Tuesday, December 9, 2014

Exclusive: Tsu Launches as First Social & Payment Platform Where Users Own Their Content

FacebookTwitter, and their investors may be profiting from user-generated content, but there's one person that's not: the user himself, who sees all the money from targeted ads (how did they know I was looking at those Ugg boots on Zappos?) go directly to those companies. But today (Oct. 21) sees the public launch of a new social media platform with an algorithm that re-distributes ad sales revenue directly to the source. 
Tsu advertises itself as the first combined social network and payment platform that lets users maintain ownership of the content they post. Like Ello, another recently launched innovative "anti-Facebook," it's free and invite-only -- but tsu seems to have a more sustainable premise and business model than the slightly more utopian Ello, which eschews ads altogether but also may be on the wanefollowing its launch in late September.
“Established social networks have built amazing business models prospering on the total monetization of free user-generated content,” says tsu founder Sebastian Sobczak. “Why should anyone commercially benefit from someone else’s image, likeness and work giving no financial return to the owner? The markets we participate in are enormous, growing and can materially compensate each user -- we’re simply and uniquely rewarding the users who are doing all the work. This is the way the world should work.”
At first blush, the world of tsu works in much the same way as any other social media network. Ad revenue is generated from page views, except in this case, only 10 percent of the money generated goes to tsu. Of the rest, fifty percent goes to the profile owner/content creator -- let's call him John Smith -- and the other 50 percent goes to the network that brought that particular user to the network, and that's where it gets complicated.
That 50 percent propagates by an infinite series of thirds up a "family tree," starting with Smith, otherwise known as a "child." The person who invited him to tsu, his "parent," receives a third. The person who invited the parent, the "grandparent," receives a third of that third. Tsu's pay-it-forward algorithm that distributes these funds is based on their invite-only principle. 
The analytics page shows which of Smith's posts and shares received the most views and thus generated the most revenue via his profile page's targeted ads. Once a user accumulates $100 in their "bank account," they can cash it in. There's also a peer-to-peer payment system similar to Venmo, and users can also donate anything in their bank account to a charity that is also on the network, like George Michael's arts nonprofit the Goss-Michael Foundation. 
Other launch partners include LeAnn Rimes, 50 Cent, and DJ Afrojack on the musical side; athletes like Miami Heat's Luol Deng, U.S. track and field Olympian Doc Patton; and organizations such as Environmental Media Association and hospitality and entertainment company SBE Entertainment. Funding firm Sancus Capital Prive backed tsu's $7 million funding round
source:billboard.com

Tuesday, November 25, 2014

Benefit of tsu

Benefits

  1. Tsu serves the need of musicians, athletes, celebrities, photographers and every day content creators who want to monetize their social media presence.
  2. Tsu offers an alternative for finding and socializing with people who have similar interests.

About Sebastian Sobczak

Founder of tsu
Studied at Columbia University
University of Chicago Booth School of Business.
Sebastian is great leader and visionary and his new venture Tsu will change the way people think and use social networks.
The company was founded in 2013 by Sebastian Sobczak, Drew Ginsburg, Thibault Boullenger and Jonathan Lewin. The group received a $7 million investment led by Sancus Capital Prive. Their headquarters are in New York.

