I think the issue with value 4 value is that it adds up quickly and becomes expensive in a sense that people are not used to that kind of spending.
The advertising model can afford to spend more as sellers make it back in profit.
Value 4 value shifts the “burden” to every user. I don’t know if this is a workable model 🤷♂️
Something tells me it’s not.
Thoughts?
I think that you're right that it's going to be a hard pill for users who are used to the ad funded model of the last 15 years.
That said, I believe many (most?) recognize now the tradeoffs of "free" services.
IMO, V4V wins if users feel some sort of connection to the creators/providers that they use.
The other thing that I believe is that the V4V model, when combined with open protocols, will result in far fewer mega-corps and a return to a large number of smaller businesses all doing well, but none becoming completely dominant.
It would require many loyal fans with connections to creator probably. 🤔
Right, and I think this points out the weakness.
There’s only a finite pool of “fans”, and manipulating their attention is the value-added that centralized SM provides creators. It’s abstracting away part of the process that V4V would require from the creator themselves.
Also, fracturing this finite pool of consumers (I expect, though maybe I’m wrong) would drive the median profit down.
Maybe, maybe not. If you're not familiar, check out Kevin Kelly's 1000 true fans: https://kk.org/thetechnium/1000-true-fans/
I agree that "creators" in the current, narrow, big social media definition probably would rather spend time trying to game an algorithm but ask yourself if they're actually creating anything of real value.
For people building things that bring value, it'll be a slower process but I believe that builders will definitely be able to build solid 6 or 7 figure incomes via V4V (or as it's been known for most of human history, running a small business).
How’s 1k true fans any different in a subscription model from v4v? If they are dedicated to you, they’ll pay.
In that sense, it's not really different, in a good way. We have lots of evidence of people paying via subscriptions for services they value. So streaming that money in a more granular fashion should feel more fair.
It's a bit like going from mobile phone bills that used to be billed at some set amount of usage in big blocks (easy to over pay), to paying by the minute in 1 minute increments. It just feels more fair and consumers are more in control.
Until you go back to unlimited just to nostr 😂 😂
Thanks for the link! I wasn’t familiar with it at all
Our entire magazine runs under a value for value model, so we'll let you know really soon.
It will scale if we have more users. If I zap 50cents a day, it will not hurt me, and if there are 100000 of people like that, it adds up! Same as ads! 🐶🐾🫡
100,000 participating zappers would mean millions of inactive zappers unless you force it via streaming. Even then, these are pretty big numbers of views for any one individual, no?
Not everyone will get much, only few with the fam base. And yes, we are talking many users. 🐶🐾🫡
Doesn’t sound too promising then :(
I could see it working for subscribing to some things as we do today, but if everyone is depending on people to subscribe, that’s a huge obstacle. Maybe some will earn well but most will probably end up in the same boat they’re in now.
The folks who put in the work will be rewarded. Podcasting 2.0 is proving that.
It will never be equal, and competition will be fierce. Same as YouTubes of today. Some will thrive while some will not. Unless there are sponsors for everyone, which is not feasible, it can never make everyone earn sustainable amounts 🐶🐾🫡
Will probably work long term for those providing value to Bitcoin holders if you believe the thesis that Bitcoin is going to significantly increase in purchasing power and thus enrich your patrons who are then likely to be feeling blessed enough to give back. Like most things in Bitcoin, a POW and low time preference strategy is needed
Looking at the music industry income in 2022 around 65% comes from streaming (indirect v4v) with around 17% from advertisement sponsored streaming. 19% comes from direct sale. (v4v)
I consider direct sales v4v as obtaining music for free is so easy this days.
All in all better than I would have expected
I think the stars for people who earn a living on music are super tiny. Most don’t earn anything. Don’t have stats handy.
Absolutely, but this is also true in other publishing industries. The narrow top takes most of the pie. Charts, trending, top 10… and so on play a big role in this concentration.
If a stream pays between 0.003 and 0.0075 USD one quickly see the amount of streams needed to earn a minimum wage. Add to that that the artists only see a portion of that income based on deal. (Roughly 50% to all creative involved, 50%)
The users pay more per stream on average, as the platform takes its cut.
