For a social establishment which is operating either in the real world as a bar or club or online as a social platform, an underlying objective is to make money from all the social interaction that the establishment or platform provides. However, unlike the real world, in the virtual world there are many business models one can integrate into their respective platforms in order to generate income. This article will discuss the more traditional revenue models such as payments for features, subscriptions and advertising before turning its attention to what it considers to be the future: a flexible token-based pay as you go revenue model.

Feature based services work by restricting or limiting certain basic behaviours that can only be unrestricted by paying a certain amount to unlock them. Want to keep swiping to meet people? Pay. Want to continue sending messages? Pay. Want to send a second picture? Pay. In this type of environment basic functionality is being artificially restricted in order to generate revenue.

The problem with limiting basic features in this way is that the cost of unlocking these features is designed to be expensive in order to lure one into purchasing a seemingly cheaper, but overall more expensive subscription. Additionally, the restrictions being imposed on the features feel arbitrary and artificial, which contribute to an overall negative impression of the platform in the sense that it can only function properly by paying.

The natural progression from a feature unlocking based model is a subscription model. In subscription based models, all the feature restrictions are removed by paying a fixed amount of money per month. Choosing a longer subscription length results in a cheaper monthly rate. However, the problems with this approach are evident; one could already match someone early on in the process, therefore paying extra would then feel like a waste. There may be any number of reasons which someone would stop using the platform for a given length of time, so why would someone want to pay for something they may not use?

The final nail in the coffin for these basic models is advertising. Besides being intrusive and under constant siege from lawmakers, the advertising model fails because in order for it to be relevant, the social platform must share your personal data with the advertisers. However, this is a danger zone for many social platforms, therefore the advertisements displayed are useless and not targeted to the individual, adding little value for the user and supporting companies who cannot decide what their business model should be.

So what could be the answer to all the problems with these revenue models? The token-based pay as you go model is a great modern way to ensure that customers are not only paying a fair price, but also that they only pay for what they use. Note that the token basis is critical here. Simple pay as you go platforms with fiat currency are in general too expensive and cannot scale. However, when replacing the fiat currency with tokens, it is then possible to obtain many tokens for a cheap price and spend less-than-a-penny amounts which simply would not be possible with fiat currency. It is also possible to support more currencies, since each currency can be separately converted into a token.

The end result is a platform that is most cost effective for the user. Simply select a price and spend the tokens as desired. If there is no desire for interaction, do not spend anything! The platform functions the exact same way for those with many or few tokens, thus eliminating the idea of restricting features. There are no subscriptions which waste your money since you buy what you want and spend when you want. Advertising supported models are already obsolete and have no place with companies who know what their business model is. Explore platforms such as personly which implement this new token based pay as you go approach and enjoy continually meeting people without the feeling of wasting time and money.

Token Based Pay as you Go: The Future?

Welcome to the first in a series of articles where personly explores how modernised personals can offer a compelling alternative to the profile and photo based matching apps that are currently dominating the dating and meet-up landscape. In this article we will be focusing on the travel aspect of matching up and how personals are more flexible and effective in establishing meaningful connections with others while travelling.

When one arrives as a solo traveller to a new city, a basic inclination is to get out and explore. And while solo exploration has a certain charm in its own right, doing it together with a local or another fellow traveller adds a certain texture and quality to the experience that cannot otherwise be easily obtained. After all, what better way to learn about a city than through first hand knowledge and experience?

But how to meet that someone when arriving in a new city? Well as it turns out modern matching apps are quite useless for this purpose. For one, having to alter your profile description to state that you are new in town has a somewhat negative appeal: the description is designed for one to describe oneself, not to describe a specific activity to do or goal to achieve, especially within a limited timeframe. What happens when the people that have already been matched in the hometown see the altered profile? Furthermore, by the time a match has been made, the traveller could already have left town since the match can happen at a much later date.

