@Read.Cash
edited
Advertising? Paid by users? Our last article detailed how we plan to go further. However, some users in comments weren't quite happy by the fact that we mentioned advertising as the revenue source in the future. https://read.cash/@Read.Cash/advertising-paid-by-users-46ae93d0 *Be very careful: introducing advertisement breaks the expectations for the platform to be paid-for by users. I will not stay on read.cash if it shifts revenue from fee-for-service to revenue from advertisement.* @JonathanSilverblood ...and Advertisements. I don't know, the platform's point was (to me, at least) that it's all funded by the users themselves, so bringing in additional revenue from advertisements kinda goes against that. @Kyouma29 It would be a pity to see @JonathanSilverblood go, I really like his work, but with this article I hope to explain why we came to a conclusion that advertising is necessary (at least to try) and why *absence* of it conflicts with our *main* goal (no, it's not getting us stinky rich, our main goal is "to make as many people use Bitcoin Cash as possible"). Also I'm going to highlight the fact that read.cash has been advertising-supported for 5 months already. The problems with "paid-for by users" model The problem is that "paid-for by users" model doesn't work. At all. We tried it for 5 months and we failed at it miserably. Just like honest.cash and yours.org did. What is "paid-for by users" model? Well, it's mostly paid tips and sponsorships. Let's take an average week before the launch of the fund.
During that week some users get paid tips from other users. So, let's say there were 500 users during the week that got tips and we have 600 users on the platform. That means that 500/600= 83% of our users got paid Bitcoin Cash. Let's chart that number over time:
(Most of the charts here are up to April 20th, the launch of the fund) Just before the launch of the fund only **2%** of users during the week got paid anything. **98% of read.cash users got no payment whatsoever.** So, in reality it was more like this:
But that's not even the biggest problem. Let's dive in to who got the tips. Let's compare the total amount of tips received by articles that were about Bitcoin Cash vs articles that were on any other topic:
You can barely even see the red area that is "all articles on all topics that is not Bitcoin Cash". Let's stretch it vertically a bit to see better:
All other topics combined come nowhere close to Bitcoin Cash articles before, during and after the IFP debate. You might say - well, there were probably more articles about Bitcoin Cash... Let's see what was the average pay for Bitcoin Cash article vs "anything else" article.
An **average** Bitcoin Cash article might get you $0.50 to $60 in tips, while anything else articles would bring you $0 to $0.80 in tips. The spike above $1 was during the IFP debate, when a lot (all of?) of Bitcoin Cash holders were on site. But in general it trended towards $0.00. Frankly, there were **a lot** of frustrated comments like "Only Bitcoin Cash articles get tips! I'm leaving!" They were right. All data shows that.
How can we hope to achieve our main goal of "getting as many people to use Bitcoin Cash", when only excellent articles about Bitcoin Cash and projects revolving around Bitcoin Cash were getting paid? It's impossible. It's a tidy nice circle of Bitcoin Cash supporters tipping each other back and forth. It can't grow beyond that. We mentioned it a number of times, but prior to the launch of the fund only **600** users got any tips the whole time (6 months!), most of them are people who already had Bitcoin Cash in the beginning, because they were BCH-supporters. That's not the way to get people to use Bitcoin Cash. So, that got us thinking. The result was the fund, so that money goes to some entity (not necessarily a centralized one) and is distributed according to some plan. Was it better? You bet! Here's the chart: the blue line is the number of people who got paid tips, the red line is the users who got paid by the fund (up until now; black line is April 20th).
