As long as it’s all Opt-In then it’s not coercive. If it’s Opt-In advertising and people get paid to view it then the users share in the win with the advertisers. The advertising network itself could be user owned as a DAC or not just as long as the users get paid.
All Advantage was not the only company to do this. Epipo was another example. The business model is called “Pay-to-Surf” and can easily be adopted to the SAFE Network to both market SAFE Network and create an immediate economic ecosystem where users get paid for their attention which they can then use to buy shares in decentralized apps, DACs, or Safecoins.
This would serve a dual purpose of monetization and marketing. You’d gain marketing because SAFE Network would go viral immediately. It would also create as much of an attraction for people to use SAFE Network early on as it would for farmers. Users could actually earn money the more time they spend on SAFE Network.
This could speed up adoption, monetization, lower marketing costs, create additional value for users (especially users for whom $1 an hr is really a lot of money), and for developers because users ultimately have to buy shares in their apps or tokens.
Developers could market by giving free samples per click as well. So for example the first 100 users to click would get the most amount of shares, the next 500 would get some slightly smaller amount, and then everyone who is late to click would get the lowest amount.
Developers could surprise people who click as well with random credits or shares in their product.
The idea is that users who pay the most attention would get the rewards of ownership of free shares in DACs. The users who don’t pay attention or who don’t Opt-In would not be able to receive ads but they also would miss out on the opportunities of winning prizes, shares, or getting paid the minimum $1 an hour rate.
How would one embed this into an autonomous system? Ads need to be controlled, maintained, changed. Money needs to come from somewhere, presumably from the advertisers. But what are they paying into? How? And then my other question would be, $1 an hour is really steep. Figure a million people sign up for this (which is actually a really low projection). This would be paying out a million dollars per hour. That’d be like airing a superbowl spot every 4 hours. And you’re hitting vastly less people than the current methods.
In advertising, the goal is impressions, not clicks. Clicks were invented as a way to trick website owners into believing they were monetizing when in reality the advertisers were getting the impressions, something much more important.
My other fear is the Pay To Surf models have all failed, right? These companies, I thought, all went under. What would be different this go-round?
It’s unlikely that 1 million people will sign up at once but if somehow that did happen then imagine the demand for Safecoin? For the apps? The more users there are the more the market cap would grow so I don’t think 1 million dollars an hour is a lot of money in the big scheme of things. It’s really supply and demand and if people decide they wont view ads then the price should rise in response to the lower supply of eyeballs.
All Advantage paid maybe around the same amount or perhaps a little bit less and those ads didn’t have anywhere near the targeting or click through rates that you’d have on SAFE Network.
The one point you did make is that All Advantage and other similar companies went under. This is true but the reasons they went under had a lot to do with there not being micropayments or cryptocurrency. It had to do with Google and the bursting of the dot com bubble.
Imagine if users owned shares in something similar to All Advantage? Imagine if the whole thing could be run with almost no operating expenses because it’s a DAC? Imagine if there were no expenses for hosting, for any of this?
Also imagine if the demand isn’t likely to go down? At first you will not have a million people so there will be money to pay them. You’re right if 1 million people flooded over night then perhaps there would be a problem paying them but you could always adjust the pay similar to the mechanism that BItcoin uses. If more people want to get paid to surf on SAFE Network then the pay becomes less. Devcoin does it already for writing.
Remember these coins/shares are divisible and can appreciate separately from the dollar. If a lot of people are paying attention then pay rates should go down. So if there are millions of people and advertisers can reach them easily then you don’t really need to pay as much. As things are right now though advertisers have to pay for attention because attention on SAFE Network for ads is going to be expensive and finite due to scarcity.
Whether or not it should be cost per click or cost per impression is up for debate. I’m not a marketing guy but I can see how it could work either way. If I were an advertiser I would want them to go to my site or download my app so I can make my irresistible pitch or give them all a look at my new altcoin. The kind of ads don’t really matter as long as you get people’s consent.
But if there are 1mil users, and the value of safecoin goes up, that doesn’t matter because all of the advertising money will be measured in fiat. The users will have a high-valued currency, yes. But the advertisers are buying the impressions. The value of Safecoin doesn’t matter in this particular case.