Ok so we agree. Which brings me back to my original point that v4v is likely not solving any of those issues for nonearners.
I hope I’m wrong.
It could broaden the field by removing the barriers to entry to getting paid.
Is it that much of a barrier if you are signed up on the platform already? I know nsfw industry has some issues with payments but don’t know if others have any significant challenges that would be solved by v4v
I believe you are right. It is not really the way in which the content is purchased that impacts whether the content creator can earn, money can come in via multiple streams, all are welcomed.
I believe the issue arise from the leeching along chain on one hand and the mentality (at least in music and film) to potentially lose money on many artists as longs as we can make insane returns on others. This is where building an industry where the top 10-20 is the jackpot works, as long as one of your horses lands the spot each year.
Marketing, as in most industries is to blame… most of my problems always come back to the same man… Edward Bernays.
Can Nostr solve marketing driven market concentration? Possibly. The advantage of nostr vs other platforms is that there is no concentration of market analysis. The data is sort of open to everyone. Market analysis, marketing strategies and so on could benefit from a healthier competition amongst them.
I believe you are right. It is not really the way in which the content is purchased that impacts whether the content creator can earn, money can come in via multiple streams, all are welcomed.
I believe the issue arise from the leeching along chain on one hand and the mentality (at least in music and film) to potentially lose money on many artists as longs as we can make insane returns on others. This is where building an industry where the top 10-20 is the jackpot works, as long as one of your horses lands the spot each year.
Marketing, as in most industries is to blame… most of my problems always come back to the same man… Edward Bernays.
Can Nostr solve marketing driven market concentration? Possibly. The advantage of nostr vs other platforms is that there is no concentration of market analysis. The data is sort of open to everyone. Market analysis, marketing strategies and so on could benefit from a healthier competition amongst them.
V4V will enable newcomers and people with a small fan base to get rewarded. There just needs to be one person patronizing the project and it could be enough. A paywall adds friction before you can actually enjoy the content and prevents people from getting to know new creators. Fans anyway pay the wall, but that's like a subscription model. There will always lurkers, but that's an issue in society and ads or paywall won't fix this.
One person?!
There are thousands or maybe high hundreds of people who are extremely passionate about Damus, but I doubt Will gets zapped anywhere near enough to pay bills.
Zaps are one example of V4V, but there are also grands you could add to that. Right now we are talking about one of many apps in a niche of a niche.
I don’t see content creators abandoning the mindset of relying on multiple streams of income any time soon, using release windows and all that. V4V would have its place in all this on light content, or older content. But pure v4v requires a huge shift in mindset. Subscriptions and adverts rule the world for now. Baskers do exist, but all of them are struggling these days.
If people are willing to subscribe to a relay, I think they will be fine subscribing to a streaming service.
Yeah probably a mix for a while.
Yes. People could be willing to zap v4v on new up and coming artists, and then expect solid quality from subscription. Advertisement will always pay for media junk food. Everyone eats that shit, nobody wants to pay for it.
Make so that the protocol can accommodate all distribution models and leaves to the actors the right to set and accept conditions. Then, let healthy competition do its job.
The most honest answer when thinking about all this is: fuck knows
But how cool is it, that we have the option now to add V4V in a proper way? I would call it: Fuck yeah!
I think street performers is what we have now that most looks like zap fuel v4v.
TIL that the average yearly income for street performers in the US is 45k
🤔
Median income would be a better metric but still interesting. How much of that is via booked gigs though. I bet they draw income from a mix as well.
I always believed that in the music industry concerts should make the most profit and not streamings. Selling physical records was always overprized, because you had the record labels in between. Digital records now making the V4V model available and concerts are the main income. I think there is no black and white right now
I dont see it will work for all and every. Some will feel that they dont get what they deserve and wont continue v4v. And its absolutely right thing to do if theres leeches sucking your life blood. But for others v4v is their life blood. So it will continue and with succes comes others.
