Contentos Live AMA Session with Binance Korean Community
On February 26, our Co-Founder and CEO Mick Tsai had an AMA session with the Binance Korean community and introduced Contentos’s current projects, future goals and launch plans in the Korean market.
Read the full AMA text below. (This AMA has been edited and condensed for clarity.)
Damian: The AMA Session is about to start! Welcome Mick Tsai from the Contentos Team!
Mick: Hello! my name is Mick, co-founder of Contentos(www.contentos.io) Nice to meet everyone in the Binance Korean community!
Please first allow me to introduce Contentos and its competitive advantage against other content related to blockchain projects.
Mick: COS officially launched on Binance.com on 8/3/2019, and went on to get listed on Gate.io, Bithumb Global, Crypto.com, and Bitrue. Major Korea exchanges will be our next goal, stay tuned!
A community voting program also has been launched last October. By voting any community Block Producers, the voter gets up to 116% annualized ROI, I encourage everyone to take a look about this BP staking program at https://bp.contentos.io/
Mick: That’s my brief introduction to Contentos!
[PART-1: Q&A]
Q1: What are the main points of CIP-0001 and how does it help the general user?
Mick A1. CIP-0001 is proposed by Photogrid developer team, the basic concept is reducing the duration of converting the “staking” format of COS, we call it “VEST”, back to COS. Originally, it takes 13 weeks when you request the main-net to convert VEST back to COS. PhotoGrid creators complain this is too long since most of them have no idea about blockchain or “circulation”. PhotoGrid team would like to reduce this duration down to 6 weeks, so they can have a better way to educate their massive general creators and users.
On Jan./20/2020, the Photogrid team posted this article (https://forum.contentos.io/topic/17/cip0001-proposal-to-shorten-vest-withdrawal-period-to-6-weeks) and ask all Block Producers to consider this proposal. 7 days later, this proposal was passed and got community consensus. Everything has been recorded on-chain and everyone can see how was the voting process.
For any content platform, this is one of the very remarkable achievements since creators, developers, and users now can discuss and reach the consensus about an important decision. Unlike YouTube or Instagram, everything important policy is made and decided by a centralized platform, and these platforms always only think about themselves.
To general users, the CIP-0001 makes their VEST can be converted back to COS and circulate / trade more easily. But for entire Contentos community, this proposal is a good evidence that Contentos is truly a community-owned content ecosystem, everyone’s opinion should be valued and take into consideration.
Q2: Perhaps the most valuable thing content blockchain technology can offer is building data transparency. How can the data industry build trust in viewership and user engagement?
Mick A2. The whole content business is built on top of user engagement. Because of user engagement, Advertisers are willing to put real money and get your attention to their products. Today, Advertiser either got to YouTube/Facebook to buy ads (those Ads play before or in the middle of watching the video) or go to find an influencer to promote the product during their content. Either way, Advertiser still need the user engagement data to track the result of Ad/promotion.
How many views for promotion/Ad? How many “clicks” (or “Call-to-Action”) from this promotion/Ad to the product? How many users skip the Ad after 5 seconds? All these data make Advertisers understand the effectiveness of Ad/Promotion, so Advertisers have the confidence to pay more money and get more users.
But this is also the biggest issue in today’s content business — No one knows how those user engagement data be produced? Even you can see the data from YouTube (for example, how many views or likes), but these data are “processed” by YouTube, no one can examine whether it’s trustable or is there any pre-condition when these data happened. (For example, if your video be featured by YouTube, you see a large volume of “view”, but it doesn’t mean you can have this number all the time). The reason why centralized content platforms cannot or don’t want to make it transparent is that their business model is built on top of it. So it creates lots of trust issue — advertiser and creators cannot see the actual data, so the business value cannot be fully distributed.
This is exactly what Blockchain technology can help! On Contentos, every user engagement such as Like or Comment become Transaction and record in the block. Later if Advertiser wants to check the actual result, it’s possible and tamper-proof. Creators can also be benefited since they will know better about their content and audience interest.
Q3: How do you control content exposure to prevent manipulation? And I want to know more about the self-voting power system.
