Conversation with YouNow.com at TechAviv- Using Bitcoin

[Yankee (BitInstant)]

Last night I attended a monthly founder meetup called TechAviv. TechAviv is a global Israeli startup founders club with over 2,000 members worldwide, by invitation only. We meet monthly in Israel, New York, Silicon Valley and Boston to showcase, discuss and help fellow Israeli founders and startups succeed. Each month, in each of our four locations, founders demo their products in front of hundreds of local peers. I'll be presenting Bitcoin / BitInstant next month hopefully.

One of the new startups, less than a year old, is YouNow.com

YouNow is a new social video platform that allows users to broadcast live video & interact with their audience in real time. By combining live audience participation and game dynamics, YouNow encourages users to broadcast live, vote, and interact with others, facilitating an entirely new social entertainment experience.
Win points and increase your level by going live, chatting and voting. Points allow you to do more on the site, to vote more, and rise to greater levels, achieving status. Eventually points will allow you to purchase virtual goods on the site. Levels give you priority in the queue, allowing you to jump ahead of lower levels to broadcast sooner.

As you can see, there's no real monetization plan for YouNow so I approached the CEO afterward and said "Hey, why not use Bitcoin?"
After giving him a brief rundown of what Bitcoin is (Thanks to LoveBitcoins.org and WeUseCoins.com) he was intrigued.

My idea, is instead of using points and votes, why not have people buy Bitcoin into their accounts and constantly giving small micro payments to broadcasters and artists. Since its a live broadcast, everything is done in real time so your essentially paying the user to stay on. 

BitInstant and Bit-pay can easily handle the implementation and I offered to basically do everything for free, and make a % off his customers (Like my currency business model)

What are some of your thoughts / ideas ? We have another meeting next week.

[1715659110]

1715659110

[finway]

Good idea. 

[evoorhees]

This would be super cool - I think he could use the new concept as marketing to grow that site. His value propesition changes from "spend your time on this site to earn points" to the more compelling "spend your time on this site to earn MONEY."  Bitcoin obviously enables the same system to work in every country. It would be a perfect application of the technology.

I'd suggest also, that Bitcoin and Points are not mutually exclusive. Every time one earns a Bitcoin, one earns a Point. Thus, the incentive structure he's built remains in tact, with rankings and the "game" feel to it. The key here is that the user doesn't need to understand what bitcoins are right away to participate. He'll understand the point system (which they have currently), and soon enough he'll learn that those Bitcoins piling up in his account can be spent on things, traded for normal currency, etc.

Alternatively, as a lower level implementation, he could simply add a button to Tip the speaker with bitcoins. This tip would give the speaker bonus points. (Turntable.fm needs to do this same thing)

[hazek]

What a cool site. I just checked it out and I think they have something potentially fairly successful on their hands.

I have a great idea on how he could monetize his site but I don't feel like typing it out and would much rather prefer to explain it via voice chat, so PM me and I'll give you my skype. I guarantee you'll like it.

[Yankee (BitInstant)]

What a cool site. I just checked it out and I think they have something potentially fairly successful on their hands.

I have a great idea on how he could monetize his site but I don't feel like typing it out and would much rather prefer to explain it via voice chat, so PM me and I'll give you my skype. I guarantee you'll like it.

Will do! Do you mind adding me on skype, cshrem90. I'm on all day, come say hello

[Piper67]

There are several sites (like cam4.com) that encourage their members to do things on webcam in exchange for tokens, which visitors to the site have to purchase in blocks from the site itself. The members then receive a cheque from the site every so often, for the amount of tokens they obtained minus a commission for the site.

It seems to me it's only a matter of time until someone comes up with the same idea using Bitcoin.

[Stephen Gornick]

What are some of your thoughts / ideas ?

Firstly, do no harm.  If I understand this correctly, right now to earn extra points for voting you needed to participate.  Allowing bitcoins to purchase points would allow someone to buy their own rank (rather than rank being based on popularity / merit as it is now).

So as a result I don't know that bitcoin and YouNow points should be convertible between each other.   Additionally, since points are earned from participation -- you'll see bots trying to earn points by creating fake accounts and posting synthetic comments, and then the bot owner spending those points on a controlled account/performance.

Perhaps one method that would be useful would be for YouNow to add the ability to accept donations (in bitcoin) for the performer (or show the performer's bitcoin address so that YouNow isn't in the middle).

Perhaps there is room for a version of the site just for "Pros" -- in which there aren't points but instead just currency units used for voting.

This also gives me an opportunity to describe a killer idea that I had.  Add in a wagering component.  There is a place for some type of in-site investment model where a performer's "stock" is IPO'd, where investors can get their money back (or profit even) by speculating on that performer's eventual success on the site.  This is quite a tangent from what YouNow offers but I wanted to show how there are related concepts where Bitcoin might become very useful.