Interested to see what will eventually come out of this all. What a time to be alive.
Surely a value for value method with people who believe the value of the thing they are getting paid in will increase (to various realistic and unrealistic degrees of magnitude) can lead to exploitation of this 'value'?
If I like your work, I can steam, subscribe and zap.
If I like the work of 3 more people, I can do the same.
But if I have to support 20 people because I like their stuff I probably won’t be able to.
With the ad model, I can still support all 24, because my views were monetized. Maybe I didn’t pay out of pocket for the other 20, but my views and those of others generated revenue for the platform which presumably splits it with creators. Someone ultimately buys something through some ad but I didn’t incur any costs.
How does v4v address it any differently? I get the small amounts argument but the numbers or views to make that math work would have to be pretty high, and probably unrealistic.
Yes but perhaps your comparison is wrong. Maybe the current model doesn’t support all 24, just the top2. We only hear about the winners.
YouTubers, even not huge ones still earn. Not much but there is ad revenue I believe. Would be great to see a YouTuber chime in.
I believe one of the reasons YouTubers make the money is that most of them operate in niche markets, which makes it easy for targeted advertisement and sponsoring, without spending on market analysis. Once you reach a certain klout, you get contacted directly by the advertisers. (Willing to sponsor in different ways…)
Ads wont go away anytime soon, i think. Like theres real cost of doing things and for some it will make no sence just jump into the unknow and hope it will work out. But for those who have no success in current world, platforms are the leeches for them and ads wont pay for what they giving... There no reason to be slave.
In the end, i hope that more peoples will join v4v becouse that will force ad companies and platforms think again their moves. To capture our energy.
On major platforms you need millions of views to make $1,000. You need to be reaching billions of views per year to make a decent living from the platform. Thats why they all sell merchandise and run their own sponsors and product placement, etc.
Without subscribers reaching the big numbers is impossible.
In this model the user pays zero, and the advertiser is paying $0.0001 per view.
This allows the user to stack up a lot of content because typical user has up to 20 hours screen time per week to pad out. Using round numbers users probably doesn’t want to pay more than $10 per month for ~100 hours of new content.
Therefore 1 hour of content is worth approx $0.10 to typical premium viewer… And this is for world class content comparable to Game of Thrones, Breaking Bad, Premier League, etc.
So I think a fair price for V4V is somewhere between $0.01/hr and $0.10/hr.
If you are making 1 hour per week of world class content then you should really be looking for $0.30 / month from subscribers.
Please factcheck my math.
But I see a lot of people where it’s basically 1 person at their desk looking for $5-10 a month, which is where Netflix pricing is. Then wondering why they can’t grow past 30 premium subs and then getting trapped with a big commitment that isn’t growing. They are charge 100-200x too much.
This thread makes me sad. You don’t have to guess at things or do math. Just look at the real world and see the examples of v4v working: No Agenda, Jupiter Broadcasting, Podcasting 2.0, etc. Then really listen to the show and reverse engineer how it works.
If your product is high-quality, and you’re honest with people, and you ask them to help, they will. That’s not a guess based on a theory. It’s a fact, based on the last 3 years of my life doing the Podcasting 2.0 podcast every Friday.
If you are trying to figure out how much your content is worth you’re already doing it wrong.
Do the things you named make enough to support themselves from v4v alone or do they have some means of monetizing?
Why would it make you sad Dave?
I’m not saying V4V doesn’t work, I’m saying I see a lot of folk with prices that preclude any growth.
Demand is a curve like this, and the optimal price is the one that creates the maximum area in the box.
Revenue = price * qty
Most V4V content creators have prices that create very tall thin boxes with small area. This really caps their revenue potential.
It’s better to charge 1m people $0.05 a month than to charge 500 people $10.00 a month.
Your price point is a huge determinant of your audience size. 
Sure there is greefers always, if thats what you mean by exploitation? But if you mean that in good way then sure too. Something you have belive that will increase in value is way more valuable than something you belive will decrease in value 😄 And bitcoin will surely help, by making it easy to participate, for consumer and producer.
