Building a Kin-powered app with Unity, Part 1
What is Kin?
What is Kin?
Simply put, Kin is money for the digital world, and it provides a way for developers (like you) to monetize their apps in a fundamentally new way.
The current problem of monetization
Developers face three major challenges when monetizing their games. Think about it, after you have spent your blood, sweat (and tears) creating your game, your next problem becomes how to make money from it, so you can keep doing what you love — (making more games!)
Until now, your options have been limited to different forms of advertising (videos, banners, trackers, etc.) or extracting value from users (surveys, data, etc). Whatever method you choose for you game, this leads to either:
- Privacy loss
- Interrupting the user experience
- High entry bar for revenue
As a developer, you have probably noticed that the money you make from advertising stays low for a long time, unless your app can get a large amount of traffic and attention.
This keeps smaller developers earning minimal amounts (left of the curve), and large companies like Facebook taking the lion’s share of revenue (right of the curve).
As these giants get bigger, users have fewer choices and developers like us make less. We need a better solution.
Kin: Monetize in a fundamentally new way
Kin’s goal is to enable developers to come together, co-operate, and make money in a way that enhances the user’s experience. Being a scarce crypto-currency, Kin’s value is directly tied to the size of the economy it backs.
When developers come together and build Kin into their apps, the value of Kin increases. Developers are rewarded for this through the Kin Rewards Engine (KRE), based on the amount of Monthly Active Spenders of Kin in their apps. Large and small developers have already started to join, and live stats are available here.
Found
Kin-powered apps are rewarded by the KRE for referring their users to other apps. This allows users to explore other apps where they can spend their Kin, and enriches the ecosystem. Importantly, this lets new apps get free advertising from mature apps in the ecosystem.
Monetize
By choosing to monetize with Kin, you enter a new paradigm where you don’t have to advertise to your users, but rather, just need to focus on keeping your users engaged in doing what they already do in your app (create value!). The Kin Rewards Engine takes care of the rest.
Some ideas
For example, your users could spend Kin on:
- Community-driven experiences — e.g. charity events
- Status-generating experiences — e.g. badges
- Exclusive-access experiences — e.g. exclusive chat rooms or weapons
Here is a helpful article on creating intrinsic motivators through Kin for your app.
To conclude
We have gone through the challenges developers have when it comes to monetizing, and the creative way Kin helps you solve this, while making your user experience better.
In the next part of this series, we will go through the steps you need to take to integrate Kin into your app.