The Social Network That Pays You to Friend




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Asked about the inspiration for Tsu, the social network he’s just launched, Sebastian Sobczak doesn’t immediately mention Facebook or Twitter. Instead, he talks about Ed O’Bannon.
Mr. O’Bannon, a former U.C.L.A. basketball player, sued to challenge N.C.A.A. rules banning athletes from making money from their own images — in August, the Supreme Court decided in his favor. And for Mr. Sobczak, he’s a sort of personification of Tsu’s ethos: People should get paid for the content they produce.
While Facebook and Twitter have been criticized for failing to share their profits with those who post on their platforms, Tsu pledges to do just that: It will give 90 percent of its ad revenue back to users.
Tsu’s philosophy is that “all content creators, which is basically every social user, should receive royalties for the commercial use of their image, likeness and work,” Mr. Sobczak told Op-Talk. “They essentially do all the work, they should get rewarded with the lion’s share.”
“What people don’t realize is how much value is created by these platforms on the backs of basically everybody’s networking,” he said.
“It’s the exact analogy to the N.C.A.A. If the N.C.A.A.’s going to be paid hundreds of millions of dollars by gaming companies using Tim Tebow or Ed O’Bannon,” he added, then “you gotta pay the guys!”
Tsu plans to pay users not only for its content, but also for its ability to bring in more people. Each user gets a unique code that allows him or her to invite others to the site. And after Tsu takes its 10 percent cut, it gives half of each post’s revenue to the user who posted it — the remainder gets divided up among the users that person invited, the users those users invited, and so on, the share diminishing with each remove from the original poster. So even if your posts aren’t generating much revenue, or if you’re not posting much, you can still make some money from the posts of the people you know. “If you brought value to the system” by inviting someone whose posts get a lot of attention, said Mr. Sobczak, “you’re actually rewarded for that.”
He believes paying users will benefit Tsu as well: “We’re everybody’s kind of de facto payment platform that is giving them purchasing power for their data, their content and their network. That’s very powerful.” Becoming a payment platform would allow the company to go beyond merely selling ads, he added. “I would rather play in the peer-to-peer credit and merchant services markets, because that’s 10 times a larger market than just digital advertising and mobile advertising markets.” He imagines Tsu potentially becoming “the people’s global banker.”
It’s not the first time a social network has paid users. At ReCode, Kurt Wagner notes that “Bubblews, a social network founded in 2012 with a similar mindset, pays users when the content they share generates engagement like comments or Likes.”
But such revenue-sharing is by no means mainstream, and some have taken the major social networks to task for what they say is exploitation of users’ time and energy.
The artist Laurel Ptak writes in her much-discussed piece, “Wages for Facebook”: “They say it’s friendship. We say it’s unwaged work. With every like, chat, tag or poke our subjectivity turns them a profit.” And on her website, she asks:
“In 2012 Facebook reached more than 1 billion users and generated a revenue of 5.1 billion dollars. It is the first social-media website to be traded on the stock exchange wherein all content on its site is created by its usersIs what we do on Facebook work? How would we calculate our value? What could an alternate form of social media, based on an idea of the commons or a feminist praxis, look like?”
Astra Taylor describes a similar concern in her book “The People’s Platform.” “A frustrated minority,” she writes, “have complained that we are living in a world of ‘digital feudalism,’ where sites like Facebook and Tumblr offer up land for content providers to work while platform owners expropriate value with impunity and, if you read the fine print, stake unprecedented claim over users’ creations.” She quotes Marina Gorbis of the Institute for the Future:
“We, the armies of digital peasants, scramble for subsistence in digital manor economies, lucky to receive scraps of ad dollars here and there, but mostly getting by, sometimes happily, on social rewards — fun, social connections, online reputations. But when the commons are sold or traded on Wall Street, the vast disparities between us, the peasants, and them, the lords, become more obvious and more objectionable.”
Can Tsu be the more communal social network critics are looking for? Brooke Duffy, a professor of media and communication who has studied women’s digital-media behavior, has doubts. “I understand the appeal and I certainly understand the buzz of it,” she told Op-Talk. “I think the problem is, if it gets a critical mass — and I think that’s a big if — who’s actually going to be benefitting?”
Her prediction: “I think what we’ll end up seeing is the same kind of social media influencers that are already getting compensated for their work are the ones that are ultimately going to benefit from this.” Those who have already amassed large followings on other social-media platforms, she argued, may have the easiest time earning money on Tsu.
Some may be able to use Tsu to gain lots of followers from scratch: “There’s always the handful who rise to the top,” she said. “But is this going to radically redefine the compensation model of social network content creation? I’m pretty skeptical of it.”
“There’s a great deal of enthusiasm for whatever the next big social network is,” she added, “and there’s always these hopes that we can identify the next big thing. But I think in all of these cases it tends to be a very small number of people that actually benefit from the contributions of the many.” Those who benefit are those who get in early, but “also people who have the time and income to actually work to grow this audience base.”
“Something that gets swept aside,” she said, “is the level of economic and social capital people need to even get started.”
Mr. Sobczak is more optimistic about users’ chances of making significant money on Tsu. “The monetization is for everybody,” he said, “that’s the beauty of it.”
“Talk to some of these kids out there, they have 5,000 Facebook friends,” he said. He estimated that bringing in 100 friends could make a user thousands of dollars annually. And, he said, “It’s not a zero-sum game: the more people that join, the more ad revenue, and the higher the rate.”
He said the user base was growing rapidly — “we’ve been in the several thousands of requests per second.” One recent adopter: Ed O’Bannon.
Quick Register:
https://www.tsu.co/quickregister 

Meet kevin Hinkle First Man Get 100$ Check "The First tsu $100 Check Redemption"

On November 12th, Tsu member Kevin Hinkle became the very first person to earn and redeem $100 on tsu’s new social network. 

