Most online users spend a considerable amount of time consuming online videos on video platforms like Youtube and Vimeo. While these centralized platforms are great they rely on advertisements to monetize that platform. While these advertisements are generally annoying, they benefit mostly the platform where the companies earn from 50 – 60% of the ad income. In our attention economy no one has stopped as asked the question – why should we be subjected to advertisements when we aren’t even compensated for our attention? Attention and time is a commodity in the digital age. Enter Viuly, the company that wants to change the business model of the video sharing market.
Viuly is a decentralized video sharing platform that uses the blockchain to pay and reward video creators and consumers. The payments are done in VIU tokens. The transaction history is public on the Viuly blockchain. It aims to solve the problems that are inherent to centralized video sharing.
You might be familiar with the Viuly tokens already if you are a holder of Ethereum, they airdropped 485 million of their tokens – so take a look in your Ethereum wallet to see if you received some.
What Are The Issues Related to Centralized Video Sharing?
As mentioned before, users who watch videos online do not receive any compensation for their time or attention. Advertisers earn lots of revenue but exploit users by not compensating them for their efforts. Also, video creators only receive 40 – 50% of advertising revenues. It is demotivating to create high quality video content when the bulk of the advertising revenue goes to the platform itself. The advertising budgets of platforms are inflated as they include the operating costs and profits of these companies, estimated at around 15 – 20%. Click fraud is also a problem where bots waste advertising budget. This leads to advertisers having to spend more money just to gain real views.
The Viuly Video Platform
How Will Viuly Solve These Issues?
Users who watch videos are rewarded for their attention. Users have to be registered a logged in to earn rewards. Users each between 25 – 95% of the ad revenue for each video that they watch. Video creators earn 65% of the ad spend by advertisers. Users can also pay for premium content using the VIU cryptocurrency. Video creators will also earn 90% of the funds paid for premium content. The biggest benefit of a decentralized video platform is that the stats on views and ad spend are independent and transparent. All of the data is recorded on the blockchain. Payments are made directly and automatically without the need for human interaction. The ad costs are estimated to be 20% lower than centralized video platforms.
What is the Viuly (VIU) Cryptocurrency?
The VIU token is an Ethereum ERC-20 based smart contract token. The growth of the token is linked to the user base and demand for the token. The more users are on Viuly, the more advertisers will want to advertise. The overall supply of VIU is limited so with an increase in demand, the value of the token should also increase over time.
How Does Viuly Work?
The Viuly platform relies on another piece of decentralized technology called IPFS. This is a peer-to-peer hypermedia protocol which retrieves data from multiple computers or peers instead of one, centralized server. This is similar to the way torrent downloads work but multiple owners do not store the same data. Each network participant only stores the data that it is interested in so there is no duplication of data saving storage space. It also serves as a version tracking system for files that have been modified where more than one version of the same file exists on the network. People are rewarded for using their storage space and hosting Viuly videos. They are paid in VIU tokens. Also, the method of storage prevents users downloading premium videos. Videos are also moderated using a rating system.
How Does Viuly Protect The Platform Using Ratings?
There is an automatic pre-moderation system in place so that videos can be screened. This is to check for original content and whether videos are in line with common sense. If the system picks up a violation it sends the info to a list of moderators. These moderators are users with the highest rating on the Viuly platform and have been automatically selected. They can confirm or deny the violations. If it is confirmed then the video will be automatically deleted and the user’s rating will be downgraded. Users can use the platform as either advertisers, creators or consumers.
How Does Viuly Work for Advertisers?
Advertisers will upload a video advertisement to Viuly. They can choose the cost-per-view and specify targeting based on their audience demographic. The video ad will only be shown to users that fulfil the demographic criteria. The reward is automatically paid to a user’s wallet for each unique viewing of the ad. Advertisers can also advertise during free videos. This allows banners or 30 second videos to be shows during these video. Both the creator and the consumer will receive a reward – 65% goes to the creator and the consumer receives 25% of the cost-per-view. There is also a marketplace integrated in Viuly where advertisers can sell their wares. Users can buy instantly using VIU tokens which are transferred from their wallets to the wallets of the seller.
How Does Viuly Work For Content Creators?
Video creators can upload premium videos and choose a price per-view. This allows for the creation of monetized video channels for instance, online tutoring. Channel creators can also created paid channels where consumers pay a subscription fee. Instead of having premium content, creators can also upload free videos that can be monetized with ads. If the video is monetized, the video creators will receive 65% of the ad spend specified per unique view. The last option for video creators is completely free videos that are not ad-supported. Instead, there is a donate button below the video where consumers can donate VIU tokes to video creators and support their costs.
How Does Viuly Work For Video Consumers?
Consumers can watch free videos that are ad-supported and receive 25% of the cost per view automatically in their wallets. Consumers can also watch free videos without ads and donate VIU tokens if they enjoyed the content directly to the video creators. Consumers can watch promotional videos and receive 90% of the ad spend per-view. There is also the option to subscribe to a premium channel using VIU tokens or to buy goods and services using VIU token directly from the seller in the Viuly marketplace. Consumers of video content never know which videos will reward them with tokens so it’s not a reward based view.
What Does The Roadmap Look Like?
Viuly already has an alpha version of the platform running and aims to have the beta version launching soon. The main aim of the project is to have in excess of 25 million people on the Viuly platform by 2019.
Conclusion
Viuly seems to solve real shortcomings in centralized, video sharing platforms. Rewarding users for their attention is a great incentive to watch ads and also motivates advertisers to create quality ads. Gone are the days where consumers of video will mindlessly skip and annoying ad to get to the video content they intend watching. When consumers realize that they are compensated for their time, the interaction with video ads changes completely. The transaction is no longer exploitative but the user is rewarded equally for their time and attention.