And theres exploitation in current system so i think it's just good to have more channels for moving energy around those walls, so many who cant thrive now can have their change 🫂
But in the end, all of it will figure out how it should be. Theres risk, succes and losses, but only time will tell.
People hate advertisements like Facebook created it, but Ads have been around since the beginning of human civilizations.
It's important to acknowledge the significance of advertising. They can also play very significant role in nostr development and discovery of new nostr services.
Additionally, some individuals even dislike paywalls. I find it difficult to comprehend how we can sustain and enrich an ecosystem solely through donations 🤷♂️
or maybe I am just wrong.
We are in early stages of finding out what this all means.
First the problem with the current media ecosystem is that distribution channels are controlled by a select few companies that then suffer from the “Agency Problem.”
https://mainstreetchungus.com/the-media-industrys-agency-problem/
#nostr and #bitcoin help resolve this, but now the new P2P model needs to be developed, and you are right wherever there is an audience there will be advertising, it will just look different in the v4v world.
Technology reduces prices to 0, so it might not be expensive going forward. (Trying to channel my inner #[2] )
My primary hurdle with straight value for value (defined as: user chosen amounts and typically in more frequent smaller payments) is there is a difficulty in determining the market reference price as a payer - basically what something costs without similar reference products/items.
You often have no reference point and don’t want to over pay or under pay - which creates friction. You also lack context around what the amount you choose means to the payee - patron subscriber goals help materialise what future support levels mean to a creator for example.
Sometimes you could calculate based on how much of your time was saved. That doesn’t really work for entertainment content.
Ultimately I think peer to peer payments to more directly support causes, communities, and individuals will grow significantly - perhaps just with more structure than ad-hoc zaps.
good points
IMO shifting the burden to every user is what makes #Bitcoin and #Nostr decentralized and amazing.
The biggest barrier is getting sats into my lightning wallet. Ads that paid sats for people to watch a video and answer a survey or subscription services for relays that provided sats as part of a package would be convenient on ramps. That could potentially replace all my subscriptions, which is about $30 per month. If I could set that up and pay for what I use I think I would get better value and creators could get a bigger cut.
I think that is not because of "this kind of spending" the model makes no difference there imo 🤔
The user have a budget an he/she can't spend more. In the usuam BM if you can't afford a product/service you don't get it, but in V4V you get it but just dont pay back so...
Ads "work" because they are a way of "increasing" the user budget by letting the user sell his attention.
No matter what model you use you need a net positive of money flowing from the user to the content creator or product maker in order for things to work properly.
That said I think V4V is interesting and will find its niche. Maybe for those things that are difficult to protect against piracy so relying on people willing to pay wothout the need to do so (and being able to pay thanks to Bitcoin and LN 🤙) is the way to go in that cases, maybe other usecases too.
A "Value-for-Value" approach could, in theory, be fairer, as users pay directly for the value they derive from a product or service. This could lead to users appreciating the services more and consuming more consciously.
On the other hand, as you've hinted, this model could lead to higher costs that quickly add up. Not all users are willing or able to pay directly for all the services they use, especially if they're used to getting these services "free" in exchange for viewing advertisements.
Furthermore, the "burden" that's shifted to every user could lead to social inequality, as not all users are able to make the same expenditures. This could result in some users being excluded from certain services that they can't afford.
Overall, the feasibility and fairness of such a model strongly depend on the specific implementation and context. It would be important to take these considerations into account when discussing such a model.
I don’t have an answer at the moment, but I’m glad that you posed this question….definitely gives me something to think about plus not to mention that a lot of media companies/publications depended on the old concept of ads to help fund/pay etc.
I believe there is a place for advertising/marketing whenever there is economic activity - however, the thing we know as online advertising is a different beast than traditional advertising - it has become a sophisticated tracking and surveillance apparatus.
This style of “advertising” has no place on nostr or anywhere else in my opinion. It seems v4v stands as a response to that more than the simple act of selling space on podcast or website.