Mick A3. (1) cos.tv featuring system is a well-balanced system, it includes algorithm and human moderation involvement. The idea is help users to explore more interesting and high qualify content. This also encourages creators to produce more original, high qualify content. Meanwhile, it’s also a constantly changing system, we love to learn from creators and audience input to improve the system.
(2) For those inappropriate content such as Porn or Violence even Controversial content. We have two lines of defense: First is A.I filter. Second is community reports and voting. Currently, in Brazil cos.tv, we already allowing the community to moderate the content and vote which one should be removed from the system after an open discussion. It prevents cos.tv become Youtube — recent massive blockchain YouTube banned incidence shows how centralized content platform can decide each creator’s life or death.
(3) Self-Voting means you can vote your own content, so top VEST holders can keep voting their content or their friend’s content. This is a big issue happened on today’s STEEM (steemit.com). On cos.tv, we want to introduce a new “VEST lending” system so talented creators or new users can borrow VEST from others and earn the reward. This can fundamentally change the self-voting issue since everyone wants to earn more. The other major solution is helping high-qualify content creators earn more, to solve this, we’ve introduced the “GiftingVote” system which allows fans to make a peer-to-peer donation to creators. When the creator earns more, more good content will be produced, then more users will stay.
Q4: What are the motivations and benefits for investors to hold COS tokens for a long time? What are the plans to help drive demand and lack of tokens?
Mick A4. COS is a token now be used with potentially millions of global users every day. And even with our main-net actual data, this is a token that is used by 5K-6K daily active users in real product scenarios around the world with over 60K average daily TX happened (http://explorer.contentos.io/).
If you take a look at any DApps on ETH, EOS, Tron or Steem, this number is really remarkable since most DAPPs on these top tier blockchain cannot match with our number. Not to mention smaller blockchain. The demand for token is now really nature and keep growing, you can also see a good hint from COS recent price chart.
It’s getting more popular across the world, we got users from Brazil, Vietnam, Russia, and China. The demand for the token will keep increasing, based on 3rd party global website ranking systems Alexa, cos.tv now is the top #10000 website worldwide (https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/cos.tv), this rank even higher than steemit.com. The other major index is the average time the user spent on cos.tv, it’s almost 11 mins, similar to YouTube already. This shows cos.tv is indeed becoming major content products, not just in the blockchain area anymore, the growing number of users will definitely drive more demand for COS and create more need of the token.
Lastly, we are seriously considering using revenue to buy-back and burning circulation. But this plan has not been finalized yet. However, since cos.tv already has a good user base, it just a matter of time to monetize and get revenue to run any further program.
Q5: IMO, the decentralized content ecosystem is expected to respond slowly to unhealthy content such as illegal pornographic videos or fake news. I’m curious about how Contentos and COS.TV are handling it. I also wonder if the rewards generated from such content can be forfeited.
Mick A5. To any regular user, the slow response to any unhealthy content is not acceptable, regular user don’t care about you are using blockchain or centralized technology, what user really care just high-quality content, that’s it, so as a content platform, we need to figure out the solution. In fact, we’ve found decentralization can do even better. Why?
Usually, YouTube or any content platform uses two ways to do content moderation/censorship. (1) A. I identify and remove inappropriate content. Since there are so many open-sourced models already published, so Contentos/cos.tv also leverages these modules to detect and remove unwanted videos. (2) More issues came from those gray area content. For example, sexy dancer, culture or religion offense, etc. This type of content is what AI cannot do. So this part relies on the human moderator. But the issue happened, on YouTube or centralized content platform, it has the ultimate right to decide whether it can stay or have to remove. It’s a 100% black-box decision and is also time-consuming. On the other hand, we found this is a perfect scenario to have the community decide and vote for the decision. Every decision can be recorded on-chain for further examination. And it can be more transparent and effective!
Currently, due to cos.tv is very popular in Latin America, we already start this program in Brazil and let the community moderate the content. Lastly, yes, if the content or even an account has been identified as “not welcome” in the community, the ecosystem reward will NOT be given. So it gives bad-actor certain punishment.
