarities are a coincidence. I'm not sure you can copyright or patent the 'rule of thirds' distribution.

For now I will use both sites, but I will be socialising on Tsu and just posting links to 3tags. I may also post some comments there.

So feel free to use my links to Tsu or 3tags to join up and I'll make a few more cents. Let me know what you think.