@fiatdemise xmrchat wtf bruh?

How do you propose XMRChat sustain itself?

Allow people to buy premium pages. Feature them on the homepage, no ads. Even let fans buy that for people. That and allow instant swaps to buy your traffic like the rest of us. A Spanish speaking YouTube history channel is completely out of touch and blind to the opportunities, sorry but you need to hear this: marketing fail.

Alright, will think about the premium pages idea excluding the ad.

By "allow instant swaps to buy your traffic", are you suggesting I received offers from instant swaps to show their ad, and I refused them? I would have loved to feature one of those, or a wallet, or something more related to monero. But the Spanish history channel was the only one that reached out. So yeah, it was unexpected, but there are some Spanish creators on XMRChat, and for the rest it's pretty innocuous.

If anyone would like better ads on XMRChat, feel free to pass on our info. The current ad expires in December.
https://xmrchat.com/ads/create

@FiatDemise integration with IRC me thinks

Edit:
By IRC integration, I mean using IRC as the underlying chat infrastructure, with XMRChat handling the Monero payments and relaying paid messages. Could that reduce development, maintenance, and operating costs? Everyone’s discussing how to fund the service but I’m asking whether the chat side could cost less to run by using existing infrastructure.

@FiatDemise
i mean for example right now, to be front page it seems to be based on the donations but someone can just donate to themselves to improve their ranking over there: https://xmrchat.com/creator

i like the idea from monerica about premium pages, like surely there are ways without bloating the content creator pages themselves

Centralization leads to this, no matter how noble the initial intentions were. The question is should we see XMRChat as a business or as an utilitarian platform.

@FiatDemise I think you should have a dedicated page in XMRChat that shows donations to XMRChat and monthly/yearly costs of operating it as a goal instead of putting ads in creator pages. And maybe you can add an option to send 2% to XMRChat in creator tipping pages so those who want to support XMRChat can do it there, since they are already sending Monero it won't be an extra step for them.

Not to shill my own project, and I know it is not easy to start using it, but as a simple P2P alternative:
https://monerodm.org/ | https://github.com/MoneroDM/monerodm_tip

MoneroDM is a very simple protocol that can derive the onion address from given Monero address, so you can send a message to a Monero address without any changes to Monero itself. Current tooling around it lets you send a transaction proof with a message, and streamers can display donation messages on OBS. This can be a self-custodial alternative for those interested.

@FiatDemise Instant swaps are hungry for traffic. Monerica doesn't even have the ability to serve them all. Cake Wallet would maybe buy your traffic, but they have become weird and don't even respond to emails or DMs. Not a fan of them anymore. And let's be clear, their whole business model revolves around instant swap commission, just go to the source.

You need to be more transparent with your pricing. Why would anyone contact you if they don't know what it will cost or for how long? Don't leave things in the dark. Only accept XMR. Advertisers just want to see prices and buy. This forum is good at that and has adapted. Also, do not rotate banners. You want someone to say: "I sponsor XYZ site" and then go there and see their ad every time.

Generally, advertisers should find you but in this case, just contact all the big names on Monerica: CCE Cash, xmr2cex, SageSwap, GhostSwap, Trocador, Bitania. They are making money and like most businesses that make money, they want to make more.

But if your mission is empowering creators then ditch the generic stale homepage and FAQ and focus on the people who want an audience. Right now, it's just a sea of random accounts someone has to scroll through. Why not let the fans pay you to get their favorite creators front and center?

Lot to respond to, will do as time allows.

@eravsar, we've actually put a good amount of thought toward the % of tips idea. Bitcoiners that use the Fountain app have had tip splits for years. It's common for content creators there to specify 2-10 different recipients besides themselves and custom % for each.

For us to do that in a noncustodial way with Monero, we need to wait for Carrot, which launches with FCMP. XMRChat/XMRPod uses integrated addresses to link messages with detected payments. Today, you can't send to an integrated address and 1 or more primary / sub addresses in a single transaction. Carrot makes that possible.

Then we'd need wallets to add muti recipient URI support. After that, a fan can enter a superchat like usual. They scan the QR code to pay, and their wallet populates the send screen with multiple recipients and amounts with % as defined by the content creator. Fan confirms, and it's sent.

All that said, Split Tips is mainly a feature to make XMRChat/XMRPod more attractive to content creators. Unless tips ramp up like crazy, 2% will be dwarfed by revenue from ads.

Best case scenario is maybe this work will serve as an example that gets copied for other uses that helps Monero adoption. Maybe weekend farmer's markets or festivals will see it as a better way for vendors to pay for selling at an event, vs collecting fixed fees up front.

Took Monerica's advice, updated the ad details page and reached out to several of the swap sites suggested. Already got multiple responses, so things are looking good for those that have strong negative feelings about the Spanish history channel ad.

@yayogerardo, we don't really have ongoing costs related to underlying chat infrastructure. Maybe that'll change if we get to millions of superchats, but so far, after 2 years we're at 3938. Postgres handles that just fine. Our development costs really go towards creating new features and enhancing existing ones. We have ongoing VPS costs, and the biggest driver there is the additional storage we need to locally run a Monero node.

The original thinking behind the XMRChat homepage is that it wouldn't see that much traffic. Content creators would drive their audiences to their tip pages, to receive tips from fans. They don't really have a reason to send fans to the homepage. The homepage is really geared towards content creators. It's meant to give them an idea of what XMRChat is, the benefits of using it, and tries to get them to create a tip page. It explains benefits of using Monero, because the hope is to get streamers and podcasters new to Monero to try it out.

Later we added the Live Now feature, which shows which XMRChat creators are livestreaming. A show that just started gets the top spot, while older ones get bumped lower. Clicking those brings people to the creator's tip page, where the banner image is replaced with live video, letting people watch the stream right on the tip page. Do fans use this to discover new shows? Maybe. We don't have any analytics enabled, just have anecdotal feedback that some thought it was cool. We added it mainly as a way to prove that XMRChat is being actively used to content creators considering using XMRChat.

The homepage has a Find Creators button that brings you to the Search page. The ranking is based on a formula that takes into account number of tips, amount tipped, and recency of tips. We wanted to avoid top spots being taken up forever by pages with just 1 big tip. We try to rank pages with real activity higher. Yes, it can be gamed if a creator sends themselves tips.

On the idea of fans paying to feature favorite creators, it's interesting, but I have doubts. Kuno has a promotion feature, and it's seen little use.