Paying users to view ads is not an economic model (ditto paying users to solve CAPTCHAs such as for crypto coin faucets). If it was, many sites would be doing it successfully and teenagers and third world would be employed doing it.
While Chinese consumers are increasingly listening to music on licensed services, the most popular services are free and supported by advertising, generating very little revenue for record companies.
As shown by Information is Beautiful’s updated-for-2015
visualization of the subject, signed artists make .0019 cents per stream on Pandora and .0011 cents per
Spotify stream. The worst payout of all for musicians, however, comes from Youtube, which pays out about .0003 per play. An artist signed to a record label would thus have to have their Youtube video played 4,200,000 times in order to earn the monthly U.S. minimum wage of $1,260.
Pharrell’s ‘Happy’ Streams 43 Million Times, Makes Less Than $3,000
I believe users will happily pay a few pennies (cents) for unlimited streaming plays for each song they like. I believe they will pay even more to download the song as a file which they can do what they want with.
I note even my impoverished filipina gf was willing to spend 2 pesos (about 5 cents) per song for songs she really liked when the local internet cafe refused to let her insert her microSD memory card in the netcafe's computer to download music directly from
youtube-mp3.org.
A subscription model wouldn't work, unless the split of all subscription revenues were subdivided according to aggregate plays, but then that requires songs to be aggregated by a provider who is likely to create unfair policies (i.e. transferring more subscription revenue to signed artists for labels that provide exclusivity so as to further concentrate its captured market) as the provider's market share grows (because they have a captured market a.k.a. walled garden).
In short, only microtransactions would have the crucial End-to-End principle for streaming and downloading music.
They key insight I am making is a very profound one. It concerns the proper design of
decentralized social networking. There can't be orthogonality of services without microtransactions, because otherwise services (e.g. streaming storage) have to bound together with other capabilities (e.g. streaming players) which then creates captured markets and the resultant effects (which was my criticism of the future of Ello):
Economics and game theory seems to be one of my forte or at least interests/hobbies, so let's take a tangent and start by analyzing economically Ello's business model:
"Say you’re a musician or a band, and you want to control multiple accounts from a single login," Budnitz said. "We can charge $2 for that. It’s not for everyone.”
Budnitz says he has seen thousands of emails from users suggesting features for which they would be willing to pay, and Budnitz says plenty are already in the works.
Ello founder Paul Budnitzpaulbudnitz.com
"Let’s say that for a few bucks, you can buy an emoji pack designed by a popular street artist," Budnitz says. "Because of how we've built Ello, it naturally lends itself perfectly to that."
Other hotly suggested features include the ability to browse Ello with inverted colors, turning the screen black and overlaying it with white text. Interestingly enough, the feature saw over 500 requests, mainly from Ello users in Europe and Japan.
And while others have debated how feasible Ello's ad-free business model will work out
[...]
"An advertising-based social network is by its nature, it actually has to do things, because all those things are the things that make it money," Budnitz says. "If we started doing that, everyone would say 'f--- this' and leave — excuse my language."
At the end of the day, Budnitz says keeping Ello sustainable will be a relatively simple feat, given that Ello's business model is inherently different from Facebook's, and that means the costs are different, too.
"There are seven of us running Ello now, with some extra programmers helping us out," said Budnitz. "It is not very hard to run at this scale, and Ello’s getting pretty big. And data is really cheap! I think if you don’t have to have an office building full of people figuring out how to manipulate people into giving you more data, it’s really not that hard to run a network with a ton of people on it."
The problem is that due to centralized control, Ello is putting itself in a position where it has to compete against others who might want certain features which ameloriate other features which Ello has a vested revenue interest. It is simply impossible for a centralized, top-down controller to remain impartial. Some users may want some feature which provides some necessarily benefit to those users but in some other way actually bypasses the need to buy a different feature from Ello. These users presumably won't be free to program a plug-in that destroys Ello's revenue stream, just as no one is allowed to program a App plugin for Facebook which displays advertising.
Ello has just shifted the enslavement problem from ads to paid features.
And their claim of anonymity and defense against national security gag orders is BULLSHIT. They can't guarantee those attributes being a centralized entity. Furgetaboutit.
So right off at the start, we see Ello's principle founder is not thinking clearly or is disingenuous.
Not to mention that a site which charges for features can't scale as well as one that gives everything users want away for free. Nevertheless Facebook and SoundCloud are also restricting and harming
some (but is it significant enough?) users as well, so maybe there is a better balance. Is it Synereo's decentralized design? I will continue the analysis.
I can say with near certainty that unless you offer some compelling feature where all their friends will want to join, users here in the Philippines will not be interested in leaving Facebook where all their friends already are.
Understand from
the upthread guessimates, that
Tsu's and
GetGems' business model is fundamentally flawed (probably also in other ways):
[...]
Just a small glimpse into marketing strategies I am formulating.