Pay day

Seven months ago I posted about my first payment of $100 from Tsu. This week I'm happy to report that I've been paid again! With the current weak pound it's worth a little more than last time. Those in the USA get a cheque in a black envelope and some cool stickers, but it has to be via Paypal for us in the UK.

I've actually earned a lot more than $100 in that period, but I gave a lot to charity via various campaigns. One of those was a month of sponsoring the runs of member in my Fun Runners channel for Charity Water. That just reached 500 followers. I've also been supporting Papillon Foundation in South Africa and Edlington Community Organisation in the UK. It would be great to see more charities on there from around the world. It's so easy to donate on Tsu, even if it's just a few cents, and there are no transaction fees. It's money you would not have otherwise, so why not help others?

Tsu continues to gain users, but has struggled to keep them engaged. I keep an eye on their stats via a couple of sites. Their Alexa ranking has been falling since the start of this year, but has just started to rise again. There's a lot of growth in places like Pakistan where a local celebrity has been recruiting a lot of new people. The new users need to be guided to using Tsu in the ways it was intended. There are still a lot of people just posting images they found on-line. They will not get paid if they are breaching copyright.

My own network is slowly growing. I have people in there from all over the world. A few are active and I try to encourage them to keep going. If they can build their own following and network then they will see their earnings rise.

I've spent some of my earnings on music by some musicians I've been following. +Matt Stevens is not yet on Tsu, but I've known him for years. I discovered +Deni Gauthier and +Cherry White on Tsu. It's cool to engage with artists you enjoy.

I bought another one from guitarist +Elliott Randall (ex-Steely Dan) who is also on Tsu.

Tsu is still fun for me, so I'll be sticking around there. I think it has massive potential for artists, musicians and charities. They can bring in their supporters to build the service. At around five million users they are small compared to the likes of Facebook and Twitter, but if they keep growing they could become a major financial force. Many of us are producing cool content that earns those sites revenue from advertising. I think we deserve to get a share.

Wow, an app

If you've been reading this blog then you will know that I like Tsu. It's a good social site that has a good mix of people. Of course it also pays you and I've made over $100 there that I was able to redeem recently. There have been a few other sites with similar models that I have tried over the last year, but none of them was as fun to use and so I didn't use them enough to earn a significant amount.

Now there'a chat app which also pays users from advertising revenue. It's called WowApp and it seems to offer a similar set of features to Skype. Like Tsu it offers the option to transfer money to charities. You see ads in the app (Window, Apple, iOS and Android, no Linux) and web site, but they are not terribly obtrusive.

I'm trying it for now with a few people and have made about a cent. I've only recruited one person whereas others have hundreds and they are making a lot more.

I'll still have to use Skype, Facebook, Google and WhatsApp to stay in touch with friends, but this is another option.

If you want to try it then please use my referral link at https://www.wowapp.com/w/steevc/Steve-Clark

Tsu really does pay you

One of the issues Tsu has had is that people think it's some kind of scam or pyramid scheme and that they will never get paid. Well, I can happily report than even a bumbling amateur like me can get paid. This week I received a PayPal transfer of $100 (minus some fees), two days after I claimed it. I've never had to pay anything in. I've just given time I would have spent on-line anyway.

It's taken over a year to get to this point, but in that time I have given many dollars to charities and bought a painting using my Tsu earnings. If I hadn't done those I could have claimed some months ago, but I don't really mind. I never expected to make more than beer money from Tsu.

There are some people who have made thousands, but they either worked on it a lot more or are very well connected and so could build a network of top people who would make them some good money. I have limited social connections. I have amassed a lot of Tsu 'children', but they are mostly amateurs like me and many gave up when they didn't see the cash roll in.

I do have some cool children now who I expect could do well on Tsu if they stick with it. These include:

• GVader who makes fun videos about gaming
• Jared from How To Play In A Band, a site with useful resources for musicians
• Diary of a Blind Lady is a blog by a friend who documents how she is losing her site, but still manages to laugh
• Brian is also a friend and he's embarking on a new music career. He's into the UK festival scene
• Alexandra is a young lady in the USA who I suspect wants to get into modelling

If you are considering joining Tsu then please do it via one of these people as it will give them a welcome boost. I'm already doing relatively well there.

As always, I welcome any questions.

