Your time is their money- Why everyone should be paid for their social media time?
He created many social networking sites, 4 to be exact. However, none of them got very popular. All of these failures taught him many lessons along the way and every next website that he created was better than the previous one in terms of UX and business model. He always took every failure as a positive lesson, and his every idea was always naturally in the same domain i.e. Social Media and networking. He always had trouble finding partners or investors in the name of social media concept as no one wanted to work on yet-another-social-network because almost everyone thought it quite become a thing of past.
Despite all that, he got ready again and started thinking about an idea for his next venture. He wanted to come up with a solid idea that would provide a real value to people and would solve some real-world problem. During his research on the "problem statement", he found that money is the root cause of most of the major problems in the world which is not a new finding as everyone already knows that. He wondered, could there be any simpler and effective way for people to make money? There are of course a lot of ways for making money, such as jobs, business, acting, farming, politics, labouring etc, however, all of these ways require education, hard work, money, talent etc. Is there still any easier way to make money? There are many unemployed people in country like India. He realised that unemployed people have one thing in plenty that is TIME. While employed people still have time but not in plenty. There is a popular saying that Time is Money. It made him think that if time is money, how can we make that saying come true for both types of those people (the ones with plenty of free time and the ones with comparatively little free time) without having them to work hard or be talented?
These days, almost everyone uses smartphone. Internet access has also become much much cheaper. So, almost everyone uses internet and is likely be using some type of social media website, such as Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, Quora, Snapchat, Watsapp, etc. So, everyone with internet access spends TIME on those platforms but, do they get any money out of the time they spend there? Why not? And can there be a way to make money when you're spending your time on any of those platforms? Is TIME not money? Yes time is money but why you're not getting it? Shouldn't you?
You might say "no", because you use those platforms for your own purposes, maybe to connect with friends, to entertain yourself, to gain information etc. You are not working hard when you use those platforms and they are more like a source of amusement for you. And so, you don't expect to be paid, which is fine. Now you can also say that we spend time in other activities too such as playing, sleeping, walking, shopping etc so shouldn't we also get paid for time spent there as well, if time is so money. So of course you can not apply phrase "Time is Money" to everywhere but when it comes to those internet based platform, you can and you should and in fact, you deserve the money for the time you spend there. But why?
When you spend time say on Quora or Facebook, you keep scrolling down on the page to see more answers/stories etc. Along the way, you also see couple of ads or promoted stories in your feed. You see the ad and Quora or Facebook gets paid for the impression/view. You click the ad and Quora or Facebook gets paid for the click. Even that is very little amount of money that you don't even care about but even if it's that little, wouldn't it be better if it came to you instead of that site? These tiny amounts of money will add up to a big amount as you spend more and more time on those platforms. Which means that money is being made out of the time that you spend there but you're not the one who gets it. So, you see, time is money when you spend time on such ad-based platforms, though you never get the money.
And yes, these companies don't charge any money directly from you and are completely free to use. And yes, they need to run ads to sustain themselves, pay for servers and employees etc. And agreeing to seeing ads is the least you can do to avail their awesome services for free. The giant internet companies such as Google or Facebook, whose major part of revenue comes from selling the ads, are undoubtedly doing a great job in terms of the quality and value of the services they provide for free.
However, their ad-based business model ends up paying them much more money than they need. The advertisers pay lots of money to run the ads on those platforms. That's the reason why these companies have grown to be so large and are worth hundreds of billions of dollars. In an ideal world, there is huge room for these companies for sharing the revenue they generate through ads with the end users who actually spend their time and engage with the ads being sponsored by third party advertisers. These companies end up making excessive amount of money and become unnecessarily rich with their top order employees getting paid millions of dollars per month and all of it made possible because of the time you spend and contributions you make on their platforms. Even a tiny amount of that money when shared with needy will actually make world a much better place. But no, these huge amounts of money rot in the bank accounts of those people while rest of the world suffers from unemployment and hunger.
