Project Overview
Hi everyone!
gFam.live is a Grant for the Web Flagship awardee and this is our Interim Progress Report. We are in our 4th month of our 6 month project and while we've made some great progress, we still have a lot of work to do. It's extremely exciting and a little overwhelming but we're working hard to bring it all to life.
gFam.live is a web monetization social media platform. It has a number of goals and problems to solve, but the big ones are:
- Introduce Web Monetization to the content creator ecosystem in an easily understandable way using a familiar format.
- Enable creators to monetize their content without needing to resort to brand deals, sponsors, advertisements, merchandise, courses, subscribers, etc.
Creators all over the internet are creating loved content, but often have to build huge audiences to work with brands to interrupt their content to pay their bills so they can create the loved content.
It's a weird business model, and gFam.live is hoping to provide a platform where creators can just get paid for the content they produce. We think it's more healthy than the Patreon/OnlyFans subscriber model where the audience is paying a monthly fee for the promise of quality content. On gFam.live, creators are rewarded for the content they've produced by Web Monetization Micro Payments or by tips via the XRP ledger.
Project Update
Here are our project milestones:
- Embedding videos into posts
- Gated Content for Coil Subscribers
- Web Monetization statistics for creators
- Tipping automation to tip large numbers of users
- gFam Learn
- gFam Challenges
- Web Monetized Chat Room
- Obstacle Course Competition Tracker
The first 3 milestones are all about enriching the gFam.live platform for our users, particularly the Web Monetization creators and subscribers.
The Tipping Automation will help the gFam admin team streamline our daily processes.
The next two milestones (Learn and Challenges) are all about bringing different types of creators to the platform to introduce them to the benefits of Web Monetization.
The Chat Room will be designed to help creators and consumers figure this whole space out. Currently we are teaching people via DMs on Twitter or Instagram, or solving problems over email. We want to get to a stage where people can problem-solve together and generate ideas for content for web monetization.
Admittedly that last milestone feels a little out of place compared to the others, and it's a recent replacement of another milestone.
It's an idea to provide value to a content-rich community we're super close with, in order to teach them about Web Monetization. Athletes who competed on TV shows like American Ninja Warrior (or the 21 other regional iterations), Ultimate Beast Master, Strong, Ultimate Tag, Spartan, Titan Games, etc have huge social media accounts but don't have a lot of opportunity to monetize their content, so we're hoping to help.
Progress on objectives
We have been providing monthly progress reports on our blog but of that list of milestones above, the first three are completed with gFam Learn only a week or two away.
If you're interested, follow the links for more information on the completed milestones:
Embedding videos into posts
Gated Content for Coil Subscribers
Web Monetization statistics for creators
We're really excited about the Gated Content for Coil Subscribers! This will provide an opportunity for creators to reward their Web Monetization supporters with exclusive content.
Here is what people without an active Web Monetization Coil Subscription see:
Here is that same post that anyone with an active Coil Subscription and the Coil browser enabled (they don't even have to be logged into gFam) see:
Any creator with an active Coil Payment Pointer will receive Micro Payments from Coil Subscribers who spend time on their content.
We didn't realise when we started building the Tracker capability that it's far more complicated than we originally thought. We need to build in different authorization roles for different types of users and that has made things way more complex.
Testing has been tricky for a number of reasons, but we've now got friends in Australia, Oregon, Chicago, Romania and the UK testing for us. We're extremely appreciative at the generosity the community has shown in helping us build a useful platform.
The gFam Learn capability requires a transformation of the entire look and feel of our platform, so we've had to work on some unscheduled infrastructure changes in order to build it. We're definitely way behind schedule here... but that's part of the fun of building projects!
At this point we're going to need some sort of montage to get us back on track.
Key activities
For us at this point in the project it's all designing, coding, testing and fixing bugs.
Honestly, we severely underestimated how much testing we'd need to do... our Community Manager hasn't yet managed a community because of all the testing.
One huge unlock for us was asking our friends and community to test things for us. When you're developing something, you'll test things how they _should _be used... but real testing, scary testing, is when you bring your chaotic evil friend into the mix who is very excited to break things. They will come up with so many combos of craziness that you'd never dream of.
We'll definitely end up with a better platform as a result of this process, but the downside, obviously, is that we haven't developed as much as we thought we would by this point.
Communications and marketing
Our blog post and this report are our first public communications of what we're building to date. We're waiting until gFam Learn is tested and released before really starting to yell about it to the world.
gFam Challenges is intended to be a marketing tool in itself, but we'll need a lot of active participants to make it valuable and useful, so we're going to need to drum up a lot of attention when it's ready.
What’s next?
Statistically we're 90% and 10% overwhelmed with everything left to accomplish in the next two months. It is going to be amazing and we're pumped to hopefully bring a lot of value to the world and to the creator economy.
We've seen huge changes in the creator economy for the benefits of creators in traditional social media (Twitter tips, Twitter subscriptions, Instagram subscriptions, Tik Tok creator funds and advertising percentages for creators), which is great to see... but they all still rely on intrusive advertising, 3rd party data sales or subscribing to creators in the hope they continue to create quality content. gFam.live is different to all these platforms because of the Web Monetization model and we're really excited to share that with the world.
What community support would benefit your project?
We'll post on the Web Monetization Community board when we release gFam Learn, but we hope the community will explore this new capability when it's released... and then again when gFam Challenges is released.
The community has already helped us with testing, and we've made some great community contacts to help us solve the automated tipping function.
At this point though, we really just ask the community to keep an eye on us, and then help us make some noise when we're ready to shout.
Additional comments
We just wanted to say thank you to the GftW crew for all the support. We changed scope and the team was beyond excellent in helping us with that. We've gotten some really good insights and advice from the Community Calls and we genuinely feel extremely supported.
Relevant links/resources (optional)
gFam.live
gFam.live blogs
gFam Twitter
gFam Instagram
gFam Technical Specifications
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