I will give credit where credit is due. The last 3 weeks has seen positive developments and some much needed transparency. Overall these are improvements but… we are not out of the woods yet, these are my ongoing concerns:
- Income in Fiat for break even is far from certain to be sustained. This affects the whole project - fiat, tokenomics, and user experience.
I say this because income is primarily derived from PTAs (home page takeovers). The problem I see is that this revenue is only as good as the impressions and click-through rates. The team is projecting income they are not sure they can make because PTAs are a bottleneck revenue stream and wholly dependent on number of users and views. You can have all the advertisers in the world lined up but unless you can get them their views you will not get an additional dime of income. Without user growth they will be unable to bring in additional revenue.
It sounds like they are working on a marketing plan and of course we all hope this is wildly successful but until then unfortunately, I anticipate the team may remove the ability to hide ads so that they can achieve more views. This in turn if adopted will annoy users and push them away due to the cluttered user experience.
-
as I have said many times you need other sources of revenue especially ones that are not as capped as PTAs. This is why I recommended revamping keywords as it is currently a horrible user experience and a terrible design from an income and value perspective. We can see the floundering from this current model with this recent lowering of costs but this will not change much the income or usage because it is flawed. I think keywords especially with the right model has much greater potential throughput than PTAs because there are infinite keywords and a revamp will only benefit by user growth. We are heading into an election year and the team is not developing this.??? Lost opportunity.
The link below is a better model I have come up with, and hope the team adopts.
New keyword consumption model! - #9 by XRPRE -
great that the team is finally talking about tokenomics the single greatest flaw in the project for the past years. This something everyone including investors should obviously be concerned about because flawed tokenomics could potentially destroy this project. Now although green shoots are forming and finally a light is shining on the cockroaches this is not a clear win yet.
The tokenomics and buybacks are tied primarily to PTA throughput, and PreGPT, everything else to include current keywords is so negligible it’s not worth mentioning. This is a problem as I explained above for PTAs but also a problem with PreGPT as this assumes the high uptake in initial subscriptions will continue; which without substantial development I think is highly unlikely. In fact I anticipate many current subscriptions will unsubscribe, unless additional changes and developments occur.
- Development - this brings me to my next concern and possibly the biggest of all which is the lack of substantial development. Tim even went so far as saying even if he gets seed funding the priority will be Marketing (which I agree is very important) and Cosmos, but crucially missing is development! Development is where the majority of funds need to be spent because development improves user experience and creates all the opportunities. Development can also fix tokenomics issues.
IMHO the team seems to be too close to the money and advertisers and not close enough to the community and users! This is a recipe for disaster and disappointment.
Colin sent out a good read about Google and their primary failures of which it seems Presearch is not learning from… one section I think is worth highlighting “when I talk about the Rot Economy — the illogical, product-destroying mindset that turns the products you love into torturous, frustrating quasi-tools that require you to fight the company’s intentions to get the service you want.” this is what happens when a team is too close to the money and advertisers and not focusing on the community and user experience. Only development creates “compelling user experiences that make users want to come back.” Focus on this and new users will come, current users will stay, and your part-time users will become full-time. When I said the slogan should be Presearch what search was meant to be - it comes back to this — Google’s original “guiding light of serving the user and using technology to do that” helped them achieve great adoption and success but over time a shifting focus on user data collection and advertisers destroyed that. Don’t make the same mistakes.
- The node reward model has flaws and when you Mass market we will all likely experience these flaws first hand. Too many unnecessary nodes will be spun up and destroy profitably for all. This flaw needs to be remedied I have given recommendations but the time to fix this is now not when you are trying to mass onboard millions of new users only for current and new stakers to be jaded by it and undermining the backbone of the network.
Recommendations:
-
revamp keywords so as to allow much greater ad throughput that is not distracting. Think about language and the number of different keywords and advertising options to different regions when this is developed correctly. This can be a token locking and income generating machine.
-
fix the node reward model flaws now so we can move forward with scalable growth unencumbered by a reward system that may not be able to scale appropriately with adoption.
Below is a possible solution I have laid out
Discussion on Lowering the Number of Nodes - #44 by XRPRE -
Focus on development improve the user experience every week and you will see community trust be restored and excited to share this project. You currently have a very hesitant community that feels completely ignored.
Even the small things can become great if you make 1% changes often that adds up to big changes over time.
Small changes DONE are better than Great changes Planned -
add additional AI options you can profit from having the best of the best alongside PreGPT limited oneself or this project to PreGPT only is a huge mistake give users access to all AI and allow those to provide better search results.
Consumptive PRE payments for AI and other services - #22 by XRPRE -
DEVELOP the indexing and storage roles so that presearch communities can be more easily onboarded curating their own improved results and giving advertisers much better targeting of ads. What I mean is that when you create communities on presearch be that through subscription or other means this gives Presearch, the communities, and advertisers a lot more opportunity.
Presearch Communities - #5 by XRPRE
Let’s say you onboard a Dan Bongino community where his team is able to curate results for their audience. Where his known advertisers and would be advisers have the products and services and values aligned. This would mean better value to those users better views and clicks for those advertisers, and if a subscription option better for Bongino community owner. When all those elements are aligned this becomes a better ecosystem and value driver for presearch matching advertisers with communities and profiting from all the growth.
//
Good job on saving project from destruction and good job recognizing some of the problems but now is not the time for hype or over-promising, NOW is the time to buckle down and DEVELOP the project in alignment with what search was always intended to be.