**The fund has funded three times more people** (1900!) in its **2 month existence** than paid tips got people in the previous 6 months (give or take). Where did the money for the fund came from? Let's explore one possible source. read.cash takes 10% of each paid tip, so how much did we make on average during read.cash's existence from that? Let's see the chart of how many **tips in US$ equivalent** were given during the last months (note: that's not how much *we* made, that's the total amount of tips):
We can clearly see that January and February are outliers, because the IFP debate raged on. https://www.google.com/search?q=site:read.cash+ifp So, let's take March as a pretty typical month:
We've got negative **$637**. Ok, we didn't pay ourselves any salary, of course, but what would happen if we continue like that? Well, this:
What else did we try? We tried talking to Bitcoin Cash community about doing a Flipstarter to raise some money for read.cash. It was received with a collective "meh", so there was no reason to even try - there's zero interest in funding that (except for one guy, of course, who yesterday donated $10,000 to the read.cash fund, which is @MarcDeMesel , of course!) https://old.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/gbk4f9/the_distributed_fund_of_readcash_or_how_to_make/ There are also sponsorships, but frankly they are so small, there's no point to even talk about it. Our total sponsorship revenue is about $25/month. Its not enough to offset the impending financial ruin of read.cash even by a few days. **I think that's about all there is to be said about "paid-for by users" business model.** It sucks. It doesn't work at all. No matter how you try. Especially it's terrible for our goal of "making as many people use Bitcoin Cash as possible", since it's mostly Bitcoin Cash holders giving tips to other Bitcoin Cash holders/supporters - there's no growth. Remember the plateau at the end of 600 users chart? https://rcimg.net/images/46ae93d0/bNW7GKp7IoVYqjIVYhitQL8MQlYWogze4bWYH2XO.png You can also notice that in the chart of comments per day on read.cash, before the launch of the fund:
You can also look at honest.cash and yours.org who go that way - the sites look pretty much abandoned. Exactly like read.cash was before the launch of the fund. Three sites tried the same business model and ended up the same. It was time to change something. The fund appears So, we were on average negative $600 per month and then $4,500 fund appears. How come? Well, it's obvious. Advertising and investments. Since January you've been seeing advertising on read.cash in form of boosts:
Does it make that much? No, not really. In our typical March, we've got only $149 in boosts revenue and last month we've got close to $250 in revenue from boosts (which are essentially advertising). While it's still not enough to offset *any* expenses it's still far better:
We're still not earning anything, but advertising helps a lot. Now, to the fund. As of yesterday the fund had $4,600. It's "anyone can pledge". Isn't that "paid-for by users" business model in play? Actually, no, only $100 of these were user funds, the rest $4,500 was our money, that we got from other stuff. Why did we invest $4,500? Because we calculated that it was highly probable that read.cash could get (right now) at least $1,000/month from non-Bitcoin Cash advertising, which in 5 months would bring our fund to $5,000, so we borrowed some money to speed up the process, to see how the fund would affect the growth of the site. To prove to us that this business model makes sense.
So, yeah, the fund works and it needs to get funded. 97% of it came from our own funds, before yesterday @MarcDeMesel added $10,000 to it, which is great and a big shoutout to Marc! Can we continue asking Marc for money? Well, so far $5,000 got us about 2000 users funded (and growing). Our estimate was that with $5,000 we could have gotten possibly 8,000 users to use Bitcoin Cash. With the additional $10,000 we could get maybe 16,000 more. Which is great, but what then? **How do we go about giving 1 billion users Bitcoin Cash to try?** Do we ask @MarcDeMesel to donate **$625 million US dollars** to read.cash's fund?.. Do we start the FlipStarter to collect $625 million US dollars? It's *impossible*. Why $625 million? 8000 users / $5000 = 1.6 users per 1 US$ in the fund, so 1 billion users ~ $625 millions It's *quite* possible with the advertising model. Every day we're getting more and more requests to advertise on read.cash. Online advertising is ~$250 billion industry. It could *easily* finance a billion Bitcoin Cash users. We understand that some original read.cash users are quite uncomfortable on read.cash now, because previously it was mostly tightly-knit Bitcoin Cash supporters community and now it's all over the place, with health, skin care, spam, recipes, travel, articles in বেঙ্গালি ভাষা (Bengali) and اللغة العربية (Arabic) etc... read.cash is not what it used to be Yes, it isn't. We see it as a good thing. Again, our goal is not to make the best publishing platform ever - the platform is a means to an end, which is **to make as many people use Bitcoin Cash as possible**. Does it work? You be the judge:
There are at least two other sites who still actively try "paid-for by users" business model and one of them is using Bitcoin Cash (that is honest.cash, the other being yours.org), it makes no sense to have read.cash try the same and it seems to contradict our main goal - we want to give Bitcoin Cash to people, not take it from them.