I think I’m also just confused at the core idea of the SAFE Network doing this. This can’t be built into a DAC because someone has to control it. It’s not just a market thing. Like, what if I don’t agree with something morally that a company is doing. I want to be able to make a statement by NOT accepting their money. I don’t want an anti-abortion organization’s ad to show up on my show or website. So I just don’t use your service because I want to retain control. And because I don’t want to (the majority of advertisers are like this), then a new market will emerge for a more centralized control of advertising. You know what I mean?
I don’t see how this advertising model is more attractive to consumers or advertisers.
Companies constantly change their policies, so we shoulden’t even think about a “Opt-in paid tracking”. People could end up blaming the Maidsafe network for companies abusing their rights. We completely need to get rid of tracking.
What advertisers want, is to sell products, so they should not be paying for impression or clicks. The old models just don’t work and are absolutely not an indication of what consumers will really do.
What if you ask the consumers the questions that really matter to them?
What product do you need?
In what price range?
When do you need it?
(there is a shoppingcart out there that is allready doing this (find products + compare prices + add discounts + delivery cost), I can’t find it @ the moment)
I’m not talking about traditional companies. The users would own shares in these companies and would only be able to blame themselves.
The idea is that people need the ability to sell their privacy in exchange for income. How do you want to go about facilitating that? Tracking is something that there will be enough demand for that it could make users money.
If you don’t make users money then how would those users buy apps from builders? Do you not see what is missing? You’ve got a lot of ways to take money but the only way to make money is through farming. Farming is just fine but then that money made by farmers has to circulate somewhere and not everyone can be a farmer.
What if you ask the consumers the questions that really matter to them?
What product do you need?
In what price range?
When do you need it?
I’m not talking about “traditional products”. The way it would work is you’ve got some app or some music album for example and you want to get users. You can do this by giving users shares in that app or in that album in exchange for their use of it. But how do they find out that your app even exists without advertisements and how will they discover your album without advertisements?
Tracking is a situation which would offer the users money and convenience in exchange for tracking. It could be set up like as a DAC and utilize Ethereum. You do not need one person to make decisions because you’d have a cooperative which can make decisions on the blockchain.
The community would determine which ads by voting them up or down just like with Reddit. There would be channels which would whitelist or blacklist for certain kinds of ads. The point here is that information has to be collected and users could profit from the process while owning shares in the app which facilitates it.
There will probably be tracking regardless but if it’s a company the users don’t own then none of the benefits from it go to the users. So the idea is some users want to be tracked, want to be paid, and should have the option. Since it’s Opt-In you would have the option not to Opt-In. If you don’t Opt-In then the design of SAFE Network should make you impossible to track.
But think also of Automatic Discounts and here’s another example.
Discounts are better then paying people money for something that they likely won’t even put money into. Here is how smart companies abuse their knowledge/power
Suppose for instance everyone who Opts-In owns shares in the company? Then it’s more like a decentralized autonomous cooperative than a “smart company”. There is no central authority because there is decentralized control. There is democratic decision making by Proof of Stake or some other process which would allow every individual to collectively make decisions.
This would mean only people who join the Opt-In decentralized cooperative would receive any ads, would receive the hourly income rate, would make decisions on what kind of ads, would get the benefits from the companies and builders.
So this would mean if you want to get shares in the apps offered by builders you would have to Opt-In to the cooperative. Ownership of the app is better than some silly discount scheme. If you own the app then whatever profits the decentralized app makes would become part of your income stream.
Users would own the products they use rather than merely receive discounts and it’s that idea which you and Russell aren’t grasping.
Check this out to understand the sort of model I’m talking about but decentralized
The problem with the SAFE Network economic ecosystem is that the users have no income to buy the apps. So unless every user is a builder and farmer where exactly is the income supposed to come from? The users who don’t have computing resources or programming expertise only have their attention and privacy to sell. If they cannot sell these two things then how are they going to have income to buy anything on SAFE Network?
If you don’t see that problem I hope if anything my posts clearly point it out because I highly doubt the vast majority of people on the planet have a fancy computer or programming skills.
It could be structured like Fairshares. The stakeholders must include the users. The users would be like “independent contractors” to the cooperative. These users would be paid to get tracked, fed ads, and give their attention. In essence they would be paid to give up some of their privacy for hourly income.
