Daniel, can you please answer the following questions:
Is what you have been calling the Attention Economy currently the "GetGems Advertising" group?
Yes, it's currently the "GetGems Advertising" group that users can opt-out and other groups that users can opt-in such as the "Cryptocurrency News" group. We're discussing AE features that users will be willing to pay gems for at this point of growth. Suggestions are more than welcome.
When did co-founder Eitan Rousso leave the company, and what was the reason for his departure?
Eitan was working at Wix during the initial sell, his goal was to leave Wix and join GetGems full-time if the sell was successful. After the sell, Eitan made a decision not to leave Wix due to personal reasons.
Is PayKey a separate business entity?
No
Do you have a commitment to fund Getgems with PayKey's profits?
The commitment was to work on achieving the milestones. Success of PayKey will help keep the business entity operational and we will be able to continue developing and supporting GetGems.
Are you hiring people to specifically work on PayKey?
If we succeed in raising VC funds, than yes.
Sorry but how is this AE is any close to this :
Potential Advertising Models for Gems
The top monetization tool for social networks is targeted ads. Giants like Google and Facebook derive the majority of their revenue from ads. The Gems team is experimenting with several advertising models:
•Paying to send personal unsolicited messages. One of the main problems of any communications platform is spam. The fact that communication is constantly becoming cheaper enables spammers to send bulk messages to unwilling recipients. The common approach to spam is heuristics-based flagging and filtering (this is how Gmail works). The problem is that this method is extremely inaccurate and only works well if the same exact spam message is duplicated thousands of times. Users resort to hiding their personal address in order to avoid receiving spam. Consider what would happen if a celebrity like Oprah would publicly share her personal email. No spam-prevention algorithm would be able to handle it.
In a world where the spam problem has been solved, there would be no need to hide your address. Everybody’s personal address would be public and we would no longer rely on secrecy to stop abuse. If you think about it, every major personal communication platform—such as email, phone, SMS, and WhatsApp—fails at this point.
Why do we hate spam so much? The answer is basic economics. Reading incoming messages is time consuming, and our time is a valuable resource. The straightforward solution is, therefore, basic economics. If consuming messages is expensive, sending them should be expensive as well.
By placing a gem price tag on sending personal unsolicited messages, we can guarantee that users pay for the right to contact you. It’s important to emphasize that messages sent between friends (approved contacts) are not considered unsolicited, since recipients have explicitly agreed to receive messages from these senders. Within the Gems network, sending messages between friends will always be free.
How expensive should sending an unsolicited message be? The natural answer here is also to rely on basic economic principles. The more popular the recipient, the more expensive it should be to contact them. This concept is employed in the bidding system that Google uses for their adwords platforms where every advertiser enters a bid for how much they agree to pay for a click. Roughly speaking, the system displays the highest bids, making popular keywords more expensive because people are willing to pay more for them. Borrowing this principle for our model, we can decide on the number of unsolicited messages a recipient will receive over a period of time, and take the highest bids from competing senders.
It might be a good idea to make this an opt-out mechanism. If a user is willing to receive unsolicited messages, they should be able to allow strangers to message them for free.
Read receipts could be another interesting feature of this mechanism. The sender of an unsolicited message would probably be interested in knowing whether the recipient reads the message.
•Paying to send private message ads. Unlike unsolicited messages, which are personal in nature (such as introducing yourself to a beautiful girl and asking whether she’s single), ads are commercial in nature.
The central distribution channel in Gems is instant messaging. Private message ads will appear in the incoming-message screen next to messages you receive from your contacts. These messages will be marked as promotions, so recipients can differentiate them from personal messages. The promotion tab in Gmail provides a popular example of this advertising format, where users receive promotional emails from advertisers directly into their inbox.
Targeted advertising is key for maximizing the effectiveness of ads. Keeping ads relevant makes both the viewer and the advertiser happy. Advertisers will not choose a specific list of recipients to receive their ads, but they will define relevancy criteria for the target audience. The criteria may be based on content, similar to how Google AdWords works; i.e., showing an engagement ring ad to users interested in buying one. Criteria can also be based on an audience profile, similar to how Facebook ads work; i.e., by showing an engagement ring ad to single males between the ages of 20 and 25.
Employing content based targeting within Gems is largely a privacy issue. Platforms such as Gmail anonymously analyze the content of exchanged messages and attempt to match relevant ads based on keyword similarities. This function can be performed automatically within Gems, but only on non-secure messages. Secure messages are encrypted client to client and end to end, and the Gems infrastructure cannot decipher them. In addition, the user should be allowed to opt out of content analysis in order to maintain privacy.
