New Digital Highways of Value

Felix Watkins
circlesproject
Published in
5 min readJan 21, 2018

A quick overview of the Circles Browser-Plugin benefits.

Meritocracy:

A social system that rewards individuals based on their ability and talent.

By using a meritocratic-based popularity system, individuals who are original and maintain user interest will benefit from the platform as they create quality content. How they choose to go about keeping their content popular is purely up to what they want to do. Because of this approach, the Circulate Plugin will offer no censorship whatsoever on these content creators so that all ideas can be hailed or shot down based on how the community feels about them. With this meritocratic system in place, many applications of how to structure videos for example, can arise.

Opportunity for all?

With YouTube’s current ad system in place, creators who generate videos with shorter run times are not available to receive bigger payouts than those who create lengthier videos. While this may be a seemingly fair system, it disadvantages groups of uploaders who focus on shorter length videos. Take animators for example. Many of the YouTube animators make videos that aren’t extremely long because animating, voice acting, and production can be a lot more effort than say, an individual playing a video game for his fans on camera. Other “youtubers” that sometimes fall into this category are artists, reviewers, educators, and skit writers. The Circulate Team aims to give content creators with shorter length videos just as much of an opportunity as those who generate longer duration media.

How is this solved?

With the Circulate browser-based plugin, regardless of how long a video is, it has the same opportunity to rise in popularity as well as afford the creator financial benefit because users would be circulating the video based on what it is, not how long it is. In this example, a popular animation can rival a “Let’s play” video in the popularity chart and consecutive circulation count because users may find the two videos equally as entertaining. This way, shorter videos can still keep up with and earn the same amount of value as a longer video as long as the community decides it.

Cutting out the middle man.

By following the meritocratic concept, the Circles Project implements a way for users to directly support and promote their favorite content creator’s work without allowing an advertising middle-man to reap the benefits. By cutting out the middle-man, creators are potentially able to receive more funds than they otherwise would on another advertising plan. And so by utilizing this method, entertainers are incentivized to keep creating quality worthwhile content that people will be able to assign value to by circulating, as they will be able to earn more. As content creators gain or sustain a following of users, their profit margin can be sustained or even expanded on because of the direct support they accrue.

Community-driven trends

As stated before, the list of popular content on the Circles decentralized application will be completely dependent on what the community circulates and spreads. With free-market ideals in mind, the Circles Project community will have the power to not share or circulate content that they do not enjoy or agree with. While this method may be dangerous and can pose a threat to allowing toxic or unhealthy content to rise, it is imperative that the community decides whether to quell the trending idea based on their own standards. The Circles team will in no way alter or change trending lists to fit any agenda or idea, because that would introduce centralization into a supposed decentralized environment. As the community decides what is trending, the users will have a more unfiltered experience that always reflects the majority of users.

Avoiding big players

A concern that may arise with the platform is how the return system works in relation to individuals with high monetary value and those with low. In the case of a big player, or “whale”, finding an entertaining video before others and placing a large sum of money into the contract pool for that video, smaller contributors may feel left out. The smaller man may not feel confident about contributing to the same video because a whale got in first and will expect to receive a 10% gain as the video is circulated.

Because the Circles Project’s goal is to help content creators as well as users, the smaller user can easily just circulate another video by the same creator and avoid the whale altogether. In this scenario, the whale may not receive the 10% gain he was expecting, but the content creator will have received a cut of the whale’s contribution, therefore helping out the content creator with future projects. The whale will then receive his money back through the payout system, albeit a bit less than he contributed. In this case, the whale may not exactly have made the gain that he was hoping for, but he bettered the financial situation of the video creator for his work. Because of this, in future circulations the whale may choose to give less circles towards the next video he finds attractive.

Putting content creators first

Users circulating content will be subject to an interest cap of 10% once entered into the circulators payout pool. This means that the most one can expect to make per circulate if they decided to enter $100 worth of CRC tokens would be $10 ($110 in total). Upon reaching this amount, this user would then be removed from the pool so that more people have a greater oppertunity of also being able to earn a reward.

This incentivizes more people to circulate content knowing that they have a higher chance of getting something back as this increases the amount of rewards per user.

For more information please refer to our Payout Formula.

The Circles Token Launch will begin on:
September 18th 2017 at approx. 17:00 GMT.

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