Scott Cunningham Interview with Zac Nien, VP of product at Contentos
1. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself?
Hi, I’m Zac, VP of product at Contentos Foundation. I joined Contentos in mid of 2018 when the project was still in an early stage. I’ve been a software developer for 7 or 8 years and then started to take care more on product design and management since 2017. This hybrid working experience makes me feel comfortable when working with developers and non-technical stakeholders. And I love cats. CryptoKitties drew my attention and that’s when I started to actually trade cryptos.
2. What does your average day look like?
I start every day feeding my cats, but that’s probably not the answer our audience would care about. At the office, communication is essential. Normally our community managers will report issues and suggestions from our COSers. Well, they are not a cosplayer but the people who hold COS tokens. We feel that it’s kind of cute to call them COSers. Some of these suggestions are regarding COSTV or PhotoGrid, the Dapps on Contentos ecosystem. So, we need to discuss with the product teams on how these suggestions can turn into improvements. There would also be meetings with Mick, our CEO and team members from marketing, business development, and engineering. Finally, I need to squeeze some time to think over what COSers really care about, how the product team could help, and carry them out.
3. Can you give us a brief introduction to Contentos?
Contentos is a blockchain and content ecosystem. Its name has two meanings. Content OS, the operating system of contents, or Contentos as happiness in Spanish. We launched the Contentos MainNet last September as scheduled. Having a proper rewarding model and very promising DApp partners, Contentos is growing to be the largest decentralized content ecosystem.
4. What problem does Contentos solve?
YouTube indeed gives everyone a stage to publish their content for free. Here I say “for free” but not “freely” because when we think twice, there are just too many cases that YouTubers got demonetized or even banned, not knowing why. When talking about revenue distribution and traffic distribution, those centralized content platforms are just like black boxes. We feel like doing something to make things more transparent and fairer. Also, content censorship is a problem. I mean it is necessary, but it may not be a good idea to deal with the issue by the platform company. Through blockchain consensus, we are giving power to our community. The users will decide whether the content is appropriate.
5. How did Contentos get its name and what was the original idea or motivation to start it?
Contentos is just like to operating system of contents. And we want everyone here to be happy! Our CEO Mick was in the content industry. He was the head of operation at LiveMe, a live streaming app famous in the US and several markets. It is when Mick got in touch with many very talented content creators and started to realize that content industry is growing so fast, but the creators are not getting sufficient benefit from the industry giants. So, with the blockchain technology and its decentralized nature, and the token economy, we thought we should give it a try to shape a better content ecosystem.
6. What are the next big updates for Contentos to release soon or that are in the works?
I’d say the COSTV app is something our users expect the most. The Android app launched just a month ago and helped COSTV gained a 300% growth in monthly visits. The iOS version is coming soon. Other than that, we’ve seen more COSers seeking to be our block producers (BP) to be part of the ecosystem infrastructure and also earn block production rewards. We are making it simpler to set up a BP candidate so more people could join.
7. Where does Contentos fit in with other existing similar projects?
There was a bunch of content-related blockchain project when I joined Contentos in 2018. I doubt if half of them are still working now. About half a year ago, COSTV launched. With the effort from our team members, COSTV is now ranked 28,000 globally by Alexa website ranking, surpassing steemit.com to be the top-used decentralized content app. This is definitely a very exciting achievement so far. I think the team is amazing that the product owners schedule regular meetings with the users to learn how to improve the website and the app. And I’d say this makes Contentos and our DApps stand out. We take our users’ voice seriously. We embrace the decentralization not only in blockchain software but our product mindset.
8. Where do you see Contentos going in the next year? The next 5 years?
As I’ve mentioned in the previous answer, we are seeking monetization and business models with our DApp partners. While users are getting used to the ecosystem reward, some questions emerged naturally such as can users borrow VEST from others to gain voting power temporarily to send likes to their favorite contents. There are a lot of ideas in our mind, we shall see some of them being implemented soon. Meanwhile, we are expanding our user base with our DApp partners. COS.TV is now very popular in Brazil and we’ll keep that momentum. We’re getting in touch with other DApp partners and blockchain projects as well. More users are coming to Contentos for sure. And then we need decentralized governance. The first Contentos Improvement Proposal was approved by the community and being implemented. We’re excited to see more CIPs coming and shape the ecosystem to meet the users’ needs. That means the Contentos ecosystem is actually evolving with the community.
It’s really difficult to predict the next 5 years, especially in blockchain world. I remember that “cloud computing” was the magic keyword back in 2010. Ten years later, you hardly hear people say it because it’s so fundamental in our internet service infrastructure. So, I have a bold vision that Contentos will be the fundamental infrastructure in the content industry in the next decade. Many content platforms will be powered by Contentos. Let us make it happen.
9. What is the current userbase size and how well is the project growing?
According to the blockchain explorer, we have more than 300K MainNet accounts, about 6,000 daily active users, and 1,500 new users every day. Many talented content creators recommended COS.TV to their fans. This helped us reach more users, even the ones not knowing what blockchain and cryptocurrencies. The growth is quite organic. We’d like to keep it that way.
10. So where can everyone go to learn more about this?
Mick and our team members, mostly me, are constantly doing the interviews and AMAs. We love to tell people what we’re doing and to get feedback directly. You may find some videos on COS.TV and summary on our Medium. And don’t forget to follow our Twitter to get the latest news!
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Contentos is a public-chain project for the global digital content industry. With blockchain technology, Contentos focuses on solving the challenges of today’s centralized content platform, including content distribution, content monetization, property rights confirmation and property management, etc. Contentos is committed to empowering creators so that they can generate reasonable revenue through the creation and promote effective collaboration with advertisers, fans and other creators, so that the overall ecology is enhanced by the positive contributions of users.
