So this thought just came to me… today’s apps charge nothing and use your data. Or they have a pay wall and charge you for an “account”. In a coin based DApp world couldn’t we offer different ways of charging.
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Like an email app that charges not for what you receive but by the number of emails you send?
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Or a social app that charges you for each post you make — or by some calculate of posts to likes. So users who post a lot but get of lot of likes are paid back in some way…the implication being they are drawing other users to the app so they should be rewarded.
If we had some kind of common plugin mechanism for DApp developers to initiate what I think of as an “economy” plugin. They could then build economies into their app use rather than simply charging some flat rate. The economies would then generate coin for the user and developers.
I guess the concept here is that you could build into your app fee for services and then take a cut or a use “tax”. The amount uses paid would be minute and based on how they use the app. Like I rarely post on Facebook but I do read a lot so I would maybe pay a little but someone providing content gets paid for adding content. Or maybe, if you join a social network and draw another user you get paid back.
I could see an DApp developer staking their app say with a token to start the economy rolling within it. Then, the user participation kind of builds up the economy.
Does this sound interesting at all? Is there something out there like this now?
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I had a large rant about monetization, which you can read in the edit history in this gist, but to stay on topic your idea seems interesting; for example, if you as a reader payed to view pages and their posts (a subscription based news outlet), then the platform could take a cut while the poster gets payed to provide content. They, however, do have to pay per post that way they understand the risk and can’t put out whatever they want (filters out bad quality items).
It would be a good social experiment at least, I’d be down to see it in action.
Yeah, that’s the idea. DApp developers don’t have the ability to leverage the data gathered from users. But they do have insight and control into the actions at points in time and the relationships among those actions within their DApp.
Instead of selling patterns from the accumulated actions of many users, you monetize by levying a tiny amount from the many individual actions of a multitude. It is “Office Space” economics:
They decide to plant a virus in the banking system to embezzle a fraction of cents on each financial operation into Peter’s account. Office Space plot summary
And as a developer, you are still incentivized to provide an app experience that is a draw to users and that they enjoy and encourage others to also enjoy.
Can you link me to your “rant” search for monetization isn’t revealing it an obvious way to my Friday brain.
Hopefully not as malicious and they keep it public knowledge that they do it! Haha.
I agree. It has a plethora of benefits… would be fun to work on! It could have any number of media - images, videos, long posts, short posts (tweets), podcasts, q&a’s (reddit?) etc, all with different prices. And being decentralized it would keep it somewhat safe… man it would be cool to see in production.
I moved it to a gist, here you go: https://gist.github.com/MichaelFedora/b7e8bfffab66de85753374ae57331acf