Business Model: Selling Subscription Services

Marketing
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This post is to facilitate a discussion about the negative ramifications of such a service.

I was thinking about services such as skype or a chat client that would incur a fee every time the user would PUT data onto the network. And since they would be doing this constantly with a highly variable amount of data month-to-month or day-to-day, what would be the ramifications if a service came along that offered a reoccurring fee?

Say a service requires many PUTs (like a chat client or a forum) and they sold subscriptions on a fixed reoccurring basis? Well first, how would that work?

I was envisioning a type of PUT insurance if you will. The user will be PUTting data onto the network continuously, no doubt about that, but what if the business model was for the company to pay for all of those PUTs? In exchange, the business would charge a fee - monthly, daily, annually, etc - to the user.

In essence, it would be akin to “betting” that the user would not use all of that PUT allowance and end up paying the company more than they would the network. Casual users, but more commonly other companies are quite attracted to this style of business, because it allows them to be lazy[1] and budget appropriately, even though they may be at a disadvantage in the long run. Regardless of the morals of this business model, it is - if the company sets advantageous, calculated prices - profitable. (As anyone who has been in the insurance industry will tell you) While this is a pretty common business model for the centralized internet and centralized infrastructure nowadays, what would it look like on the SAFE Network?

Here are my main concerns: What is the minimum level of access that the company could have to the data being PUT? What is the maximum? How can this break the security of the SAFE Network, while still appearing to conform to it’s values and morals?

[1] Given that the user interfaces of competing clients are seamlessly integrated into the client for payment process, this is still a valid way to go, as people like to see a “dollar amount” up front. It’s not in their best interests, but to them it’s familiar. Why do you think many people now rely on cell phone plans now instead of minutes.

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Is there a problem?

Its a service using an APP that does the PUTs under its account rather than the users and charges a fee to use the APP.

I can see plenty of legit businesses using this to provide services. For instance a house alarm system that is monitored by a security firm. The Firm is paid monthly and all data costs is borne by the firm. Basically a series of IoT devices that run linux & SAFE and communicate to the Firms monitoring systems. The system is maintained and installed by the firm and so the SAFE IDs uses are the Firms, but owned by the customer.

Maybe an art gallery wishes to go online and allow artists to get exposure by displaying a sub-set of their works and patrons pay a “visiting” fee.

Maybe these are not peoples preferred models of operation that they wish to see on the SAFE network, but I do feel that these would have their place in the greater scheme of things.

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Content gets ripped and their toll booth pay wall finds itself competing with after the fact tips on what would be otherwise free. Open access is the highest value here.

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I doubt subscription services will catch on to begin with, once rewards are reduced and total coins are distributed over the 10 year period then maybe but you get rewarded for popularity , say someone is offering a service that charges a small fee, anyone could simply copy exactly what they are doing, offer no subscription and simply earn from the people that view it, which will likely be all the peple refusing to pay and stealing some of the other sites customers.

It does make me think of netflix thou and similar video content services , (this is purely hypothetical but will most likely undoubtedly happen) but if i was to upload literally thousands of tv shows , would that give me a monopoly on those files and prevent anyone from hosting their own show shud they wish to join the network (like netflix) cos i remember reading about some sort of program to deal with replication of files , if someone was to upload them.

It would be pointless to start doing it to begin with , cost while the network is likely gonna be at the lowest size possible in its life , and huge lack of people actually on the network to begin with and i doubt luring people over is gonna be as easy as “here watch these videos you can likely get online anyways anyways on the normal internet”

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These are important questions, but I can’t answer them definitively. Obviously any application handling the user’s unencrypted information (prior to PUT) has access, but I don’t know what arrangement there might be for one party to pay for data being PUT under another’s account. I expect it could be achieved (with 100% security for the user once the data is PUT), but am not sure.

Any application can pretend to be SAFE while doing something else, so I don’t think this model is particularly susceptible able to that. This is one of the things that make open source so important when choosing an application, or failing that, reliable trust and reputation systems for application authors.

There will of course be insecure options, that will be exploited, and we can only protect people from those to a limited extent.

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