By
Darya Rudz
January 17th, 2020
Decentralized lead sourcing platform Snov.io launches new LinkedIn-like platform – Snovian.Space, which takes the idea of the company’s Marketplace and Data Contributors one step further by allowing people to get paid for supplying their own data.
Charlemagne was a powerful ruler and a famous king, but he did not earn this recognition because of his astounding swordsmanship or massive army. The reason his name went down in the annals of history is because he focused so much of his resources on gaining, and maintaining information – more particularly, information about his allies, friends, and his enemies, which proved to be the most important possible resource to a man in his position.
Charlemagne was one of the first great monarchs, who truly understood the value of correct, accurate, and updated information. How did he keep such an incredibly sustained database? He was able to offer incentives for those, who could tell him what was going on in the world, because he knew that information was incredibly powerful.
It was powerful in 814 AD, and in 2018, information is still the true king. So it begs the question: why give away your data for free?
The Old System
LinkedIn is perhaps the largest professional database in the world. It’s used by private specialists, companies, entrepreneurs, and anyone trying to form invaluable connections across vast swaths of industries. Over 450 million people upload their private data onto the site for absolutely no compensation. The only paltry exchange for your priceless information is a link to your profile and a digital business card.
This isn’t much of a trade. As if this weren’t bad enough, LinkedIn sells premium plans. With these paid subscriptions, LinkedIn sells access to your private data to other users. Those with premium accounts are allowed to search the entire, colossal database with few restrictions, and are provided with many ‘In-Mails’.
Free profiles are limited in their mailings, and significantly restricted in their searches. LinkedIn sells your data to its paying customers, providing you with almost nothing in the trade. And they’re not the only ones taking advantage of this system. Facebook and Twitter subsist entirely off of selling YOUR prized data to the highest bidder. No matter how much they make in profits, however, you don’t see a cent of it.
It’s important to note that this is the present day concept for data contributors, except that instead of providing other people’s data, you provide your own. For free.
There Has to be a Better Way
Snovian.Space, unlike LinkedIn, believes in proper payment for valuable information. When you create a profile on the Snovian network, you get rewarded for adding your own data. The more information, the higher the pay. So if you’ve ever wondered about the value of adding your true professional skills, and personal interests, you’ll finally get to see it.
Snovio pays you for your updates, which is an enormous difference from a company like LinkedIn or Twitter, so there’s a reason to stay current. But there’s something more. Snovian will not be selling any paid plans. There won’t be anyone, who gets more access to your information than you. So, without this flawed, tiered system, the network will allow for easier connections and more mutually beneficial shared information.
As opposed to LinkedIn’s shaky reliance on “shared connections”, who you may have met once at a conference and forgotten immediately afterward, Snovian connects people directly, and businesses actually pay users when they want to message them. When post-ICO and ICO stage businesses want to contact a new audience, they do it by offering Snov tokens, which can be bought regularly for ETH.
Doesn’t sound so bad, does it? So, what might ordinarily have been a cold email will have much higher open rates, because viewers are paid with tokens (SNOV, or any other crypto) just for reading the message, and responding to the message can also be incentivized.
Examine this use case: A user profile will contain a host of professional information, and have hidden contact data. Business profiles are tokenized, and exist as business entities. A token value gets set as an incentive for contacting and replying, thus ensuring professional and meaningful responses.
To start, a user joins the Snovio platform, and fills out their profile with a bio, a skill list, and some contact data. The more work (and information) a user provides, the more reward is given.
Finally, a Fair Trade
When a business joins the Snovio Platform, it can browse a user database complete with profiles and create its custom target audience. As soon as the business thinks it has found a fit, and wants to contact a potential client, it sets out a reward for users whom it wants to contact.
So that upcoming, pre-ICO promo is much more likely to be opened, and actually read in its entirety. If the reward satisfies the user, then the tokens go straight to the ETH wallet, and the business gets added to a user’s whitelist. As long as the business stays in this whitelist, the user can receive emails from the business.
Further incentive will also be provided to users, who create accounts via Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google; this will be monetized with a higher minimum reward. The user profile links to his or her ETH wallet through MetaMask for ease and security. And the whitelist is managed through Gmail API or Yahoo API automatically.
Meanwhile, if turn to some figures characterizing the current state of the startup, Snovio’s native token SNOV makes $0,033 at a press time, while market capitalization constitutes $13.5M. $94K worth of SNOV was traded on exchanges in the last 24 hours, according to the CoinMarketCap.
Considering that data is the new oil, as far as valuable resources go, it’s crazy to assume that people will offer such incredibly valuable asset for absolutely no reward. Looking through the myriad of problems with a tiered system like LinkedIn, at the heart of it the premium plan and the assumption that a free user will provide their information for free, is just wrong. Snovio aims to change this system, to offer proper payment for important information. Finally.
