With the debacle about Youtube switching to Google Plus comments and effectively ruining conversations on the site, plus the recent announcement of Warlords of Draenor, I want to get my own ideas about how to create two completely independent systems but have them using the same business model.
I'd love to work on one of these. I think both of them could change the world for the better in big ways, so in the absurdly unlikely event someone reading this has the capital to fund this stuff, contact me.
First, the premise - modern business transaction based business models are broken, especially on the Internet - you are either bound at the hip to advertisers (Youtube), abusing the skinner box and micropayments (mobile gaming), or don't actually make money (Tumblr, Twitter). In principle, you won't get people to pay to see or use your site directly (a good thing, your marginal costs of usage are nothing so the marginal cost to use should be nothing). Some people are having success on Kickstater and its ilk, however that model is proving itself weak in the capacity to fund a long-running project. IE, even after collecting your 1000% of asking price in donations, you still run out of money because you are trying to use crowd funding as venture capital. To make matters worse, even though upwards of millions of people directly paid you to create a product whom you are not beholden to at all in that they don't own your company or have any investment return prospects besides the product you are creating, you often expect to abuse copyright to make proceeds off your product after it is finished, ie, selling a kickstarted game on Steam.
I understand why that happens - if you tried to actually pay the entire development cost of a modern gaming title, it would not be in the budget of a million or two bucks but maybe ten to twenty. The most successful campaigns barely scrape 10 million, and those are hardware projects.
But I think the problem there is the payment window. You make a month long campaign and then go dark after that to additional funding avenues, at least in public - you might use the kickstarters success to pitch to investors, but not the general public.
Likewise, the average joe content creator, be it indie games, music, video, art, etc - are all shackled to either comissions for their work on a per user basis, or advertising giant Google pretty much exclusively. Many webcomics use non-adsense advertising, but that almost never breaks even with the time investment.
I see the same solution to both problems - instead of asking for money once, or targeting individual contributors, or being beholden to advertising as a surrogate revenue source - you constantly collect from a broad pool of users in variable amount.
Media Platform built around micropayment subscriptions
Today, a lot of youtuber's are having success with subbable and patreon, services that allow your audience to pay you on a monthly or per-content basis a fixed amount they set. Twitch also uses a similar system with its subscriptions - $5 a month, but that is very limited in scope compared to what I'm going to talk about.
The idea is that a very small fraction of your audience will often have the disposable funds to pay you for your work and will do so to keep you producing. As long as you have enough income to justify your content creation, the number of people "freeloading" off the pervasive information penetration of the Internet are just a catalyst to attract more voluntary subscriptions. It is also important to let people volunteer as much money, as often or as infrequently as they like, because the amount of money someone might offer can vary tremendously.
You can also integrate "prizes" into such a system for one time or recurring payments. IE, every $20 you get a comission from an artist, or every $50 gets you a song or you could pay $1000 for a 30 second animation.
Rather than focus a platform on one type of media (video, audio, games, art, text) I'd propose a model where you have users, who have feeds of created content of any form - with means to batch consume a users content of a type, with the ability to tag or categorize it as you wish into your own personal collections - with reddit-style comments and "forums".
As a result, each user is their own effective "subreddit" of posts they create, and only they can submit to their own personal page - you would have three sorting options, rating, max rating, and date. Rating behaves like reddit or google+ comments that degrade over time so newer popular content will rise to the top. Max rating is raw voting totals, and date is by oldest or newest.
You can also have public forums in this system that can behave just like normal subreddits on reddit - a user creates it by unique name, and can control its usage by assigning moderators, etc. They behave exactly like user pages, which also allow you to password lock them or make individual entries private or password protected.
Your subscriptions feed is just like reddits home page, the sum of all the users and general groups you follow. You would also be able to create, submit, or share meta-posts and meta-groups - colections of users or forums as one forum or collections of submissions as a single submission - that imitates music albums, tv show seasons, photo albums, aka, playlists and meta-reddits.
