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A journey that started on October 6th 2010 when Instagram first launched it’s iOS App to the public is at it’s peak.

A peak that not only reaches a thrilling 1 billion people every single month, but also is accountable for Billions of Dollars in Facebook’s Ad Revenue.

And from a financial point of view that’s just the start “The app could contribute $20 billion to Facebook’s revenue by 2020, or roughly a quarter of Facebook’s revenue, Wells Fargo analyst Ken Sena said.” (Bloomberg)

Now how much of that revenue did Instagram ever direct to you: creators, consumers and active members of its community? ZERO!

At Swelly we are committed to ride a wave of change.

When we launched our tagvertising™️ platform in 2013 we already knew that something wasn’t right with Social Media.

We wanted to reward users for tagging brands they wear on Images posted to Social Networks in order to let brands reward them for the reach they generate.

We thought of every single member of our community as a Micro Influencer, no matter if one was posting to a Million+ followers audience on Instagram or just a selfie to 50 close friends on Facebook tagging their favorite brands t-shirt on the photo. Obviously a bigger impact would lead to a bigger reward, but at our core we believed, that every single content creator should be fairly compensated for their contribution.

Back in 2013 the time wasn’t right for a number of reasons:

Advertisers didn’t yet understand the huge potential of Facebook and the likes. Influencer Platforms were not a thing yet. At least not at todays scale. Therefor a brand had to directly reach out to every single influencer they were interested to partner with and build relationships for themselves. As someone who personally worked with hundreds of Social Media Influencers I can tell you that it can sometimes be nerve-wrecking to say the least. Rewards were hard or for certain demographics even impossible to put in place. Generation Z, teenagers and young adults often don’t have Credit Cards or not even bank accounts. Let’s not even talk about regulations for paying teenagers in cash.

Now how is that different today?

With Instagram alone doing Billions of Dollars in ad revenue the model of ROI driven campaigns on Instagram are in place. Influencer platforms such as AspireIQ, Famebit, Speakr or Upfluence make it easy to create scaleable, ROI driven campaigns leveraging the reach of Influencers. The answer here is Cryptocurrencies. The rise in popularity and accessibility of crypto currencies such as Etherium, Litecoin, Sense or KIN let’s even a young audience participate. A young audience who doesn’t necessarily even have access to a credit card and depends strongly on their parents for (online) purchases. Now for the first time in history this Generation, that will guide us into the future can be empowered and rewarded.

Now what is the real power of a photo sharing platform? How can we empower online communities in the right way?

Let’s imagine a community in which every single member get’s rewarded for their activity. A great creator get’s rewarded for posting amazing content we all love to watch. An active member who comments and share content get’s rewarded for keeping the community buzzing. And even a passive member gets compensated for watching branded content she’s interested in.

Let’s imagine Micro Jobs get generated. Not just for the most outgoing influencers who can manage to attract brands and negotiate contracts. But for every single content creator who want’s to get compensated for doing what she loves.

We’ve been working towards that goal for quite some time now.

At Swelly, we built a Social Community with the purpose of sharing and receiving opinions. A Photo Sharing Platform were one can ask a question and share it with the community. The community can vote by clicking on one of 2 images to decide what they think is better.

We think a vote is much stronger than a like. Opinions are our currency.

After what we’ve learned building tagvertsing we wanted to focus on an intrinsic motivator. It was important to us to build a foundation.

In the case of Swelly this foundation is community that is excited about sharing opinions and getting feedback. A community that loves taking photos and sometimes even making big decisions based on community votes.

Now this community is big enough to take it to the next level. Millions of young users in Generation Z have joined Swelly since it’s launch in 2016 and hundreds of millions of opinions have been shared between them.

In 2018 it’s time for us to go the extra mile. To think social media differently and start turning Swelly into a fair Social Community were every participating member is more than just a download.

The first step was the rollout of our points system to make users aware of the fact that they should be getting something for what they were doing within our community. Read more here

The 2nd step is coming on November 15th. In collaboration with the crypto currency KIN we’ll be launching Swelly 5.0 the first step into the future of social media. A future in which every participant will be fairly compensated for being part of our community.

We believe that the real power of a photo sharing platform is community. A Community that not only shares passion for photos but shares earnings.

Stop being the product, join Swelly today.