61 comments
Although I do not understand so deeply about development. I support reading.cash with the aim that we can hope to achieve BCH main goal of "getting as many people to use Bitcoin Cash", when only excellent articles about Bitcoin Cash and revolving projects around Bitcoin Cash were getting paid. Yes, the method I took is good and right. Maybe each individual has a different view of the coin he supports, but the goal is to return to the construction of the BCH itself, wherein the people will be more easily attracted to and sympathy.
Sincerely I believe that the site need to combat spam and also keep the site running in good way that promote quality on the platform, all the future measures to make it happen are welcome by me and as a community moderator I will be more concerned with quality of approved articles, and Team always will he the ones who will disagree with the innovations what's needed its a positive way to maintain the site and still defending Quality on the website and to @MarckDeMesel its a man to take hats off, he helps a lot on Tips on the platform that encourage authors to keep On👊!
I am new to Read.cash but I totally understand what your team is doing. Like crypto-currencies wich become popular, business model of crypto sector can't progress by speaking only about crypto-currencies. There are more and more people who have crypto-currencies and have no problem to be paid with, also i think it's normal to see others kind of articles. It's an awesome work your team did, be proud of that and no matters about "read.cash is not what it used to be".
Your analysis here makes perfect sense. Not that I like advertising, but I can clearly see the need for it. Stubbornly refusing it would kill read.cash in the end. It is the only viable thing to do, as everything looks right now - provided you can get advertisers.
To be clean - we don't like advertising either and we'll try our best to make sure its as non-intrusive as possible. For sure, no AdTech (users tracking, etc..).
I have nothing against advertising. As long as the website does not end up like yours or honest. The model "paid by user" does not work. Only a few people want to spend some satoshis for content. I have great hope that you do it right.
Thank you so much read.cash. You have totally spoken my mind in this. We have complained in comment sections of articles that place this point of nonBitcoinCash authors getting little tips. I am so glad that you have heard our complaint and working towards solving this issue. I can barely see any article thats not about BitcoinCash getting above $10 tips-its somehow impossible as of now. I love your idea of the adverts. Thanks for this review. You are all doing a great job.
Honestly I feel that advertising is a necessary evil. Google wouldn't be what it is today without it's advertising business right? Even the company that says Do No Evil. Or atleast the compant that said in the past. I would totally support this move, just make sure the ads are non intrusive like the Brave Browser ads so this platform can live and thrive!
Also, i'm blown away by your transparency levels. Sometime you don't even have to be that transparent :)
Thank you! I don't think we've got that much to hide :) It's not like we're secretly making billions or something. It's unprofitable business that slowly advances towards our goal.
Makes sense. Hopefully with the introduction of ads, you guys will go net positive! The last thing we want to see is great projects close down because of profitability issues.
Advertising is good, really, since you get your money that way too. However, make it too distracting, people will start to use adblockers. Force them to not use adblockers, and you will lose a lot of users. This is a delicate balance which you need to cover. It's sad to see that you're getting negatives, and it's also sad to see that the fund is mostly just from the staff, but I still hope for the best. Don't screw this up, please. Make sure to have the layout ready. If people use Adblock, sure, just let them be. Don't give a big hole in the site. And maybe minimize the possibility of ads leading to scams, please?
Frankly I advise people to use adblockers! :) I'm personally using Brave myself, which blocks most of the ads. That's not a concern for us. If people choose to block ads - it's their decision.