This site would use the minimal of advertising, potentially none - the funding source is through user content. Depending on some beta testing, users might immediately be able to accept payments or might need a certain submission comment threshold to do so. Users could hide content pages to subscribers or donors only, but one of the principles of this kind of site would be that in the TOS all content posted must be under a permissive license, with the most permissive license being the default creative commons license, with the default being creative commons attribution share-alike.
The goal is to let content uploaded be distributed by users - in effect, to minimize costs, I would propose using an optional desktop client for computers to share the bandwidth load and seed content to reduce server costs using the bittorrent protocol, so that as users view content they cache it locally and seed it. Such content would have expirations - ie, the user could set a maximum local storage limit, and whenever that limit is reached the oldest content not seeded is purged. Content uploaded should not be able to be restricted back into proprietary non-open usage, but we would want to mandate attribution.
I would need a more thorough legal evaluation of licenses for this purpose - because I'm not sure if the CC-A-SA license guarantees derivative works need to be openly redistributable.
Back to funding - I'm open to traditional dollar based funding models, but I imagine using bitcoin as the primary funding tool would help the platform evolve. We wouldn't act as an exchange, but I would definitely integrate with coinbase at the least and possibly other exchanges especially for foreigners in other countries to have ways to move fiat into btc for use on this site. Each user would get an account-bound wallet we maintain, and can move funds in and out using web tools and can deposit to a btc address we give them.
Like I said, we could also have fiat money accounts and the like, but that gets very complicated. It would probably use paypal, amazon payments, or some other authority that has the legal power to deal in that tremendous mess. Users would get to choose varying ways to pay for works or user content creation - you can donate on a timed basis, ie, daily, weekly, monthly, annually. You could donate per-content, and can pick by tags, a title filter, content type, or all content produced with daily, weekly, monthly, annual limits. You can do a one-time donation of any amount, and like I said earlier the content creator can have a listed set of donor benefits that are either recurring or one time, with either per-user or in general limits on availability.
To help enable this, nothing stops a later iteration of this product finding a, say, t-shirt company , and offering donor incentive shirt designs on-site with seamless integration. IE, like this animation by insert-X-author? The donate button is right on the video, and the shirt is one of the choices. If you have money on site it is literally a one-click buy assuming your shipping info is already on record, otherwise you have to enter that. If you have no on-site money, we can provide third party payment services including bitpay. Users would have an option to make their site btc address (or a personal one they want to list) public so you can donate from alternative btc services.
I want to mention I'm not a big fan of the depreciating nature of bitcoin as an exchange currency, and if any competitive inflating cryptobuck came along I'd want to be an early adopter. People will more willingly donate and exchange on and off site if their money is becoming worth less over time.
As with any good site, it would require a comprehensive and effective search engine for content - recommendations, filtered searches by content type, tag, user type, user name, rating, etc. I don't think one sentence, however, is sufficient to detail the complexity of a well implemented search engine, so we might depend on something like duckduckgo on the backend.
It would all, of course, be completely FOSS, and the revenue is from transaction fees. Since you would expect the site to be operating with huge amounts of money transfer in bitcoin, you could use a very low transaction fee of like 1%.
This way the success of users means the success of the site. You have to leverage the convenience of on-site funding over using an off-site service like patreon or subbable, and there would be a balancing act - attracting content producers with favorable margins in the first place while understanding the convenience factor of on-site payments can let us put margins above what other such services get from transactions of this nature.
2. Collaberative MMO
The MMO space is horribly stagnant. I have an idea for a potential organic game and business model based off the media site above - in theory, nothing prevents the same code base being used or it even being within one company with two interacting teams.
I won't go into details on game mechanics here, because I've talked about how I'd want to design this theoretical MMO in other posts on this blog. The series is kind of on hiatus, because I keep going back to software rants whenever I want to talk game design, but I'll work on that.