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In a youtube video release, Mr. Hinkle shared his experience claiming the first $100 in earned ad royalties after just 29 days since joining the network.
He claims that although he was skeptical of tsuat first, he says “he started to see it all coming together” and then proceeded to spend the next few weeks, 10 – 12 hours a day, building a large following.
His accomplishments are quite significant, with almost 14,000 followers and 5,000 friends in less than a month. It is reported that he has received well over 1 million page views on his social updates on tsu during that same time period.
Kevin Hinkle is a Joyologist who launched a website called The GraceVine in 2012 focused on his finished work of Christ Consciousness and helping people transform their bodies and minds through Nutrition, life coaching, relationship counseling, and wellness.
First 100$ Redemption Video

New social network Tsu signs one million users in just five weeks

New social network Tsu signs one million users in just five weeks

Summary: Tsu has been celebrating passing its one millionth user. But what is so different about the social media platform that has so many users flocking to sign up?
New social network Tsu has experienced explosive growth since it came out of stealth mode in October 2014. On Thursday the site posted that it had reached the milestone of one million users.

New social network Tsu signs one million users in five weeks ZDNet
Image: Anthony Long / Tsu

This is an amazing achievement for a relatively unknown social network to reach in five weeks. Social networking behemoth Facebook took ten months to reach one million users on its platform. Tsu’s global rank on Alexa, the measure of how popular the site is, has climbed from below 11,000 in October to 5,000 today.
So how has Tsu achieved this growth? The network grows by word of mouth. Its existing users reach out across their social networks to find new users who create accounts in the network.
You need to have an invite code from another user. The website http://Tsu.co will ask users for a code.  http://www.tsu.co/quickregister will enable you to create your own Tsu account as you are accessing the site through an existing Tsu user.
This creates a network of users. Influential users recruit more users to the site which enables Tsu to see who are the most influential in its network. It can mine the relationships between its users to build up a comprehensive network of relationships.
It is the relationship and engagement between users in each user’s own network on Tsu that enable royalties from ad revenue to be created. Users share posts with their network and more ad impressions are made resulting in revenue for the platform.
Tsu has positioned itself as a socially responsive social network. It distributes 90 percent of its royalties gained through ad revenue to its content creators and their networks.
It also encourages users to donate their royalties to charities by using the “Transfer Funds” button on each user's wall.
Founder and CEO Sebastian Sobczak says that Tsu is the “first socially responsible social network ... paying content royalties for the commercial use of content creators’ likeness, image and work”.
Sobczak wants to “collaboratively change the lives of people for the better with these new found royalty streams”.
He donated $100 of his royalties to the non-profit organisation Charity Water, one of the first charities to benefit from peer to peer royalty transfers on Tsu.
Charities can easily set up a page on Tsu and check the box to accept peer payments from other Tsu users.
Currently the platform can only issue checks in US dollars. Hopefully there will be mechanisms in place in the future to pay out to charities across the world in their own local currencies. The team have not yet been able to confirm that this will happen.
Gaining one million users in just over a month is an achievement in itself. Encouraging users to redistribute their earnings by giving to charity is a noble thing to do.
My first months' activities on Tsu have earned me more royalties than I earned during seven years of social activities on either Twitter or Facebook. Perhaps your activities will too.

The Content You Share has Value

Yes, as a user on social media platforms, your content and interactions are valuable. On tsū, you will get paid for your content. Half of your earned revenue is in the form of royalties generated by the content you post. Sharing content on tsū is as simple as any other social platform. Sign up, post your status, photos, or videos to your page, and engage with your friends as little or as often as you’d like.
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