Services like Klout and Kred may turn people’s social influence into points. But social curation site Fancy says it’s going to give users something more: payment.
Calling it the “next step in its evolution,” the New York-based Pinterest rival announced Monday that it will roll out a program to compensate users for their curation and sharing.
“What we’re saying is, you the people are curating the
-
2017 Black Friday Bundle #1
$995.00 -
2017 Black Friday Bundle #2
$10,000.00 -
2017 Black Friday Bundle #3
$27.00 -
2017 Black Friday Bundle #3
$27.00 -
2017 Black Friday Bundle #4
$15,000.00 -
2017 Black Friday Bundle #5
$395.00 -
Choosing the Right Service Provider for Cloud Infrastructure Outsourcing
$299.00 -
Cloud Computing Market Trends in 2015
$299.00 -
Cloud-Based Billing Solutions in 2015
$299.00 -
Content marketing: Brands Embrace User Images and Video
$299.00 -
Customer Targeting: Beyond Demographics and “Likes”
$299.00 -
DIY Storage vs. Hyper-converged Systems
$299.00 -
Employing Industrial IoT: A Framework for CIOs
$299.00 -
Ensuring a Successful OpenStack Deployment
$299.00 -
Extending Hadoop Towards the Data Lake
$299.00 -
Generational Performance Comparison: Amazon EC2’s C3 and C4 Families
$299.00 -
Gigaom Change Talks
$495.00 -
GigaOm Research (Basic)
From: $83.33 / month -
GigaOm Research (Business)
From: $416.66 / month -
Outlook: Internet of things in 2015
$299.00 -
Outlook: Mobile in 2015
$299.00 -
Partners
$0.00 -
Schedule
$0.00 -
Sector Roadmap: Enterprise Mobility Management
$299.00 -
Sector Roadmap: Hadoop/Data Warehouse Interoperability
$299.00 -
Sector Roadmap: Marketing-Technology platforms
$299.00 -
Sector Roadmap: Work Media Tools
$299.00 -
Speakers
$0.00 -
Survey: digital marketing tactics for customer acquisition
$299.00 -
Survey: What the Enterprise Cloud Needs to Become Business-Critical
$299.00 -
The Benefits and Challenges of Personal Analytics
$299.00 -
Ticket Registration
$0.00 -
Visualizing Work: New Ways to Map How Businesses Operate
$299.00 -
Workshop
$0.00
As people “fancy” items on the site and share them with friends on Facebook and Twitter, users will get a link with a unique referral code. Each time a friend clicks on the link to buy the item, the company said, the user will get 2 percent of the transaction value. For now, users will receive compensation in the form of credit they can use on the site (and manage through a dashboard that helps track purchases made through their links). But Einhorn said that once the system is stable and they know they won’t be a target for hackers, they plan to allow users to eventually convert the credit to cash.
In the last year, the company said its user base has grown to more than one million people who generate upwards of $10,000 a day in sales. As the social discovery and commerce space heats up, Fancy’s rewards program could be a nice enticement for new users. Pinterest boasts 17 million users and is a powerhouse for driving referral traffic but doesn’t yet offer users a way to purchase directly from the site. London-based social shopping site Shopcade also rewards users for recommending products to friends but it’s just starting to make inroads in the U.S.
Just like Airbnb lets people turn spare space into money and TaskRabbit lets people monetize their time, Einhorn said, “We’re saying, turn your taste into an income stream.”
A drawback of the new compensation program could be that if Fancy users get a little overzealous with their sharing, friends may interpret it as spam. When I asked Einhorn about the issue, he said they’re going to monitor user behavior but think that people will be careful about alienating friends with over-sharing.
“We’re going to have to watch it,” he said. “But, right now, I think you know what your audience is going to tolerate, it’s the same as anything else. If you tweet a bunch of junk people may unfollow you on Twitter.”