What travellers need is a simple way to publish their intentions via a personal, view a list of replies and select the one that fits their current situation the best. Previous personal based websites such as Craigslist Personals were great in this respect because one could immediately see the current open personals, or create a personal and wait for replies. However, newer personal sites such as personly aim to improve this process not only by the personal creator being able to pre-determine the number of replies via tokens, but also by improving the relevancy of matches returned and thus avoid having to scroll through numerous personals to find the ones that best fit. Lastly, once a traveller has left the city, the personal can easily be cancelled just as easily as it was created, leaving your other set of matched personals completely unchanged.

In conclusion, travellers do not need to feel constrained anymore when trying to match people online with similar interests. Anonymous tokenised personals are very well designed to fit the criteria of travellers who are eager to explore new cities and would like to get to know people there. Try personly when the mood for Wanderlust strikes you and we hope to see you online soon!

Personal Wanderlust

Social media has been receiving a lot of negative attention lately regarding the depression that is being induced amongst its large user base. However, nobody is really talking about the similar depression that is being induced from online dating services as well.

For most (if not all?) matching services, much like social media there is the constant expectation from the platform to project the best version of ones self to the world. In terms of profile pictures, this has resulted in endless streams of vacation photos, great bodies, enjoyment at fun events, etc. With respect to profile descriptions, it is not much different: descriptions such as love for vacations, no "ONS", etc are frequently observed  time and time again. When combined with the photos, the end result from browsing these profiles is a dystopian world of perfection and unmeetable expectations where the reality of people, in the sense of who they truly are and what they want, is not being actively nurtured and revealed.

After all, we as people need to have our needs nurtured and cared for. And through the course of meeting people online we should be having much more meaningful experiences. So why is it such a chore using these services? Why are women still waiting for the man to write first? Why is there so much pressure to say the perfect thing or be a certain way, lest you be instantly unmatched? What about the negative feeling of not being matched by anyone? Or feelings of depression when you view profile after profile of people seemingly having so much fun and knowing exactly what they want?

The reason is that the service has been designed that way. By placing the photos as the prominent feature of the profile, by providing your real name, by having limited space to write about yourself, and by trying to find that "perfect match", you are being actively forced to present the truncated watered down version of yourself to the world. There is no room for uncertainty or for imperfection. And there is no real chance to actually get to know someone in a relaxed way.  The elation of actually being matched within this mess is the stimulus that keeps people coming back for more, much like gambling. In summary, the prospect of a match is addictive much in the same way as social media is in terms of overall negative reinforcement with the outside chance something positive can come from it.

So how can this be solved? At personly we provide you with however many personals you desire to see, thus alleviating the burden of manual selection. You are given more space to write with the additional option for sharing pictures later. You are anonymised, thus allowing you to better express yourself. The platform is allowing you to be more of who you want to be and express much more of who you are. The gratification in using personly should hopefully come from meeting new and interesting people, or as should be said, the value of personly is lying more so within the journey, not so much the destination. The destination we will leave to you.

Social Media Malaise and Online Dating

Although it has been some years since the shutdown of the personals section of Craiglist, there has yet to emerge a true replacement for a modern take on anonymous personals. The standard dating apps out there feel too formal and public, in which exhibiting a bit of anonymity and privacy (either through lack of profile pictures or usage of nickname) is viewed somehow as a social stigma. The existing personals websites, while having been around for years, still rely on the same basic and formulaic processes which make the entire experience very uninteresting and unevolved.
Enter personly. Faced with the mounting frustrations of using modern dating apps and archaic personals websites, we decided to opt for a new approach. At the core of our concept is the idea of a tokenized personal, in which the amount you spend per personal correlates to how many people you want to see it. We hope that this new approach can function as a tradeoff between standard personal matching, in which one receives too many matches, and modern dating apps, in which one feels like he or she is not matching anybody. The goal is to ultimately feel connected.
Please stay tuned for future updates in this space, where we will be posting regularly about dating culture and especially international dating culture. Thanks and hope to see you soon, but anonymously of course!

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