If these companies were really good enough and were not blinded by the greed, they would have thought about sharing a percentage of the ad-revenue with the end users. Can't they let all the money go the end user directly who engage with the ads and then take a part of the money generated by the end user as service fee? Wouldn't it be a win-win situations for all the parties? With the existing ad-based business model, it's a win-loss situation between companies and end-user where these companies are depriving the end users of their share of the money. These companies win and become rich while the end user gets nothing. They have got us all "end users" thinking that getting access to their services for free is a boon, forget about anything else. Instead of following the phrase of "time is money", the new phrase that suits the situation is- "Your time is their money".
With above thoughts in mind, he reached out to some of those big companies, including Google and Facebook with the proposal to make changes in their existing business model so that end users could get more benefits. But it was not a surprise that his requests were watered down by them, they explained why it was not possible and wouldn't certainly be a good idea at all. He doesn't even blame them because they are at a point where changing their business model will reduce the company's growth rate and bring down their revenue figures to a great extent. Doing it at this time would certainly be a nightmare for them. So the bottom line is, big companies have known about it for a long time already but never had the guts to share a part of the revenue with the end users who really deserve it. Also, it's very unlikely that they will do so until a new startup comes up, implements and revolutionises this new model. Only at that point, those companies will be compelled to follow the revenue-sharing model and do what is right i.e. giving consumer the price they truly deserve for spending their time and engaging with ads.
This gave him a reason for working on this issue and getting the end users what they deserve. This is how he came up with idea of Svanq (https://svanq.com)-
S- Social media
V- Video
A- Ads
N - Networking
Q- Questions
As the name suggests, this platform consists of all the mainstream social media activities in one place including-
Video- Video content just like Youtube
Social Networking- Like Facebook
Q&A- Like Quora
It combines best of all the most popular social media platforms, such as Facebook, Youtube and Quora and allows users to upload and watch videos like Youtube, allows people to connect with friends and share stuff like Facebook and ask and answer questions like Quora. On Svanq, your feed contains all types of those elements- such as Questions, Videos, status update etc. So, you don't need to go to Quora for asking questions, no need to go to Youtube for watching videos and no need to go to Facebook for connecting with friends. It combines best of those "three worlds". At the same time, it pays super attention to user's privacy and data security. Users can control their privacy options and only their name and profile picture are public stuff by default, nothing else. Additionally, unlike other networks, Svanq is strictly against data monitoring and analysis as we have no interest in user's data. We never need to do that because we are never going to be directly benefited from running the ads, we will always be benefited by taking a share from the revenue users generate engaging with the ads.
Basically, they will see questions, videos, friends updates in their feed. The best and most important part is, end users get paid whenever they see a sponsored post/ad that will look like a highlighted story in their feed. They can click on the link in ad or watch the video in ad to make more money. All the money that user make while watching the ads keeps getting added to their Svanq wallet. They can withdraw the money to their bank account anytime and when they do so, Svanq takes 10% of the amount they withdraw, which is enough for Svanq. Taking a share of the user's revenue will still give us enough money to sustain the platform and improve the services over time. If someone doesn't want to see ads at all, they can easily disable ads at click of one single button at the top of their feed and continue to use the site for free.
Lastly, an unique feature introduced by Svanq is video answers. On Svanq, people ask questions like "Show us how funny you are?" or "Show us how stylish you are?" etc to which, other people can respond by the means of a short, non-edited video clip and can show "how funny they really are" or "how stylish they really are". This short (typically 10-15 seconds long) video is called video answer. It allows people to see what and how other people are doing things in their lives in very beautiful and fun way.
Some examples of the questions that people gave a video answers to-
Show Us Your Favorite Exercise ?
Show us the best gift you ever received?
Show us something that you're afraid to do ?
SHOW US YOUR SWAG ?
Show us can you mimic someone famous ?
Show us your smile ?
SHOW US HOW YOU RIDE YOUR BIKE ?
Show Us Your Favorite Jewellery
SHOW US , CAN YOU DANCE ?
SHOW US YOUR SECRET TALENT ?
Show us your acting skills ?
The biggest support that he had got from was his brother in implementing this project. Both brother worked very hard shoulder-to-shoulder to bring this platform in front of the people. We are hoping to help people make money out of their time and make them realise that time is money, at least on the Internet :)
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