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.

Tsu is not a scam or a pyramid scheme

Recently Jon Dunn on Tsu pointed out that some Google searches implied that Tsu was a bit dodgy.

I think the other results relate to Texas Southern University.

The definition of a pyramid scheme is that you use money paid in by some people to pay others, so that it will eventually collapse when people realise they will never get paid. It's a scam rather than a business.

I think this idea is due to a misunderstanding of how the Tsu algorithm works. It's true that people get paid based on what those they recruit make, but none of them needs to pay in any money. All the revenue comes from the advertising on the site and in the app (available on Android and iOS). The company is taking 10% to cover their costs, but still has some way to go before they are profitable.

The fact is that people are getting paid just about every day. Some of them post pictures of the cheques they have received to encourage others. The biggest I've seen is this one by songwriter Andrew Fromm.

He's by no means a typical user as his contacts in the music industry means he could recruit people who can easily grow a large network. He has 29,000 followers himself, so he can earn many dollars a week from his own views regardless. I know of many other people who have had hundreds of dollars from Tsu over the eight months since it started.

Personally I've made about $40 and I've given about half of that to charities on the service. There are about forty of those now and they seem to be doing well. The recent Tsu Madness event raised over $1000 that went to a wildlife charity. There are various events such as #FiveCentFriday that encourage regular giving. You can give as little as one cent, so just about anyone can donate.

It's still going to take me a while to get to $100 (threshold for a payout), but before then I may use some of my funds to buy some art from an artist on there. I've said before that the Tsu market has great potential and it seems to be taking off. It just needs a few more features to make life easier for those selling goods and services. The site is still evolving as they find their way.

The fly in the ointment is the fact that Tsu is not growing so fast of late. They have reached around four million users, but public statistics seem to indicate that fewer than 1 in 40 is visiting daily. I know a lot of my child accounts are dormant. Somehow they need to keep people engaged and actively recruiting. I think that some of the newcomers do not understand that they stand to benefit from getting their friends to join up and use the site. There is still massive growth potential, so it will be a long time before new users stand no chance of building a network. I've written about that too.

I'll keep using Tsu because it's fun. There are nice, friendly people there and we have a laugh. If I make a little extra money, then that's a bonus. As always, you can find me at http://www.tsu.co/steevc

Tsuper Powers

Being part of the Tsu Madness tournament has been a very positive experience for me. I had lots of support from people I don't know that got me through the first round, but in the second round I was up against BigFollowing who could muster more votes than me. I still did pretty well considering I'm just a regular user. This campaign has already raised twice as much as last time with over a week to go. The eventual winner gets to decide which charity gets all the money. Of course people are free to donate to any of the charities instead or as well. The scale of the charity donations on Tsu has greatly impressed me. People can choose to publicly display their donations and some are for many dollars.

I have benefited in the tournament by gaining a fair few new followers. I hope some of them will stick with me and engage in some discussion as that's what I'm there for. I also benefited financially as my views were way up and my daily 'monetization' has increased. I've passed on some of that extra money to the Tsu Madness fund.

My Tsu earnings

In my early days at Tsu it looked like I was not going to reach the payout threshold for years, but I've steadily built my following and network over the last 8 months so that it looks like I could get paid this year even if I continue to make charity donations. I do intend to spend some of it buying a picture from an artist who accepts Tsu Dollars as payment. There are a number of companies and individuals doing this now and some are listed on the Tsu Market. As I have said before, there is massive potential for this sort of commerce.

In the long term a large Tsu network of people you have recruited, and their recruits, should give a steady income as the membership increases, I'm starting to see that even though many of the people on my network are inactive. It's obviously good to get in early on this for maximum benefit. I do not consider this a 'multi-level marketing' scam as some critics have accused, Nobody has to pay anything to use the site. All the income is from the advertisers, with the Tsu company taking 10% to keep things running.

People ask how I have managed to gain so many Tsu 'children'. I've gained a lot via the tsumatic site where anyone can advertise their profile link for free. Now that you can make your profile truly public on the web people can review your posts before deciding whether to join up. I hope this will result in less dormant accounts where people only signed up to see what was there.

As always I am open to any questions about my experience on Tsu. I don't claim to be a social media expert, but I will always try to help. Of course you can check out my profile too.

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.

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.

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