Should You Be Paid For Your Social Media Posts?
A new social media platform aims to subvert the traditional model by
paying users for their updates. But what's the value of what people put on the
Internet?
If people are unhappy with Facebook, the company's
success at selling ads targeted to smartphone users tap-tapping through their News Feeds doesn't show it.
Despite a wallop of bad PR over its News Feed manipulation study and some users fleeing the site, the company’s $2.9 billion second quarter earnings outstripped the
previous year’s by 61%. Facebook's mobile ad revenue drove much
of the growth.
That fact still leaves the social network in a tricky
position. Does Facebook primarily function as an arm of the advertising
industry, or as a platform that benefits its users? Can it be both? If so, at
what point does laser-targeting ads to users become exploitative and creepy,
rather than desirable? Plus, if Facebook’s revenue comes from ads piggybacking
on user-created content, does that mean users deserve a cut of the profit, too?
THE WORLD’S LARGEST UNPAID WORKFORCES
Entrepreneurs Arvind Dixit and Jason Zuccari think that if social media platforms are raking
in big advertising money, it’s only fair that users are able to monetize
themselves. That's why the two old college friends founded a new social media
platform that pays users for their posts. After initiating a testing phase in
2012 and a re-launch earlier this month, Dixit and Zuccari's Bubblews.com now retains a total of 300,000 users, each of
whom are paid a penny per click, per comment, and per like on their posts.
It's notoriously difficult to
start a new social network when success depends on a critical mass of users to
get hooked. But given frustrations with Facebook, people are hungry for
alternatives, and earning money for social media "work" makes an appealing
pitch. Still, as Bubblews's early successes and obstacles show, it's harder
than it looks to construct a model that does this well.
“We started the company because we were reading about
how a lot of the social media networks out there were creating the world’s
largest unpaid workforces,” Dixit says. “And we said we could make that
different.”
On Bubblews, users--or workers, depending on how you
see them--receive pay in $50 batches at a time. In order to obtain their first
paychecks, Bubblers (as users are called) have to rack up 5,000 likes (or their
equivalent) across their posts. Two more caveats: Bubblers can only post in
English, and each post has to be a minimum of 400 characters--the length of the
first two sentences of this piece.
It's unclear how much money Dixit and Zuccari have
already doled out, and how much an average Bubbler makes. Dixit won't disclose
the figure, and it also seems a little tricky to calculate, because Bubblers
can cash in whenever they want. In theory, a Bubbler could hoard pennies and
cash in on his or her deathbed.
A BAFFLING
COMMUNITY
Compensating people for social posts gets even more
complicated when you take into account rewards that can’t be monetized,
says Ramesh Srinivasan, a scholar of digital labor and an associate professor at the
University of California-Los Angeles. If Bubblews wants to last, it’ll have to
make people feel like it’s a place where they can sincerely enjoy one another’s
offerings. After all, Facebook users post to feel rewarded by a sense of
community, not necessarily by paycheck.
“The key for [Bubblews] is
whether they can balance the feeling of monetizable value,
the compensation that they provide to these different users, with the
experience of being part of a community that many of us go to Facebook and
Twitter for,” Srinivasan says.
It’s clear that Bubblews has already managed to
cultivate some kind of community, but it’s still a baffling one. Many of the
posts I find while browsing the site read like a filibustering senator in his
eighth hour at the podium. Some bubbles do contain recipes or personal stories,
but somehow, even the barely readable posts yield comments full of praise: It's
probably smart to pay it forward when more likes and comments on your posts
will get you paid.
Zuccari sees the positive commenting as a sign that
Bubblews really does attract a strong sense of community--or at least a strong
sense of instant gratification. Both of these things benefit Bubblews, which
sells advertising alongside user-generated content. And it's precisely because
Bubblews pays users for posts that users don’t feel exploited while writing for
the platform, Dixit says.
"WHY DON’T WE CREATE SOMETHING THAT’S
BUSINESS UP FRONT?"
The pair's broader business strategy doesn't seem all
that different from Facebook's desire to pepper its users with highly optimized
ads, and their privacy policy reads like they're keeping their options open on
how best to do it. But Bubblews sees its own ad strategy as distinct from
Facebook's data collection practices--mostly, they say, because they're
analyzing information that users choose to make public, like posts.
"We’re not taking any private data from
people," Zuccari says. "We know age, as well as location, rather than
these other social media sites that are taking private information and using it
to target ads."
That ethical argument’s a little more difficult to
parse than it first seems. When I ask Dixit and Zuccari why their privacy
policy still guarantees that the company can “collect information from
commercially available sources” about its users, they tell me that they still
plan on targeting Bubblers with ads in unique ways. The Bubblews creators are
currently working with a sentiment analysis company--a firm that would apply
sophisticated prediction models to users' posts--to generate portraits of
users' personalities. If those algorithms become reliable enough, Bubblews
could one day cut out third parties collecting user data, and enable brands to
target specific personality types with sales directly through the site.
Whether Bubblews does end up engaging in the data
collection option preserved in its privacy policy is an open question, but for
now, its creators say their methods are more transparent than other social
media platforms. To elaborate on this point, Dixit compares social media
networks to spaces that could have once been described as free public parks.
“As time progressed, they were forced to figure out ways to monetize, which
upset people because now there’s billboards in the parks,” Dixit says. “Why
don’t we create something that’s business up front? We do have to advertise, we
do have to monetize, and we want people to feel like they’re part of the
ecosystem.”
That rationale doesn’t sit well with everyone,
especially those who don’t see the exchange of data for basic online services
as a foregone conclusion about the future of the Internet.
“I find the very notion that our social life and the
future of the Internet should be framed in terms of monetization both appalling
and reductive,” says Adam Fish, a professor of sociology and media studies at
Lancaster University, located in northern England. “The Internet can be used
for more than selling of the self. The intimate details of our lives and the
future of the Internet should not be up for sale to the highest bidder or those
who have the computing power to crunch the data in such a way so as to be able
to sell it to advertising companies.”
For better or for worse, social media companies are
hunting and selling as much selfhood as possible, and Bubblews has chosen to
follow that same basic business model. But if Dixit and Zuccari cast Facebook
and Twitter as parks with billboards blocking out the sun, what does that make
Bubblews?
“The best thing I would compare us to is a Starbucks,”
Zuccari says. "It's a place of commerce."
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