XFL Tokenomics, Part 1
The use case and market for Flame Token in numbers
We start this article with a recent quote from CZ:
Because we couldn't agree more: A token without a use case has no value. A token needs a use case or a utility that drives its value. And you need to build it before you issue a token. And that is exactly what we did.
Flame Token (XFL) is a utility token that serves as a medium-of-exchange for promoted posts (advertising) on our social discovery platform Sharesome. We build the platform already and we rolled out advertising on the site. Now we start to launch the token.
The value of XFL will grow with the utility, which means when the volume of sold ads on Sharesome grows. This will depend on how big the market is and how much market shares we are able to get.
Here are our assumptions:
How many people consume adult content online?
To get a feeling for the size of the adult industry, and how many people consume adult content on a regular basis, it makes sense to look at the traffic of the world’s biggest porn websites, and what kind of information is publicly available.
Let’s look at three different sources.
Source 1:
“Overall, for April 2020, the world’s top 100 sites garnered 14.5 billion views from 3.3 billion unique visitors who spent an average of six minutes watching video sex.”
Source: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/all-about-sex/202010/how-much-time-does-the-world-spend-watching-porn
“As of January 2021, there were 4.66 billion active internet users worldwide — 59.5 percent of the global population”
Source: https://www.statista.com/statistics/617136/digital-population-worldwide
If 3.3 billion out of 4.66 billion people watch adult content on a regular basis, that means that around 70% of the digital population watches adult content on a regular basis. Plus, these numers are 2 years old. The internet did not stop growing in the last 2 years.
Source 2:
“28,258 users are watching pornography on the internet (every second).”
Source: https://www.webroot.com/us/en/resources/tips-articles/internet-pornography-by-the-numbers
That would translate to 2.4 billion people watching adult content every day. That information confirms the above-mentioned number of 3.3 billion people watching adult content per month.
Source 3:
Another study shows that “about 75 percent of the people looked at in the study, averaged 24 minutes of viewing per week.”
Source: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1743609516308426
With a third number confirming the same trend, it is quite safe to say that around 70% of all adults watch regularly adult content online and that the overall number is somewhere around 3 billion.
This is our potential market.
What are the market shares of social media sites?
To see what kind of market share is achievable for a social media site like Sharesome, we looked at mainstream social media sites and adult tube sites which are the big players for adult content right now.
Mainstream social media sites:
Total internet user: 4.66 billion
Facebook: 2.8 billion users = 60% market share
YouTube: 2.3 billion users = 49% market share
Instagram: 1 billion users = 21% market share
TikTok: 689 million users = 15% market share
Snapchat: 400 million users = 9% market share
Twitter: 326 million users = 7% market share
Reddit: 300 million users = 6% market share
Market shares of social media sites are between 6–60%.
Adult tube sites:
Total internet users consuming adult products: 3 billion
Xvideos/Xnxx: 600 million users = 20% market share
Pornhub: 250 million users = 8% market share
xHamster: 150 million users = 5% market share
Market shares of adult tube sites are between 5–20%.
Goal 1:
Based on these numbers, we believe that we can reach 10% of our potential market of 3 billion users and reach 300 million monthly active users (MAU) in 10 years.
Before picking this growth pattern, we have considered several other growth alternatives. However, the current was deemed as the most realistic.
What is the Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) in the adult industry?
As the ARPU on mainstream social media sites is somewhere at around $10 per quarter, that number is way lower on adult sites. But as all adult companies are private, it is quite hard to get a hold on any numbers. They don’t report as Facebook does.
The last public numbers that are available for Pornhub’s revenue have been this ones: “The Luxembourg-registered group, which in 2018 recorded just over $460m in revenues, entices more than 115m visitors to its websites every day.”
Source: https://www.ft.com/content/b50dc0a4-54a3-4ef6-88e0-3187511a67a2
We also know from a public statement of their CEO that 50% of that revenue is advertising.
Source: https://www.ourcommons.ca/DocumentViewer/en/43-2/ETHI/meeting-19/evidence
Pornhub has today 130 million daily visits, around 13% more than 2018 (with 115 million). So, their ad revenue today should be $260 million (460:2*13%). That translates to an ARPU (quarterly) of $ 0.25.
Goal 2:
We think that we can sell (in 10 years) at least for twice the money that a tube site sells today. Therefore, we target a quarterly ARPU of $ 0.45.
Based on the chosen growth model and the 10-year target, we can estimate the company’s revenue in the horizon of the next 10 years and what % of it will be facilitate through the token (100% in our case)
Limitations
“The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable.”
John Kenneth Galbraith (economist, bestselling author)
Please be aware of the fact that any financial projections should generally be treated as a target rather than a prediction. Their purpose is to ensure that the project has sensible and achievable goals, and upon reaching those goals, the rest of the numbers would add up and make sense. On the other hand, they cannot predict the future, nor account for all possible variables and scenarios with any reasonable degree of certainty.
Conclusion
We believe that the adult industry is in fact a mainstream industry, although it is publicly considered to be a vice industry. If 70% of all internet users consume adult products on a regular basis, that’s not what can be called “a niche market”. It’s a $100 billion industry that just nobody talks about — in public.
We believe that there is a need for a sex positive social media platform like Sharesome that is generally open for sex workers, and diverse communities like the LGBTQ+, BDSM, or others. NSFW content and discussions about sexuality have always been a part of social media, for example on Tumblr, or on Snapchat — this will not change.
We believe that we can grow Sharesome in 10-years to a size where Twitter and Reddit (in mainstream), or xHamster and Pornhub (in adult) are right now. We see Sharesome as a hybrid between an adult and a mainstream platform, which will help us to grow even more. We are hosting a very diverse community already and have therefore a big advantage over “model only” platforms.
We believe that advertising is the holy grale of the adult industry right now. The industry is changing from a gig based industry to a creator driven passion industry, creating new potential advertisers every hour of the day. Traffic is now generated on social media and will become more valuable over time, as mainstream social media continues with its “war on porn”, driving sex workers away from their platforms to Sharesome.
We believe that utility tokens like XFL are the true champions of the crypto market. They will surive all the hype, the FOMO, the pump & dump, because they have a real use case. Utility tokens benefit the community, as our users are typically the ones buying and holding XFL. When Sharesome grows, the ad revenue grows, the token price goes up, the XFL holders, our users, benefit. This is why we created our own token, so we have a symbiotic growth environment with our users. You can’t do that with fiat, not even with Bitcoin.
Thanks for reading Part 1 of our Tokenomics articles. We will continue in the next article with talking a bit more about the token supply and the token flow.
Stay tuned.
Further research
The best way to start your journey into Flame Token is our website: www.flametoken.io
Especially these parts:
Flame Token Whitepaper: https://flametoken.io/whitepaper/
Flame Token Economy Paper: https://flametoken.io/token-economy/
Check also our latest Medium post:
Join the conversation here:
Discord: https://discord.gg/sharesome
Sharesome: https://sharesome.com/FlameToken/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/FlameToken
Telegram: https://t.me/FlameTokenNews
Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/flametoken
Best regards
Ralf Kappe, Flame CEO & Founder
https://sharesome.com/RalfKappe/ (NSFW)
https://twitter.com/RalfKappe
