Unlike Facebook, this new social network pays for your content

Meet Gaption, a new social network that’s trying to shake things up in Malaysia.

Gaption wants to deliver what behemoths like Facebook and Twitter have not done, which is to share profits with those who post on the platform.

“People today are being treated as products by advertising platforms like Facebook and Twitter. They don’t receive compensation for the content they publish. Gaption aims to change that by giving back some of the revenue we earn to the users who contribute to our success,” co-founder Kenneth Ho tells Tech in Asia.

Users don’t need to do anything different – they share updates, photos, and links, except they’re monetizing the time they spend on the social network.

Gaption has a proprietary technology that allows it to track which user content or activities are responsible for an advertisement click or in other words, which activities kept other users on the platform long enough to discover and click on an ad.

The calculation is based on many factors such as quality of content, the amount of engagement the content received, and the size of the user’s following.

It is hard to determine how much a user will earn, but it typically ranges from a couple of cents to a couple of dollars per week, sometimes higher depending on how popular the user is. The premise is: the larger the user’s following, the larger the distribution of the content and higher the potential to earn.

The system was designed to automatically work without the users having to change their social networking habits. Not only is the experience nearly the same, it is more appealing since they gain monetary rewards. And because they are unable to determine how much they earn, they don’t try to exploit the system.

Social network cum marketplace

This model seems to be working well for Gaption as its registered users have reached about 20,000 since its launch in June. But this isn’t all what the company is about.

Gaption is also an online marketplace. Anyone can post a product and purchase one right from the news feed.

Kenneth says the idea makes sense since social media has been an underlying driver of ecommerce.

“At Gaption, we want to make it possible for anybody to do business without the need for any technical knowledge or having to spend excessive amounts of money,” he explains. “We think one of the gaps that Gaption will eventually fill are on demand-related services. Many creatives are on the platform today, and it allows them to showcase their work and gain more potential customers.”

Growth potential

What the future holds