This is essential because if users cannot make money using SAFE Network there will be nothing to entice users onto SAFE Network from the web where users can make money through micropayments. So the problem to solve here is that we need to figure out a way that every user can make money.
What is the one thing that every user has that everyone wants? Attention. What is something else that corporations want? Private information.
One way or another the users of SAFE Network are going to have to be paid for their attention and private information. So it’s important to figure out how to facilitate it in a way which allows users to own shares in the cooperative which facilitates it. This means there should be no central control.
There are many ways to do it as a DAC or as a market. For example individuals could literally auction their attention or “mindshare” to the world. This would turn their attention into a currency and force corporations to pay them to click on their link directly by attaching some money to it.
The other way to do it is the way I mentioned which is a decentralized autonomous cooperative. In either case you’re not going to be able to stop it from happening so you only get to choose how it is done. Hackers will steal the private information from users who are less sophisticated if it’s too scarce so you do need a way to make certain kinds of information less scarce while at the same time allowing people to control what information gets sold and for how much.
SAFE Network is going to need users. Users need a way to earn as well as to spend on the SAFE Network or the economy will fall apart. How do you help users to earn? Give them shares in your decentralized app as a reward for using it earlier and more often than others.
Thanks for the link to the Fairshares_model, because it gave me some new insight. You make a really good point that Maidsafe needs to offer more options for people who are not farmers or builders. Let alone people who don’t have a computer or internet. In the future it will be possible to integrate Maidsafe in televisions and have people scrolling through pages with a remote controller. The people who only have features phone, are not completely lost either, they could still receive money through sms. It would even be better, if phone traffic could go through Maidsafe and be free of charge for people located in a certain neighbourhood. In the future we will have a real big problem with proof of unique human. Especially if your service are only online. People and how they think, is something that is allready well documented. What is to stop a Facebook, Google or somebodyelse from launching botnets/AI’s to become users? If you would be paying $1 per hour, you would be making an imposter rich instead of the poor people that you had in mind.
Why I say to offer people discounts, has two reasons, that way you don’t just give them (or it) money to participate and by letting someone pay for a product before they get a discount, you can make sure that they really spend money on your product. Drones will also be important in the future to identify “REAL PEOPLE” on delivery of their product. In sucha way what you said makes perfect sense. I also got to admit that your “Opt-in paid tracking” will be valuable to some people (sorry i was speaking from my personal idea of tracking). There was this article that people would even install software without knowing/caring if it was mallware if they got paid for it, so yeah you make a really GOOD POINT. I don’t see shares of a company helping out the poor people, unless a company would offer them monthly payments for participating.
Maidsafe does give a lot of company running on it SUPERPOWERS, imagine to not paying for hosting anymore, because yourself hosting your website. Through Maidsafe companies can have a whole different set up, how they do business. A Facebook could just offer users a monthly payment, because the sheer numbers of users, bring advertisers, which makes Facebook money and the circle is complete. What would be real nice, is if everybody that signsup would automatically get an account and receive the profit of that month, split up automatically to their accounts. A company could basically have layers of accountholder
Builders (30%)
Farmers (30%)
Users (30%)
Read on to know where the (10%) will go (to my bank account and I will buy a private jet and Yacht)
We need to put up something like localbitcoins.com that way users could also make a little money. Maybe the DAC should have a [10% DONATION] programmed into it for the real poor people. This [10% DONATION] would ONLY go to TRANSPARANT ORGs like Seans Outpost. One of many problems that poor people got is that a “Opt-in paid tracking” might not work for them, because companies could think that they are poor so have no money to buy products. If they could receive funds just to be a user, would bring us back the issue I mentioned earlier. (Yeah I know what I said “Maidsafe does give a lot of company running on it SUPERPOWERS”, it’s because I see it allready, this company is Powered by Maidsafe"
The holy grail would be to find a solution to the Proof of Unique Human problem. Find that and everything could work.
The main problem I see for users is the users need income. It’s like if no one had any income in society how would anyone buy your products? It’s that problem on the SAFE Network until we find a way to solve it.
I think you’re right that for certain things bots could become a problem and I don’t have a solution for this yet. Captcha ? Face recognition? This is an area of research which should receive dramatically more attention because it is critical to have a fully functioning biometrics capability which can be accessed by anyone. I’ve given some ideas for approaches but it remains unsolved.