As such, I think there is room yet to explore what works across different scenarios, but fingerprinting users and forming centralized predictive models of behavior is antithetical to everything we are doing here.
I think everyone is different and it’s important to set your zap amount accordingly. Some people can afford to zap 10k sats other times other will opt for 100 and some might opt for 1. Whatever works for individuals but I think the more people who join the more powerful v4v can become and I am bullish that eventually advertisers will have to compete with individuals by zapping.
At first I wasn't sure, but after I started zapping and becoming acquainted with how it works I like the idea. Some will like and some won't... that's just human nature, but what I really like about it is it gets everyone (including non-bitcoiner or crypto users) acquainted with lightning network and the power of it.
I agree. I think value 4 value is cool but will never add up to much beyond those at the top of the engagement heap. It also won’t keep out more traditional advertising. Brands will continue to pay influencers.
I think it can scale because your attention and time is limited so give value back only on the things you are actively consuming ie pay while streaming. This way the feedback loop for content creators is way faster and they can adapt quicker.
I hope you’re right
if 100 people give you $5k dollars
or 200 spend 5 once a week
That’s 50k a year
More than 80% of artist make off Spotify yet they still get millions of plays,
patrons who find your work matches their political social and prestige ambitions, others will contribute in other valued ways.
being anti-ad isn’t anti merch, this is how those just below that 80% are eating, it’s not thanks to ad supported Spotify. This is really no different than sending a 5 dollar of twitch bits or a 5 dollar supper chat once a week.
I think a younger audience is very aware if they don’t buy the merch they fucking over their favorite creator unless they doing billions of plays a year and headlining sold out appearances. They buy a 50 dollar hoodie, they know is way over priced every 3-6 months. They proudly wear it as a symbol of the prestige that comes from being a patron of that artists, not because they think they are baller wearing an overpriced hoodie.
Then you add in micro payments in the future where you are also making something (maybe only microsats) just for your content to be served in a subscription app. Maybe you earn some back by increasing the reach. Now free tier is no longer, it’s just micro tier. This is essentially twitch prime sub just better facilitated because they don’t have to bundle stuff together for a 20 cent Mastercard processing fee.
I had typed up a long blog post on this topic, then my computer crashed and I lost it all. I think v4v is a libertarian self-contradiction. It's motivated by the liberal ideal of thinking the best of everyone, but is incompatible with Austrian economics, which focus on aligned incentives and price discovery. What v4v is, is a marketing term that is either synonymous with "freemium", or a way to create an exclusive social club that feels more authentic than Patreon.
I have so many ideas about advertising that it's frustrating to even try to talk about it. I'd probably write a book if i could sit still for more than 20 minutes 😂 The nonconsensual nature of the popular ad model has both consumers and manufacturers/creators jaded. The middleman is probably necessary for both, whether anyone wants to admit that or not. Those guys have little incentive to change course despite functioning on a model that is clunky, outdated, expensive, wasteful, and replaceable. Even if they did try, it would be met with a ton of resistance because how do you make a nonconsensual relationship suddenly consensual?? But at the same time, examples of consensual targeted digital & nondigital marketing already exist and people utilize them everyday. One not need look much further than a grocery store to find the perfect model for effective consensual marketing that rewards the consumer for their engagement AND the manufacturer for their creation ...and that's where I get frustrated talking about it. Familiarity makes it easier for everyone involved to just maintain the nonconsensual relationship & complain about how ineffective or annoying it is. V4v really should be looked at more symbiotically if it's going to take root. It has to be a constant circular exchange in both directions if the middleman is going to be removed from the equation. Content creators tend to see their value as only the entertainment/education they provide, but they are dependent on the consumer...Without a middleman to curate/incentivize, what can creators provide to consumers that rewards the consumer for their engagement? That answer is probably different for everyone but they're out there. And I wouldn't discount the future of v4v4v ♻️ advertising taking a reversal. With micropayments & a movement toward recognizing personal data as property, its just a matter of time before someone with time/money/influence/brains sees the potential of flipping the direction of the flow. Haha! I better quit before I accidently write that book here. 😊
