Tsu: Getting Paid to Hang Out Online

This past weekend, I had the chance to check out the film Nightcrawler, starring Jake Gyllenhaal opposite Rene Russo.

If you haven’t had the opportunity yet, definitely go see it. There’s a good reason it’s the top critic-rated box office film according to Rotten Tomatoes right now.

In Nightcrawler, Gyllenhaal plays Lou Bloom, a young and persistent entrepreneur who finds himself smack in the middle of the L.A. crime world. The story follows Bloom as he advances his career as an independent film journalist armed with little more than a camcorder, a police scanner, and an endless supply of succinct narcissism.

Without spoiling too much, Bloom makes a living chasing (and sometimes manipulating) crime, capturing it on video, and selling the footage to morning news stations.

His first piece of footage gets him a couple hundred bucks. By the end of the movie, though, Bloom is able to demand thousands of dollars (among other things) for just a few seconds of film.

While the movie itself is obviously a work of fiction, the underlying plot does mirror reality. There are real-life “nightcrawlers” out there who do this kind of work every day, though the proper term for what they do is called “stringing.”

Nightcrawler even pays homage to a few of these stringers — Austin, Marc, and Howard Raishbrook — at one point in the film. The three brothers, who run a real-life stringing company called RMG Media, are seen taunting Bloom for being late to a crime scene.

In this scene, Nightcrawler makes it a point to show how fiercely competitive stringing can be. However, the movie fails to address the real threat to this profession. In a recent interview with the L.A. Times, Howard Raishbrook explains in one sentence why stringers are becoming a dying breed:

“People with their iPhones are giving away the footage for nothing but a Twitter credit.”

Fifteen years ago, stringers could make an easy living chasing wailing ambulances, fire trucks, and police cruisers. When a stringer got to the scene, they were the only ones with a camera.

Today, however, you’d be hard-pressed to find someone without a recording device in their pocket. It’s a lot tougher to get the most compelling piece of footage when everyone in the world is a photographer, too.

Free Content

This recent phenomenon of users giving away content for virtually nothing extends well beyond L.A. crime journalism. For some time now, businesses have been leveraging social media platforms and having users generate content for them at no cost.

Take, for example, Starbucks’s White Cup Art Contest, where fans were asked to doodle on a Starbucks cup and submit a picture to the company’s social media page under the hashtag #WhiteCupContest.

By submitting their works of art to Starbucks, people were generating a free marketing campaign for the company:

Or take GoPro’s (NASDAQ: GPRO) video of the day. Over 6,000 GoPro videos are uploaded to YouTube daily, greatly expanding the company’s social media reach — all for a measly chance to get 50% off your next GoPro purchase.

Then you have the actual social media platforms that provide nothing but a virtual canvas for us to express our views, share our work, and so forth.

Twitter (NYSE: TWTR), Facebook (NASDAQ: FB), Instagram, etc. wouldn’t exist at all without the content users provide, yet their users receive no monetary payout for the traffic they bring to these sites.

If that doesn’t bother you as a user of any of these sites or products, it should. Corporations used to pay people for creating valuable content that generates traffic. Now, they just expect us to give it to for them for free.

There are, of course, a few exceptions to this model of free user-generated content. Google’s (NASDAQ: GOOG) YouTube, for example, has been compensating content creators with its Partner Program for some time now.

Additionally, social media site Reddit recently decided to distribute 10% of its shares to its user base.

However, many of these users are being lowballed for what they provide and, like Lou Bloom in Nightcrawler, may soon begin to realize how much their content is truly worth.

Social Media Payouts

On October 21, a brand-new type of social media platform, called Tsu, launched to the public.

Tsu allows users to create a profile and have friends just like Facebook, but it uses an algorithm to redistribute sales revenue based on generated traffic.

These distributions are called “audience royalties” and could potentially bring users a few hundred dollars in extra income each month.

To be clear, Tsu isn’t designed so you can quit your day job, but it will at least compensate you for your contributions to the site. And while the payout might not be huge, if you’re already spending time posting on sites like Facebook anyway, why not move over to somewhere that’s going to compensate you for it?

As Tsu’s founder Sebastian Sobczak puts it:

“Why should anyone commercially benefit from someone else’s image, likeness and work giving no financial return to the owner? The markets we participate in are enormous, growing and can materially compensate each user — we’re simply and uniquely rewarding the users who are doing all the work. This is the way the world should work.”

Sobczak isn’t just talk, either. Tsu gives 50% of its ad revenues to profile owners/content creators and 40% to those sharing the content and bringing people to the site.

Tsu gets just 10% of ad revenue, making YouTube and Reddit seem like modern incarnations of William Vanderbilt and Boss Tweed by comparison.

It’s way too early to tell if Tsu will take off, but paying users for creating and sharing content is certainly a viable way to generate traffic and bring on new users. If any social media model is going to dethrone Facebook, this is it.

Until next time,

Jason Stutman

P.S. To create your own Tsu account, simply visit this link here, enter any other Tsu member’s short code (mine is Jmstutman), and fill out the required information. The site seems pretty quiet right now, but there are at least a few personalities worth following.