Why I say to offer people discounts, has two reasons, that way you don’t just give them (or it) money to participate and by letting someone pay for a product before they get a discount, you can make sure that they really spend money on your product.
This has pros and cons. Why not give all three? Users earn shares and credit coins. Credit coins are always redeemed at a discount to any other currency so as long as your credit coins are in circulation people will have to redeem them for your products.
But the individual user who received the credit coin might not be the same user who redeems it. Ultimately the credit coins would be traded around in a market allowing everyone to get a coin for whatever they desire.
Drones will also be important in the future to identify “REAL PEOPLE” on delivery of their product. In sucha way what you said makes perfect sense. I also got to admit that your “Opt-in paid tracking” will be valuable to some people (sorry i was speaking from my personal idea of tracking). There was this article that people would even install software without knowing/caring if it was mallware if they got paid for it, so yeah you make a really GOOD POINT. I don’t see shares of a company helping out the poor people, unless a company would offer them monthly payments for participating.
Wealth isn’t money. Resources are wealth. Poor people must have assets. Shares are assets.
Shares can appreciate in value. Safecoin themselves are a hybrid between a share and commodity currency. Safecoins represent the real wealth which is the computing resources.
So rather than designating by class (rich and poor), I see the demographics as “farmers” “users” and “builders”, where any individual could be any combination of the three. It’s a heterarchical network rather than a hierarchical bipolar class based network as you’re thinking about it.
Builders (30%)
Farmers (30%)
Users (30%) ← critical for critical mass!
Wealth on SAFE Network are shares/tokens in decentralized applications. I’m not talking about the legal stocks where you’ve got some contract but the sort of shares/tokens which can be traded and redeemed. DACs and DAps don’t require hierarchy. The shareholders own it and the users in my opinion should be among the shareholders.
The role of the users if it’s voting shares is they could vote for features, they could get paid by dividends (if it’s not regulated), and these shares in DAps can be used by the users as collateral to lend their own currencies into existence backed by their shares. So for this reason it’s critical that users are shareholders.
One of many problems that poor people got is that a “Opt-in paid tracking” might not work for them, because companies could think that they are poor so have no money to buy products.
This is why there has to be income streams and one possible income stream is Opt-In paid tracking. Saying they have no money when they have shares doesn’t make any sense. If you give them shares in decentralized applications it’s better than giving them money. If you give them shares it’s better than giving them charity as cash which will just get spent up.
The idea is to bring users into the ecosystem so that users are part of the ecosystem itself. The user must have income or the economy will never grow. Imagine having a global economy with no middle class where it’s just industrialists and computers?
And as it scales you know farming is going to become more centralized. Google and others can get involved in it and sooner or later you’ll have the problem of the users not having any means to earn money to buy shares, tokens or anything else.
So the only way to bootstrap the economy that I see is to make users part of the decentralized autonomous corporation or decentralized applications themselves. You do this by designing the DACs to form a symbiotic relationship similar to what you see with Fairshares.
There should be no distinguishing between class, race, gender or any of that. The user is the best and most accurate definition for the role in the network. The user exists to buy stuff from merchants and to use apps that the builders make. Builders want attention from users and can pay for it by offering shares which turn the users into partners who promote the DAC.
So if we know that the wealth will be the shares in the decentralized applications then one way for the DAC or DAp developers to market themselves is to reward users with free shares. It would be no different from mining where the users who discover the apps first get the most free shares while the people who discover the app last get the least. To make the users test the software out you also would have to figure out a way to measure frequency of use which would require collecting statistics of some sort.
But if you can do this then you could set it up so that attention itself is like a commodity currency which buys a stake. The deal to the users would go something like this: “Give our product your attention ASAP, test it out by frequent use, and the more you do this the more shares you get. These are voting shares which allow you to vote on features”.
Overnight you would have thousands of people from the community flooding into SAFE Network to be QA testers/users. You could also reward shares for users who find bugs/exploits so that hackers have something positive to do.
Shares would be better than anything else to motivate people because it’s a real asset unlike cash which becomes less valuable with time. There is no reason why people would kick through doors or stay up all night waiting on some cash payment but if it’s a stock payment in what could be the next big thing then the behavior is different.