Advertising has become a huge part of social media, for better or worse. How many times has it happened that you were watching a video on Facebook and suddenly paused to show you an ad about some exotic Airbnb in Bali? The reality is that you, as a consumer, are barraged continuously with ads every single minute that you are spending on social media. At VID, we wanted to turn this equation around. Instead of making you the target of all the ads, we want to empower you to monetize your data and memories.

Social media and advertising

Where consumers go, advertisers will soon follow, and the world of social media is no different. As with any other businesses, the advertising space has also been disrupted by social media. Advertisers had a platform where they could not only find a targeted audience, but they could even reach a broader market than ever before.

Here are some stats for you to show how much social media is growing and why advertisers have found so much opportunity in this market.

As of 2018, 3.196 billion people are using social media on the planet, up 13% from 2017 to 2018.

70% of people use social media daily in North America.

People, on average, spend 15 mins more time on social media than watching TV.

On average, 50% of people use Facebook daily, while only 39% watch television.

Social media advertising revenue is forecast at $51.3 billion USD for 2018, which is $17.24 per user. The ad revenue is set to grow 10.5% annually.

As per CMO’s survey, social media advertising budgets are predicted to increase by 32% in 2018, and almost double by 2023.

How much money do social media platforms make from ads?

Facebook

On January 27, 2016, Facebook announced that its revenue reached almost $18 billion last year, representing more than 40% growth over 2014.

Image Credit: QZ

As you can see from the chart above, the average Facebook user generated almost $12 in revenue for the company last year, most of which was from advertising. The average revenue per user has virtually doubled from 2013 to 2015, as Facebook made their ad revenue generation from mobile devices more efficient.

Twitter

Twitter generated total revenue of $787 million in the first quarter of 2019, which is an increase of 18% year-over-year. They also saw an 11% year-over-year growth in monetizable daily active usage during this period.

As per Investopedia, Twitter earns at least 86% of its revenues from advertising, In the 2018 fiscal year, the social media giants posted an advertising revenue of $2.61 billion, which was a 24% increase from what the social media site earned in 2017. For Q1 of 2019, advertising revenue reached $679 million, an increase of 18% year-over-year.

How does VID change the game?

VID is a privacy-focused AI video journal app that allows you to remember your life and monetize your memories. VID completely disrupts the advertising paradigm as it exists today.

Our advertising philosophy is based on a very simple question. Who is the most critical component of a social media ecosystem? The user, of course. A thriving social media platform needs to have a healthy amount of users who are actively engaging with the platform.

Yet, most of the traditional social media platforms simply harvest their user base for generating revenue. Suppose you put up some content on YouTube that goes viral, the platform will take a significant cut from the revenue generated and give you whatever is leftover. We want to turn the tables around and empower our users to generate revenue from the content they create.

Creating revenue via content

VID utilizes AI to automatically generate your memories by collecting meta-data from all the popular apps on your smartphone. After that, it will auto-tag them, create a nice little video package, and then organize them in a calendar to give you your own personal video journal.

If you choose to make your VID public, and it includes the auto-generated memory for a particular brand, then that brand will have the opportunity to add a swipe-up link to that memory, provided the user has chosen to monetize it.

VID will not be charging the brands for these auto-generated memories. Also, the users will be pocketing all the revenue that they generate from these brands. VID will not be taking any of this revenue, which is a stark contrast from what traditional social media platforms usually do.

Conclusion

We believe that our revenue generation model will greatly empower content creators to have full control over revenue generation. By reward the user directly for their work, we are developing a new advertising model which completely cuts out the model and engages in a fair distribution of wealth.