The principle issue with most modern MMO games is content - the investment to create an initial set, the habits of making leveling content and group content independently, the inability to release it rapidly enough to keep up with player hunger, especially in monthly subscription games, and the habit of invalidating past work.
To address budgetary concerns this game would not have a long development time. In traditional MMO terms, if we wanted the initial product to be 60 levels, we might release with only 5 levels worth of zones and content done. Then as we finish more zones we push them to a beta realm for testing and then live for people to experience, with constant releases of small amounts of content. Since this game would not be subscription based (we will get to that).
The business model is the direct funding of content creation using a reddit like platform - and both users and the business itself can do it. In theory we could make this an entire funding platform independent of this origin MMO, in that a user will submit a content creation proposal, and would set a fixed or variable funding campaign, with pontential donor incentives. This ties back into the media content site, because you use the same backend payment and rewards systems, and that site already can enable a user to create a funding project for eventual creations rather than donations on a recurring basis.
What we do here is use that system on a macroscopic scale in the context of an MMO - users can create submissions on a "requests" forum, where top ranked posts can be reviewed for potential funding projects, and the development house itself will create independent listings of different projects to fund. What gets funded gets made, so users can pick and chose the content they want to be developed.
You might see, say, in WoW terms again, a new raid for 100k, a new dungeon for 5k, a new zone for 50k, a class review for 10k, a new specialization for 30k, new monster models for 15k, new skins for 3k, etc.
You could have donor mounts and perks as well, in the same micropayments system in place in many MMOs now.
The real divider is that this game, like the original site, would be entirely FOSS. All models, all sounds, music, textures, etc - would be under CC attribution sharealike or AGPL3 / GPL3. This lets others, if they want, host their own servers. In the end, as a business - we don't care, because our funding isn't in trying to sell the finished product, but in creating it, and in getting paid to host our own servers. It doesn't affect our bottom line at all for someone to use third party servers, especially because our servers are free and where the new content momentum would be.
Because of the openess, we would also have a forum for user created models, animations, textures, and sound effects - users would upvote them, and by submitting content there you have to approve a TOS that says you give it to us under CC-A-SA or A/GPL3 licenses (the latter if it includes code).
Just like on the media site, we could have game resources in a bittorrent network. The one thing I would like but I don't think it is feasible is having users host their own servers - there is no way to verify the game is unmodified, because the code would be open they could just spoof authentication measures. This means we need to self-host the game servers to avoid cheating.
I think it could be wildly successful and popular - the natural popularity and hunger for content would accelerate funding to enable the development of more content to make the game better and attract new users. Because the model isn't pay to win - it isn't pay for pretty much anything with the exception of any pay-for cosmetics the users fund in the first place - you can expect a huge playerbase with no difficulty actually balancing the game. You could create "hardware" content for the extreme raider and casual content for the 1 hour a day full time mom because both can contribute to funding whatever they want to see in the game. It is literally putting your money where your mouth is.
Since this would be a company, we would be able to deny feature requests and we are the only ones to establish the funding campaigns for content added to the final game.
Another way to entice user participation would be a model where, once a model or sound or such is produced and verified working and wasn't pre-funded kickstarter style, we could have a funding campaign to pay the user creator that gets the asset put in the game.
Of course, the user could skip such a funding goal if they just want to give away their work. But it is an alternate way to get them paid to create, without the risk of not getting what you asked for.
I want to also mention this need not be an MMO - you could create any game this way. Make a single player FPS with one level for free, and have such infrastructure in place to incentivize the funding of additional content. You could do this with almost any game, it just seems an MMO would work best due to its inherent networked nature and the lack of a model to make an open MMO.
In general, I'd want to found a business to implement both ideas under one codebase and roof - they tie together very well. Such a platform could enable an entire generation of media creation and sharing, and b y enforcing open license principles it could keep a generation of media free while paying content creators.
If anyone reads this and finds it interesting and would go so far as to be interested in trying to make either a reality, contact me! (yeah right)
