Tiki wants to monetize user data with a radical new approach – they want to charge businesses directly for a user’s personal data & their unique pivot is that they want to pay users for sharing their information.
Tech giants such as Facebook & Google rely on their users’ data to sell advertising that converts. What this means is that they use their knowledge of a users behavior to predict what they might buy. For instance if Facebook knows that you regularly interact with kids’ fashion posts, you might be a good candidate for inclusion in the target market for a kiddies clothing company who is advertising on their platform. You, the user, have no say in Facebook’s decision to include your profile, & they get paid for it rather than you.
Tiki has very noble plans, & with the news brimming about breaches of users’ personal data, they are well positioned to get traction for their idea. Their notion is based on the premise that businesses in need of user metrics will search their database of users to find suitable data & that once their search proves fruitful they will pay the user for the privilege of using said information.
The platform has a transparent roadmap for achieving its aims & these have been published on its Website. The Tiki team claims to use only open source code to build the product & promises never to store any user data on their app.
Tiki founders Mike Audi, Anna Stoilova, Shane Faria & Brian Gagnon told Whats New On The Net that there were using Discord & Clubhouse to broadcast their mission to the world & they’re hoping to gain the user level they need to proceed with their plans: for the community to “take back control of their data”.
Tiki believes that there’s a 3-step process to launching their idea – 10,000 email sign ups (they say that they’ve got more than 4000 already) & 5,000 app installs. Once these steps are achieved it says it will be ready to pay users between $10 – $100 each per month.
For users, Tiki’s plans are fairly simple. They want users to sign up, then connect their data to the platform – that means that users will need to connect at least 1 of their social media profiles to the app. Then, Tiki promises that these users will be able to “see” who is using their information & for what purposes. For enterprises, their plans are even simpler – businesses need to subscribe to find the data they crave & once they do, they need to pay the user for it. Tiki’s financial model allows for users to receive 100% of this payment, with their cut being a 10% charge over & above these fees, which they will charge directly to the business concerned.
