I created an exploratory notebook for sticker market here Status Sticker Market Utility Value Exploration / Barry G | Observable
2 Likes
Hey great thread, some really solid suggestions and ideas.
It’s not bulletproof but I created a general Poll just to gather quick feedback from the Status community. It may suit people who wish to have a say but don’t want to delve too deep. Of course it’s none binding but thought it may prove some value if only a little insight into people’s thinking.
https://ipfs.infura.io/ipfs/QmSmv5e5DYc2otwWcpUzuqmt389s3HHx651TbxDvKBFFue/#/titleScreen/18
It runs for 2 days
3 Likes
I think we should consider getting away from calling them fees for the following reasons:
When the app store charges the creator fees those monies go to a corporation at which point the creator no longer has much say in how those funds are used, those funds are controlled by a different group of stakeholders (shareholders), who often have different interests from the creators and consumers.
In our case the monies go into the network to maintain and support it, which is in the long term interest of creators. If the funds go into a DAO, the creators have a direct say in how those funds should be allocated and they can choose to burn or invest in further building out the network. This concept has been elucidated in much greater detail by @ricardo3 with fee recycling and @vbuterin, Hitzig and Weyl in Liberal Radicalism (https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3243656).
In my opinion, the value from burning is the hurdle rate and should be the option chosen when the potential value from other network improvement opportunities is lower. This is what markets naturally seem to gravitate towards, ie: Amazon choose not to buy back stock or pay dividends instead opting to start and grow AWS.
1 Like
Just going to chime in with something here, not sure if it was considered. If you’re building a platform which is charging for X, and X ends up being popular but the charging ends up being a barrier, and the platform is open source, it’s only a matter of time before someone forks a “Status-libre” repo and distributes that instead, especially if both apps share the rest of the functionality.
If one could run a fully fledged iOS App store with 0% fees that’s more popular than the official ones and all one needed was a jailbroken iPhone, I imagine that ecosystem would quickly become self-encouraging.
I think any kind of fee system that goes beyond curating the stickers would be a gun aimed at the proverbial foot.
I don’t think history validates the “it’s only a matter of time” thinking. There are many paid products that have free competitors and have not been displaced, probably because the free products could not invest in improving the product while the paid ones could.
Even so, if our sticker market inspires someone to build a Status client which users love then the Status network not only grows but becomes more decentralized which is a net positive.
I vote for burning the fee (reasonable % of under 15%).
I’d say this is because the products comparatively suck. All Photoshop alternatives can’t hold a candle to the original. Same for Illustrator, MS office (gods, Libreoffice is the worst), etc. What’s more, most of those apps are not compatible with their libre versions (any MS Word document will break in alternatives even to this very day, and vice versa), so it doesn’t apply. If Photoshop was open source and it was optional to pay for it, I don’t think there’d be many people who don’t compile it on their own to get it for free, if they get the same functionality without paying. Same here with the sticker market - the fact that the “libre” version would be functionally identical to the feed one is what would tilt the scales.
Oh no doubt, I’m just trying to point out the flaw I see in reasoning for a non-curating fee in the sticker market. Seems like a shame to put that much work into it if someone just ends up forking it out and replacing it with a free one.
What about a staking mechanism for sticker sellers. Similar to the license for the teller market- x amount required in an address to enable selling(and receiving of their sales income). And maybe if the seller decides to leave the network/selling, then charge a small burn fee from removing the stake? This incentivizes hodl.
A couple of these comments triggered the idea-> https://twitter.com/tokenstate/status/1095782534624018432?s=19
I think Binance really has done a great job with their token model.
I guess I don’t see how a small fee is in any way a barrier to artists. I know your line of thinking extends beyond this, but… in the case of stickers, it’s status quo, and as much as crypto economies are about breaking status quo, I find it hard to imagine someone forking the market because they’re angry about 10% of sales being sent to the DAO/Status or burned.
@barry valid point that artists should know fees are taken in service of the network. What do you think is better terminology?
To prepare for any situation, Ricardo’s written logic into the contract that allows us to send a percentage of sales to Status or burn it. This percentage is set initially to 0.
10% is a very different story from the original notion of 30%. I agree 10% is far from an amount that would warrant a fork.
I feel the same about 30%. Only if the artist earns less than they are accustomed to would I think the fee might discourage people from entering the market, but this is just me conjecturing.
Sound like a good question for marketing & UX. Perhaps contribution?
Perhaps the DAO mechanism can satisfy all types of creators. I think the Moloch DAO design might help here.
When a sticker gets sold (10% or whatever the DAO sets it to) of the fee goes into the DAO, if the creator doesn’t want to be a part of the DAO anymore they can call the Rage Quit function at anytime and get back their prorata share of the funds in the DAO.
I think sticker designers will be willing to be charged to some extent because the sticker market help them make a profit from selling their content. They all know that there is some maintenance cost and would like to express their gratitude to Status for providing them with the incentivising Web3 platform.
However, because Status is community’s eventually, I think it is better to create a poll on this topic.
For example,
- No fee
- 0~5%
- 5%~10%
- 10%~15%
- 15%~20%
- 20%~25%
- 25%~30%
- More than 30%
Just a thought on democracy 
Hey 
Results are in 
from the recent Poll on Sticker Market Fees.
Thanks to the 7 other people who voted 
Not all heroes wear capes 
.
Please see attached pics for a breakdown!
Not to be taken too seriously
2 Likes
Thank you for sharing the results!
On a different note, many people in the Korean community didn’t know the poll at all and even I didn’t know that as well although I suggested it as above. I may have been better if we could promote the poll through community channels before because it is so important.
Someone in the community suggested push notifications or something like a modal when we’ve got a new poll topic that is open.
3 Likes
Ah yes, I mentioned it above but I can see how it’s easy to get lost in such a large thread, I also shared in the main channel but I think because it’s early days in the sticker market development maybe people didn’t want to participate.
I definitely think a future (more serious) Poll on Fees is the right way to go. We could include a more detailed breakdown with SNT burn/reward and various other options. I’d be happy to collaborate on that if and when that time arrives 
I like your idea of push notifications Jinho for anytime a Poll is available to vote on, I think that would be amazing and a solid route to take towards Status becoming a fully fledged DAO, nice one 
2 Likes
I have been thinking about this more recently and we should ask ourselves if we don’t believe this service is valuable enough to charge any fees, why should the end users even use it?
IMO that’s a little odd to think about that way. Ultimately, you provide value and utility to the platform by enriching it. Fees or no fees, making a platform more appealing to use is a net benefit for everyone except Devops (at first). Granted, the sticker market wouldn’t move a needle for me in either direction, fee or free, but if we want to get that Telegram / Viber crowd on board, it sure as heck makes sense to reduce friction to the max. But I’m no economist, and these are all just my feelings on the matter, admittedly backed by nothing of substance.
This maybe me with my enterprise hat on and it may not apply here. There have been cases of SaaS offerings not get enough customers to trial when it was priced low. The same product would be rebranded and offered with what seems like an obscene cost in comparison. When one zooms out this does not seem like rational behavior especially coming from large corporations. The only explanation is the higher prices influenced their perception of value.
Now this may not apply to individuals, but it seems worth figuring out a way to test this.
Also worth considering there are no free tiers for consumer services like Netflix and Amazon prime. There are paid versions of Gmail and Youtube for consumers but what percentage of users opt for that?
Facebook, a service given away for free since inception could have introduced a paid ad free version in the past two years, in fact there is plenty of political pressure for them to do so. They must know the amount of users opting for that would be so small as to make the effort not worth it. They have conditioned users to view Facebook as a “free” service.