Post
Topic
Board Altcoin Discussion
Re: Technology vs. Marketing. Which is more important?
by
TPTB_need_war
on 24/01/2016, 05:09:42 UTC
Thus I have concluded that in most scenarios the consumers of interactive media have no use for crypto currency.

Is it possible to create interactive media where some of the participants (maybe providers of content or interaction) are motivated primarily by economic income (or a combination of the holistic benefits and income)? What are the examples out there already in cyberspace? The examples that come to my mind seem very limited in participation, e.g. live nude chat, typing job, creative job such as graphic arts or writing. Are there any music distribution sites where the providers of content are being paid by the consumers of content? Isn't it so competitive to get your music heard, that you must not charge for it?

Can anyone comment?

There are many people who create content for YouTube with the primary goal of income generation (through advertising revenue share) and countless other examples. In many cases the platform owner (in this case Google/YouTube) captures the lions share of the profits. Micro transactions (tipping income instead of ads) could help provide more income for the content generators in such situations assuming the infrastructure was built to easier facilitate it. Users would benefit (from voluntary tipping) by not being forced to watch as many advertisements.

You might not be aware that I also proposed this idea in my vaporcoin thread.

Please read again the links I provided upthread on why the cognitive/effort load of paying in small morsels is hated by humans.

I am believing in the concept that content producers want to earn an income. I am not believing in the concept that users want a pay-per-view model for enjoying videos. It appears to me that Google is experimenting with just how frequently they can push ads on viewers without causing attrition. I agree the ads are annoying, but I don't think that per-per-view is going to work for an activity that people simply want to enjoy. Even if you asked people to knowingly pay $5 a month a month to avoid ads, I think they would not bother to switch from Youtube. Google would moderate the ads sufficiently so that the incentive to switch would be diminished.

I think rather the incentive is on the content provider side as you said, Google is taking the lions share of the revenue, but also bear in mind they have the lions share of the web traffic.

Again a chicken-and-egg dilemma and additionally the problem that users won't pay-per-view. I think I may know how to solve the latter issue, but the former issue is very challenging to conquer. Even if you assume users will agree to have their microtransaction balance automatically deducted some microcents for each video viewed, you still have the initial problem of how to distribute the currency into their hands in the first place. If they have to go buy it on an exchange, that kills adoption right there. Even if you could sell the coin for credit card or Paypal, it still would cause a huge attrition rate.

A third problem is that the value users are willing to transfer for watching a video may be much less than the advertising revenue that could be generated. Typically afaik ~$10 CPM, that is 1 cents per video viewed for each ad on the page.

Are you going to pay $1 for each 10 - 100 videos you view so there will be no ads on the page?

The video ads are the most disruptive (unlike banner ads) but they also probably pay a much higher CPM. I haven't researched that though.

Edit: also ideally you would feel better if you only have to pay once and can own viewing rights to that video forever. And you would feel better to pay for what you know in advance will be quality content. A potential difference between YouTube and music, is if you could trial music for negligible cost then you may pay more when you are sure you want to own the song for unlimited future listening. Whereas, for video we typically watch most videos only once. Music doesn't require our total attention, so it can coexist with doing other activities and thus can be replayed in more circumstances. Video demands our complete attention which is perhaps why advertising is more lucrative for videos (I am assuming, not sure  about that).