Something from nothing

In October 2014 a friend told me about a new social site that paid users a share of their advertising revenue (90% in fact). I was a bit sceptical at first. There are loads of 'get rich quick' schemes on-line. Often these are some variant of a pyramid scheme where early adopters may get paid by new people paying to sign up. Those have no sustainable business model. The site was Tsu and as there was no sign of any cost to join up I gave it a go.

Things went fairly slowly to start with. I acquired a few followers, but it took a few weeks to even earn a few cents. I could see people frantically adding friends and followers (you can have 5000 and 1000 of each respectively). That did not appeal to me as it would make it impossible to monitor the feed of posts. I don't have the time to go looking at lots of separate feeds for cool stuff. I use social sites to see what friends are up to and to see cool/interesting/funny posts.

You have to make $100 before you can ask to be paid (originally via cheque, Paypal and other means were added later). It looked like that would take years to achieve, but I gradually built a larger following and started earning a little more. I also built a network of people (Tsu 'children') who used my profile link to join the site. I get a percentage of what they make and a smaller slice from their children, grandchildren etc make. That's not making me much at the moment, but it should in the long term.

I'm a long way from $100, but this week I just took delivery of a physical item bought with Tsu currency. British artist adogaday sent me one of her pictures that I took a fancy to. She's doing well by selling her work on Tsu. Anyone in the world can easily send her the money and she can get paid when she builds up enough.

My picture was partly paid for by a blog post I wrote on Tsuniverse. That may be my first time being paid to write.

I'd have had enough for a picture much earlier if I hadn't given so much to charity, but that's another great aspect of Tsu. There are all sorts of events and challenges to encourage giving and I find myself getting involved. One of these is #fivecentfriday. I try to give a little to a selection of charities each week. Some of those with more income have been matching these donations to boost the totals. It all adds up.


I expect I will get to $100 one day. It will take months, but then that money will go into a fund towards buying myself a treat.

Come and join us on Tsu to be part of the new economy.

The Tsu Economy

A lot of the focus on Tsu has been on making money. Various other web sites have played around with this concept, but often in some made-up currency. Tsu uses US dollars, so you know exactly how much it is worth.

One of the issues for most people is that you can only take that money (via cheque or Paypal) when you reach $100 and that may take years. However, you can do other things with that money.

Firstly you can give some to other users. Any user can enable the Transfer Funds button on their profile page. I believe Tsu take 3% of such transfers.

The other option is to donate money to charity. There are a number of charities on Tsu. There have been various donation campaigns that have resulted in some of them getting hundreds of dollars. Of course the charities also earn money from their views and network like anyone else.

There's a list of charity accounts here.

A limitation of donations and transfers is that you cannot send less than a dollar, although some people seem to be able to send smaller amounts. I think there is some potential for small amounts to be used a 'tips', e.g. if you like a picture by an artist or a song by a band you can give them a few cents as you would to a busker or pavement artist. In the Bitcoin world there are sites like ChangeTip that do this.

There are a fair few musicians and artists on Tsu. Some offer the option to buy their work by transferring Tsu funds. As this is money you would not have otherwise it's almost like getting free stuff. Of course you still need to earn enough, but I expect they would all accept other payment methods. It's just that a Tsu transfer is very simple and has a fairly low transaction fee.

I have bought lots of music from bands via Bandcamp as that gets most of the money to the artist. Tsu could be encouraging a similar thing. I think they could go further in allowing artists to register themselves for extra features to allow them to manage orders more easily. e.g. providing a form to fill in order details such as the delivery address.

Tsu make a big thing of wanting to encourage original content. They can help this by supporting the artists better than other sites.

If you are not already on Tsu then please consider joining using my link at http://www.tsu.co/steevc