Democratizing Earning Potential
Driving towards Props-powered earnings on YouNow
About a year ago, we discussed the fundamental flaws of large, centralized social networks: their lucrative revenue model depends on heavily taxing their users, or not compensating them at all.
At YouNow, we prefer a direct transfer of value between fan and content creator. That’s why we’ve been using digital gifts, which YouNow content creators earn when they broadcast creative and engaging content. Currently, YouNow shares revenue with its top content creators via the YouNow Partner Program, but this has been an operational decision as much as a strategic one. We aspire for every user who generates value on the network to earn — but making millions of micropayments internationally every day, week, or month is inefficient and expensive. We are going to change that with Props. That is why we began building the Props Network: to empower all content creators by rewarding them with a stake in a network growing thanks to their hard work.
We are building a world in which all contributing users programmatically receive fair rewards for the content they create. Full stop. We do not want to limit earning potential to the top 1%. Rather, we intend to make earnings accessible to the broadest possible group of users on our platforms. We believe that by giving every user a personal stake and long term financial interest in the network they are helping to grow, we can create a community of owners.
But how do we get there?
Near-term Roadmap
In early November, we shipped a “raise hands” and “drag-and-drop” user experience that allows broadcasters to easily add users as guest broadcasters (think FaceTime call — but publicly, between audience members and content creators). Next up is 4-way guesting, slated to launch by late February. We are always working to deliver features that will make broadcasts on YouNow more engaging, fun, and worthwhile. The following step is the introduction of a re-architected gifting experience. With Props, we will work to enable gifting to all.
All in all, these features facilitate more engaging content, increased participation among users, and more democratized value creation across our community.
Hand Raise
We initially implemented the raise hands and 4-way guesting features on Rize. When we analyzed the data, we discovered that engagement with the guesting feature was very positive.
We also know that YouNow broadcasts with guest sessions tend to have stronger engagement, watchtime, retention, and revenue , so we hypothesized that recreating the raise hands and dragging experience on YouNow would drive these metrics and move the needle.
The early results have validated our hypothesis: so far, we have seen a 3x increase in audience members opting to become guests. On the first day alone, we saw a 22% increase in guest sessions per broadcast hour.
Four-way Guesting
Because enthusiasm for hand raise feature is so strong, we are taking swift steps to capitalize on it. We have started integrating the Props Video SDK (used on Rize), which enables 4-way guesting, to allow even more more audience members to guest, engage, and gift. Additionally, the powerful Props Video SDK is lightning-fast, low latency, and extremely reliable — meaning overall video performance will improve noticeably.
This paves the way for a re-designed YouNow rewards engine, which will programmatically reward users in Props for the watchtime they generate, gifts they receive, and a host of other value-driving indicators.
I hope this has been a useful look inside the product development process at YouNow. At every decision point, we rigorously analyze our data, test our hypotheses, and ship features that drive YouNow towards our north star: a Props-powered community of owners.