Profile-based targeting within Gems is even more tricky. The Gems network does not require users to fill in profile information. An interesting potential solution is to let users provide a voluntary profile by answering questions that will help Gems deliver relevant content (for example, “What is your age?”). To encourage users to give more details, the network can compensate them with gems for doing so. A natural way to implement this would be to give the ad recipient a portion of the ad revenues paid by the advertiser. We could even make the payout proportional to the amount of provided profile data. Some profile data could also be generated automatically, but usually at the expense of privacy. A good example would be geolocation. If the user agrees to share his or her location with the app, we will be able to use the data to show local ads. It is important to emphasize that profile data will never be shared with advertisers and it will only be used anonymously so the network can deliver relevant ads.
The cost of advertising should probably be based on bids as well. The size of the target audience is limited to the number of participating users who fit the ad criteria, so only ads with the highest bids will be shown. Another interesting question is whether these ads will be paid per exposure, or per click (an advertiser only pays if a user opens their message and reads it). If we choose the latter, we could maximize network profit by factoring in both the amount of the ad bid and the rate of successful click-throughs from previous exposures, and choose accordingly which ads to display.
•Paying for priority messages. Quality of service (QoS) is an interesting factor worth exploring for monetization purposes. Consider the real-world example of package shipments. A free-shipping method usually involves a standard service such as USPS, which takes a little longer to deliver and offers less control over tracking and delivery status. The shipper can pay extra to use a premium shipping service such as FedEx, which arrives much faster and is generally more reliable.
Borrowing from this example, users of the Gems ecosystem will pay for sending messages of a higher priority. Delivery speed and reliability are probably not necessary aspects to consider, because standard free messages on Gems will always arrive virtually immediately and be extremely reliable.
So what aspects can we use instead? One option is to sort the order of incoming messages. Normally, incoming messages are sorted according to arrival time. High-priority messages would always appear first, regardless of the order in which they were received. Another option would be to highlight high-priority messages to mark them for special consideration. This could be achieved by using a more prominent notification sound, or by using bolder colors or urgency icons with the messages in the incoming list. Another option would be to send several push notifications to announce a high priority message, until the recipient opens it (instead of just a single notification, as with normal messages). We could also provide tighter control over delivery indications and notify the sender as soon as the recipient has opened the high-priority message. Alternatively, we could display priority messages inline within the incoming-message list, meaning the recipient will not have to click on them in order to read their content.
Generally speaking, if recipients are aware that an incoming message was paid for, they will be more inclined to open and handle it in a timely fashion.
•Paying for a sponsored appearance in the contact list. The Gems user profile will potentially include a status message. Every user can write his or her own status line, which is very similar in concept to a Facebook or WhatsApp status. This status line will appear below every username in the contact list and user directory.
The status line is an excellent platform for a quick, one-line advertisement. Consider the following use case. In a startup company looking for new developers, a member of the startup could set his status to say “looking for talented iOS and Android developers” and he could invite his contacts to message him about any potential applicants they may know.
It makes sense that these appearances be sponsored as well. A sponsored result could appear first in contact lists (and be labeled as sponsored). We might also show sponsored results that aren’t related to direct contacts. For example, even if I don’t personally know the startup member who advertises for a developer, I will still see their sponsored result when I enter my contacts screen, or when I search in the user directory.
Keeping advertisements relevant is similar in nature to previous channels, such as targeting by content and targeting by profile. In addition, another interesting criteria is the distance between users (hop count or connection degree - 1st degree are immediate friends, 2nd degree are friends of friends, etc). It makes sense to show sponsored statuses from users who travel in similar circles.
Paying for a commercial company page / e-commerce. The traditional entities within the Gems network are private individuals. Any user can join Gems and connect with their friends. Just like how Facebook grew to accommodate businesses as an entity within the network, Gems might make the same decision as well. Registering a new user as a commercial entity / business is a good candidate for a paid action.
How will company / business users be different from regular users? First of all, the profile page will have a commercial orientation and show relevant details about the business - such as an address / map location, website, logo, phone number, email, link to mobile app, opening hours, etc. In addition, business users will be geared towards e-commerce. Since the Gems network allows for easy fund transfers between users, it will be convenient to use for light e-commerce (1-click purchases).
Deeper ecommerce capabilities will allow businesses to present a goods/services catalog, support checkout with Gems and provide light order management.
I didnt get my reward...