Q6: How are you different from many similar platforms today in terms of security and cost solutions, and what are the different elements?
Mick A6. The opposite side of “Security” is “Easy of Use”. In order to increase security, a certain level of usability must be decreased. Take Public/Private key management as an example, anyone who knows about blockchain understands the importance of keeping private key safe. But the truth is most of the regular user has no knowledge about this, they rely on traditional Username/Password and from time to time they need to do a Password recovery.
So if you are building a consumer-facing product, you need to take all this into consideration, otherwise, a regular user will not adopt your solution even if you tell them it’s built on top of the most advance blockchain. On cos.tv, we have “proxy mode” to help the regular users deal with this type of hassle. It takes time to let users familiar with all decentralized components, and we intend to teach them one by one. Certainly, for those advance users, keeping the private keys is also possible. It’s an option, so we can cover everyone. In terms of cost.
currently, we still work with AWS to do video distribution since they have the most reliable and cheapest CDN solution. In the meantime, we also have some potential on-going partnerships with decentralized content infrastructure projects. Soon we will announce and it should help to further reduce the operation cost.
Q7: How can a decentralized platform benefit content creators?
Mick A7. Recent lots of blockchain YouTubers banned from YouTube is a good example — we need a content platform that can respect creators and truly operate by community-based on transparent, trustable guideline which cannot be changed anytime if platform wants.
In order to build this kind of platform, you need the trust of everyone, from creators, from the audience, from the advertiser and from the platform itself. The only chance to make it happened is to make sure every data are stored transparently. Data includes user engagement, community decision, and policy, etc. And it happens to be the advantage of blockchain technology. So for me, Contentos and cos.tv represents as an option to global video creators, an option that can really respect them and work with them, an option that creator and any contributor can become part of the team by holding COS, not just a users can be banned anytime without any reason from YouTube Blackbox policy.
This is happening, not just an idea, today, on cos.tv, we have over 40K daily visitors on average globally to produce content and share their story, earn the reward or support each other. It’s a small content ecosystem compare with YouTube, but this is a large player already in the blockchain world and each day, we are becoming bigger and more impactful. Eventually, when YouTube pushes away more creators and users, it will be our choice to earn more creators and user’s trust.
Q8: Do you have a strong plan to attract talented video creators on YouTube or other platforms? They already have huge user data and are using a variety of artificial intelligence. COS.TV’s rewards program is a fascinating element, but I wonder if there’s anything more.
Mick A8. creators always looking for two things: become more popular and making more money. On today’s YouTube, the chance is getting smaller to become top tier YouTubers since YouTube doesn’t really want to feature more organic small creators, they want to push out their own show (YouTube Red or Membership).
It gives Contentos and cos.tv first good opportunity — helping creators to build a new place to share their work and get more fans. This strategy actually works now in Brazil, we got several million subscribers YouTubers joined us and getting more new fans on cos.tv.
The second part is making money. Once again, on YouTube today, a small creator cannot easily make money, you need to first meet the YouTube Partnership program standard, which can be changed anytime if YouTube wants to. (And they did change few times). But on cos.tv and Contentos, it’s a fair standard to everyone, as long as your content is good enough, you are qualified to earn a reward.
Meanwhile, we also provided a peer-to-peer donation called GiftinVote to creators and fans, so fans can donate to the creator if they love the work. Soon we will introduce the Advertisement system into Contentos ecosystem, so creators will be able to monetize just like what they got on YouTube.
Lastly, we are working on a new way to sync the creator’s YouTube video to Contentos, so you can only publish once then enjoy the best revenue from multiple content platforms. We believe this will also be a good way to attract those who didn’t get much attention or enough reward from Youtube.
Final point is, We commit to treat everyone fairly and respect community decision,this is the ultimate difference compare with any centralized content platform such as YouTube. No black box policy and share all information with the community.
By the way, I’d like to share with you good news, on Google Global Search Trend, now cos.tv is more popular then steemit.com and other popular content blockchain projects!
https://trends.google.com.tw/trends/explore?q=cos.tv,steemit.com,dlive.tv,trontv.com,lbry.com
Mick, Co-Founder & CEO of Contentos