I still think this is a misstake you're walking into. Since you opened the fund, I have moderated a ton of articles that's been pushed that is not related to the topic I'm moderating. I've seen articles with 100% unrelated spam comments and even for articles that has some good engagement it's not at all uncommon to see 80%+ spam. I have been OK with doing this extra work because I believed in the long-term vision of this platform and that you'd find good solutions eventually. Paying me to do the work is not a solution - if the work I am doing is not meaningful (and removing spam is not meaningful), then I will do something else and let it detoriate. The explanation in this article is insightful: it shows that the goal of this platform is not what I expected - it was my belief that the end-goal of read.cash was to get sustainable on the 10% fees from people using the platform. Don't get me wrong, I very much want the stated goal of as many new users to BCH as possible, but if you sacrifice the foundation I though this platform stood on to get there, then I am starting to question what value I get from remaining on the platform. Right now I get a few dollars here and there, a decent editor and free hosting of my content, and I get to support something I believe in. The last part is the sole reason I'm here: I believe in the paid-by-user model. If you put in advertisment into the platform, then I will no longer want to share my content this way, it's just not what I believe in. Advertising grew up on an internet that lacked the ability to do payments and that have caused significant problems - I'd go as far as to say that it, together with censhorship by nation states / ISPs, is **the** remaining problems to solve before we can actually start to build something that is free as in freedom. Your numbers for how much money you've earned with paid-by-user is small, because the userbase is small. I absolutely still believe that the paid-by-users model is a working and good model, it just didn't scale fast enough to make sense for you at this point in time. Sucks to be early and build during a bear market. In the end, you'll do what you want to do. I'll do the same.
First, of all, the spam is the problem and we don't argue with that. It needs to go. Our whole previous article was dedicated to that. I totally understand the frustration of moderators, since I'm moderating Bitcoin Cash community too, which also gets a lot of irrelevant submissions. We will give moderators better tools to do their work. I don't say we're necessarily going to stay with the advertising model. If the 10% fees (or maybe optional membership fees or donations to the fund or some other yet undiscovered feature) are going to make enough to fund us and advance us towards the goal of making billions of new Bitcoin Cash users - we'll surely get rid of ads. Believe me, I'm not enjoying ads at all as I myself run Brave after Chrome crippled uBlock Origin. But right now it's fighting with reality. Reality (at least right now) is that "paid-for by users" is "death". Also, as I stated previously, the fund isn't the reason you're seeing spam. Check out Twitter, Reddit, they don't pay users, they still see tons of spam. Spam is the result of plaform getting popular. Getting paid just accelerated that probably 10x.
I like to lnow what is considered as spam? Can I find those rules back somewhere? How you find back spam and why is this the first concern?
For me spam is anything that doesn't really add value to the site, to the readers and distracts users. Anything that is done purely to get money without creating any value. Examples could include: comments such as "Thank you, wonderful article" under every article without even reading it, illegally copy-pasted articles from CNN, BBC, Investopedia, articles that are copied and split into 50 parts to get 50 times more points, etc... This is a concern because left unchecked it will mean that read.cash will end up to be nothing but useless content without any value.
The comments I understand. I received some great ones, compliments about something I didn't write about (sport for example). I asked how or what bit no answer.
Well, that was your first meeting with spam :)
Last spam question: can everyone report/delete spam?
Delete: yes, just block the user. Report - yes, you can, but usually we can't do anything about it - there's just too much of it. That's what our last article detailed.
with the advent of Brave, the ad model is death. You could try the paid membership (disable ads, boosts, sponsorships) model now no?
Well, I'm using Brave, I still see the boosts, which are in fact ads :) Brave/uBlock blocks only obvious things. > You could try the paid membership (disable ads, boosts, sponsorships) model now no? I could go on and on how we tried asking people to pay for stuff in Bitcoin Cash, starting from our Taskopus project, which took a year of my life, but the dumb reality is like this: there are very-very-very few people in the world who would spend Bitcoin Cash, much less of those who would spend it regularly. Sponsorships for us are $25/m. Disabling ads - yes, we could try that, of course.
Just to entertain the thought - maybe we should create a clone platform on a new domain, where there will be no ads, just plain "paid-for by users" experience? Using Flipstarter to fund it? Maybe even self-governed by the funders. If we can figure out how to do it :)
Why not decide whether to show ads or not on a per-author or per-community basis? Accept ads and part of the revenue will be shared with you or among the authors of your community. No need to split the platform into two, just let people make their own choices for their own part of the platform.
Is it possible to make an overview of what you have in mind? A plan how fast this platform can or should grow? I wonder how many members there are and how many really active ones. 💕
> I wonder how many members there are and how many really active ones. Right now it's 3,600 users, of which 1,600 are active monthly users
3,600 users? Strange I always bump into the same ten. How can I reach them?
That's the total amount of registered users. Many of them never came back. Like I said, monthly active (these who were here less than 1 month ago) are at 1,600. How to reach them - there's no special way to do it. :)
Well, I'll see if I can find a way to find some new users to my list. I noticed some comment but do not post. Next step more (new) active users.👍
> I still think this is a misstake you're walking into. I 100% agree with Jonathon on this one .. I really don't want this platform to become another Medium (which I already love and pay them $50/yr); but I have NO control over who gets what; it's like when you eat-out and have a great waitress who gives you impeccable service, but then he/she has to "split" the tip (FUCK THAT!).. i feel like the fund JUST started, please give it a lil time to build up (and the community a lil more time to grow, as we enter another bull market) .. also, there's probably better (read. more annoying and intrusive) ways to promote the fund to get people to cough up! I'm thinking of that Wikipedia shit where they plaster the whole platform once a year for donations (I've given each and every time).. I'm really excited about the moderation stuff your starting, but I can assure you, i ain't moderating shit on an ad platform, why would I?? in the end, business is business, and you know your business better than ANYONE ELSE, so I'm confident you'll do what's right for yourselves and what you believe is in the best interest of BCH.. __best of luck!!__ 🙏
Again, look at honest.cash, yours.org - they do exactly that. Exactly. They are exactly in the position we were on April 20th, giving in to slow and painful death by obscurity. How long ago have you seen a link to anything on Honest? Here's one more chart: [the number of donors to the fund](https://i.imgur.com/xBjb9Rp.png). Thank you for being one, BTW! Does it look like it growing? No, the sad truth is Bitcoin Cash holders don't want to give away Bitcoin Cash. After looking at the data we don't expect it to grow that much and bull market won't help with that. > i ain't moderating shit on an ad platform, why would I?? I understand your position, but I think you misunderstand one thing: the advertising revenue won't go to make us rich, but it'll go to the fund. We might finally see some salary after working on read.cash for free for nearly 8 months, but other than that it's going to fund the users, because the more we spend on the fund, the more popular read.cash gets. It's pretty easy. It's in our best interests to invest in the fund. One more important thought: we don't want to **wait** for the bull market, we want to create it by taking advertisers fiat money and buying up Bitcoin Cash to give away to our users.
would your problem be solved if you could set a minimum price of a comment on your articles?
Glad that you put in the effort to explain this concept. I can now see why it won't work without getting some additional revenue from advertisements. Well, I guess I am okay with it as long as the ads aren't too in the face.
Paid by users only works if we all are wealthy enough to invest. If there's nothing to invest you need to earn first. So far - as a new member - I can only say I like this platform and I hope it grows fast. As long as my screen - I am a mobile user only - isn't filled with an advertisement, I can read and comment and post it's worth trying. Thanks for the insight in read.cash. 👍💕
Use Brave mobile browser - it cuts the ads (otherwise it's just regular Google Chrome under the hood) and you'll have more text, less ads :) I do.
Brave doesn't run for me. Main problem generally speaking I deal with 16-18 kbs!
Oh my God. read.cash must work awful on that. Just our JavaScript library that we need to support Bitcoin Cash is 1MB in size... What browser do you use then?
If I am lucky I can load, read, more lucky I can comment but posting takes long. Main problem the photo needed.
This is a well details insight of how read.cash plans to work.. it's good you shared this with us the user of your platform it show transparency... But then again on the issue of ads personal I don't really like them in anyway because they act as distraction... Speaking from experience I got to learn about read.cash from an advert posted on telegram by a user... He stated I had to register on read.cash before I can continue reading the article on the channel which took my attention from the content I was going through... But from your perspective and analysis I can tell it's almost not possible to attain your goals without going into advertising... Because for anyone to fund you they would most likely be looking at what they stand to gain at the end most times. For someone like me who just started working with BCH some days I have engaged more with it than with other crypto currencies recently, I even invested my personal funds into it and it's all because of your platform. I would love to stick with you guys as you go along even if you have to go with the advertising as long as you don't go overboard. Then again, I still am not clear about the whole span thing on read.cash. What is really considered as spam because I came across this platform by someone asking me to join from an advert is that considered wrong... Also if I had a blog and I post an article on it and also posted the same article here is that considered as spam or let's say I watched a news on TV or heard something on radio and decided to share it here is that also spamming. Please elaborate on this so I know note to go against the rules.
I understand why some people refuses thte advertising idea. But seriously i think it's an inevitable step to take if you really want Read.cash (probably any other online project as well) to success...The advertising can be the differance between failure and success nowadays. I think we should only ask for Read.cash team to not ruin the platform by putting ads everywhere and especially no pop ups. That's just my openion.
Popups.. Yuck! No, of course there will be no popups, no overlays, pop-unders, user tracking, etc... In any case we recommend using uBlock Origin or Brave browser to block these anyway (and a lot of ads too).
Very well! In that case I honestly don't see any reason why not to do advertising then. If the platform won't be ruined with ads and that will help you earn more to make this platform even better then go ahead.
Having advertisement as a means to fund the platform is not a bad idea since it is gear towards achieving the purpose of making Bitcoin cash available to many users. There should be a system that allow individual to decide whether to see ad on his or her home page, a sort of customization of ones home page. I think i have found it somewhere at webtalk where you pay a some fee to remove ad from your home page.
Let see how this goes, I pray you achieve your aim.
I've always wondered why these BCH-based sites aren't advertising for each other. Memo should want to advertise for read.cash and the other way around. Just be careful about what you advertise. You don't want the site to look like a scammy-looking joke. Keep it professional looking.
Thank you for the transparency. I have noticed a drop in article and comment quality overall (due to the fund) but I also noticed greater variety of topics (probably due to the fund) with some high quality articles. I don't think in-house advertising like sponsorships (like reddit) would hurt. I'm sure you all thought of it but maybe a read.cash version of gilding (again, like reddit) can help. One thing I think read.cash can do is tip amounts that show emojis. I don't know if you were familiar with the changetip bitcoin bot back then but you could tip a beer ($3.50), or a cookie ($1) or dime ($0.10). That was really fun. Although not important, I would like to see how much I've spent on the site.
It's inevitable in any platform. The more users join, the lower the quality of content. Then it's a question of bubbling the great content up and drowning the bad content. That's the plan for the near future. Gildings actually are interesting idea that we haven't thought. Though still looking at all the charts it doesn't seem like it would be popular enough to bring in millions of USD necessary to on-board a billion of people :) I wrote a note about "how much I've spent on the site". I can't promise anything about when it's going to be implemented though :) Too many things to do.
I have imported my seed from read.cash into Bitcoin.com wallet and can easily see all income and expenses there. Here I have described how to do it (the description is for older versions though) https://read.cash/@Telesfor/how-to-integrate-readcash-wallet-into-bitcoincom-wallet-80747c24 You can check it also in Blockchain explorer
I am all for experimentation and am confident this team will adapt when necessary. I want to see BCH get in more people's hands so more and more folks can be educated on what Bitcoining is all about.
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